October 26, 2003
A flying object of true love

The Concorde era ends - and air travel will never be the same

By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor

Concorde, the most beautiful and swiftest passenger aircraft ever built, a true goddess of the air, flew for the final time last week and has now gone forever out of service.

Were I not laid up by a knee operation, I would surely have been aboard to bid a passionate and deeply sorrowful adieu to la belle Concorde.

The needle-nosed, Anglo-French supersonic transport was unlike any other airliner - save its ill-fated Soviet carbon copy, the TU-144, which proved a flying coffin. Nikita Kruschev ordered KGB to steal Concorde's plans from Britain. Alerted by a mole, MI5, British intelligence, replaced the drawings with doctored plans that caused the Tupelov to be fatally unbalanced and crash spectacularly at the Paris Air Show.

Concorde could cruise at Mach 2, twice the speed of sound, reducing a New York-Paris flight to only 3.5 hours. My heart raced each time I laid eyes on this sleek, sensuous beauty.

Concorde's cabin was cramped. The aircraft could carry only 100 passengers, not enough to make a profit, in spite of sky-high fares. When Concorde hit Mach 2, the aircraft's thin skin become very hot from outside air friction, radiating heat into the cabin.

Those were the negatives. The rest was sheer exhilaration. Takeoff was an explosion of raw power and ferocious propulsion - 0 to 380 kph in 20 seconds - as Concorde's four mighty engines - big brutes built for Britain's Vulcan heavy bombers - hurled it into a steep climb. Once at altitude, and away from populated areas, Concorde's engines went to full throttle, and the aircraft punched through the sound barrier to Mach 2, a delta dart hurtling through inner space at a vertiginous 20,000 metres altitude.

From the small windows, you could see the distinct curvature of the earth, and eerie black sky above. Yet there was no sense of motion or speed, other than the Mach indicator and heating cabin walls. On landing, it seemed Concorde would never stop; its landing roll was extraordinarily long, reminding me of the famous auto designer Bugatti's reply when a driver criticized the brakes of his racing cars: "Bugatti cars are designed to go, not to stop."

On deplaning from Concorde, I felt I was still hurtling at Mach 2. I wanted to run. Standing, worse, sitting, felt intolerable. I kept looking back at the magically beautiful aircraft, with its sinister nose and drooping, bat-like delta wings. A work of art, and for a veteran flier like myself, an object of true love.

Decades of financial losses, growing maintenance problems, and a crash in Paris caused by a tire explosion finally sealed Concorde's fate. First Air France, then British Airways, took Concorde out of service.

This loss would be tolerable if Concorde were being replaced by an equal or superior aircraft. Our society is by nature teleological: we expect life to improve through technology and human intellect. Alas, after Concorde, we see the march of progress squarely reversed and heading backwards.

Boeing toyed with a design, the Supersonic Cruiser, that would approach, but not surpass, Mach 1. It was dropped.

More versions of the 747

Once the most daring of aircraft designers, mighty Boeing now contents itself with reinventing the wheel, producing more versions of its venerable 747 or ever larger twin engine transports, like 777, that offer little or no benefit other than saving fuel, and must cross wide oceans on only two engines.

Boeing's rival, Airbus, will bring out a 500-seat plus jumbo jet, but this new flying whale will be little faster and just as crammed as its predecessors.

Aside from these long-range aircraft, a new generation of downsized mini-jets is entering service, cramped cigar tubes packing 50-120 passengers into ever tinier spaces. They will replace larger, but still crowded aircraft, like Boeing 737s, Fokker 100s, MD-80s and Airbus A-319s on short, medium and even long-haul flights. Hard, narrow seats; low headroom; nil passenger amenities; micro-toilets sized for dwarfs.

To think, back in the 1980s, I used to laugh at the old, stubby Soviet Yak-40 mini jets. Now we've got Soviet-style aviation at capitalist prices.

How far we have regressed. I remember flying the Atlantic in 1949 in a Boeing Stratocruiser with berths and a cocktail lounge. In 1994, I took a Pakistan Airways 707 from Lahore to Karachi, an original, unmodified 1959 model making its last passenger flight. I was flabbergasted.The aircraft had huge, widely-spaced seats in economy class, more capacious than today's first class seats.

I had forgotten that air travel used, in the dim past, to be comfortable and regarded as a gracious, highly civilized experience - unlike today's flying, which combines all the joys of George Bush's Guantanamo Prison gulag, and being vacuum-packed in a shipping container, with the risk of arrest or crashing.

No air passengers of this generation will fly even near the speed of sound, never mind Concorde's lightning 2,200 kph. Packed flying mini-buses, with bad air and grumpy crews, will continue to lumber along at 800-900 km an hour. That's the melancholy future of air travel.

So shed a tear for beautiful Concorde and the golden age of air travel.

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