Flying into the sunset

As Concorde makes its final flight today, Nick Morrison looks at the world's first - and maybe the last - commercial supersonic aircraft.

'A COMMERCIAL disaster" which "should never have been started" - two years after its first test flight and five years before it was to take its first fare-paying passenger, the verdict on Concorde was not good. But by 1971, as the same Cabinet paper recognised, the government had no choice but to "commit itself wholeheartedly" to the project.

Thirty two years later, after 27 years of service as the flagship of two national fleets, Concorde will make its final journey today. When the distinctive nose touches down at New York's JFK Airport this morning, it will mark the end of the world's first commercial supersonic aircraft.

But when Concorde trundles into retirement, destined to become a museum curiosity, there is no new generation of supersonic aircraft waiting to taxi into its place. There is no clamour among passengers who will settle for nothing less than supersonic travel. There are no manufacturers rushing to build on its innovations. The trailblazer of the skies has nothing following in its wake.

And the reasons why lie in Concorde's protracted - and hugely expensive - gestation. It was 1956 when Britain and France started toying with the idea of building a supersonic aircraft, 1962 when the two governments decided to share the costs, 1969 when Concorde took off for its first test flight, but not until 1976 that it carried its first fare-paying passengers. Its seven-year test programme is still the longest in civil aviation history.

The cost proved similarly uncontrollable. In 1962, it was projected to cost £160m, the equivalent of around £2bn today. By 1975, the year before its commercial launch, more than £1.2bn had been spent, around £11bn in today's figures.

Problems over noise and the distinctive nose helped account for the escalation, but matters were not made easier by the difficulty in maintaining the Anglo-French cordiale. When Harold Wilson became Prime Minister in 1964, one of the Labour government's first acts was to cancel the project. But a year later it was back on track as Wilson performed the first of many U-turns. At one point, work was halted over whether there should be a final "e" in the name. For years, the British referred to it as Concord, but it was the French who got their way.

Between the time Concorde was designed and the time it went into commercial operation, the cost of oil had risen from $1.70 a barrel to $11. Little wonder that both French and British governments flirted with the idea of dropping the project altogether.

But when Captain Andre Turcat took off from Toulouse Airport in Concorde's first flight, on March 2, 1969, it was hailed as an engineering marvel. Six weeks later, Captain Brian Trubshaw took off for the UK's first test flight, at Filton, Bristol.

Only the Russians had joined the supersonic race in earnest, launching their own version, the Tupolev TU 144, dubbed Concordski, before the Anglo-French aircraft got off the ground. Although details were hard to come by at the height of the Cold War, Concordski was said to be faster and able to carry more passengers, but a crash at the 1973 Paris Air Show saw the project run out of steam. For their part, the Americans never got off the ground, spending more than the French and British put together but ending up with only a plywood model to show for their efforts by the time the plug was pulled in 1971.

But Concorde's problem did not end when it came into service. The Americans, worried by the noise and environmental impact, refused to allow the plane to land on its shores; unkind observers suggested pique at not getting there first may have played a role. So an aircraft built specifically for the transatlantic route found its inaugural journeys were instead to Bahrain, for British Airways, and Rio de Janeiro, for Air France. But the Federal Aviation Authority soon relented, and a trial service was allowed to fly in to Washington DC, and the following year, Concorde was given a special noise exemption to land at JFK.

The first service to New York, in November 1977, was heralded as revolutionising transatlantic flight. Instead of the seven hours of a jumbo jet, Concorde took just three-and-a-half hours to reach the Big Apple, once completing the journey in seven minutes and one second inside three hours.

Cruising at around 60,000ft at a speed of 1,350mph, on a clear day it was possible to see the curvature of the Earth. Taking off from London at 10.30am, 3,600 miles later it would arrive in New York at 9.20am. There were few thrills to match arriving before you have set off.

But this came at a price. Concorde consumes twice the amount of fuel needed for a jumbo, can fly only 4,500 miles before refuelling, and has a capacity of just 100 passengers. Consequently, the £7,000 cost of a return ticket made it prohibitive to all but the thoughtlessly rich or the once-in-a-lifetimers. And in exchange for the buzz of flying supersonic, passengers had to tolerate notoriously cramped conditions inside the streamlined hull.

British Airways reckoned it made a £20m annual profit from the London to New York run, but this discounts the development costs, borne by the two governments. And while the original aim was for a fleet of several hundred, only 20 were ever built, and none was ever sold commercially.

Despite its teething problems and commercial struggles, the greatest threat to supersonic flight came on July 25, 2000, when an Air France Concorde crashed just after take-off outside Paris, killing all 109 people on board. Both Air France and BA grounded their planes for almost 18 months until they were pronounced fit to fly again.

But it was commercial reality which saw the end of the big bird. Even though it is on the ground more than it is in the air, and suffers from less fatigue than jumbo jets, the cost of an overhaul which would extend its life proved too much, and in March this year, Air France ended its commercial services, followed seven months later by BA.

And as Concorde makes its final bow, it will mean the end, at least for some time, of commercial supersonic flight. Last December, Boeing scrapped its Sonic Cruiser project, which aimed to produce a aircraft which can fly between Mach 2 and Mach 4 and capable of trans-Pacific flights, and a French plan to develop a Mach 2 jet has been put on hold. Instead of going faster, the emphasis is on carrying more passengers for less money. With no successor on the horizon, man is going back in speed for the first time in aviation history.

But if Concorde does turn out to be a flash in the pan, a short-lived experiment in supersonic flight which never quite brought the revolution it promised, at least for one short period in human history it provided an unparalleled thrill, its piercing nose breaking technological barriers. It may have turned out to be a white elephant, but what an elephant it was.