High-flying luxury - at a price

Concorde is the travel choice of royalty, world leaders, pop stars and tycoons. But even before yesterday's disastrous crash, it was an endangered species.


Concorde - slender, swift and graceful, carrying only jetsetters and royalty ...

The world's first supersonic passenger jet and maybe the last for decades ...

And one of the most under-used commercial aircraft in the world.

The 100 passengers on yesterday's tragic flight were unusual in that they were tourists. Concorde usually carries the rich and famous.

Air France styles it as the pride of its fleet, extolling the pleasures of enjoying champagne and caviar at twice the speed of sound, and enabling businessmen - for $15,000 - to go to New York for a day of meetings and fly home again that night to London or Paris.

The snobbishness even covers Concorde's seating arrangements. Insiders at Air France say passengers fight to sit at the front of the aircraft, within nodding distance of seats 1A and 1B, where the airline puts travelling heads of state and government, film stars and rock stars.

In fact, it is usually senior businessmen, the rich and famous (and the occasional lottery winner) who enter the somewhat cramped narrow tube to be hurtled at the speed of a bullet on the edge of space.

Princess Diana used it. Other famous passengers have included Joan Collins, Sir Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Sir Sean Connery.

For some the seats are a little narrow. Disgraced tycoon Sir Robert Maxwell is said to have bought two tickets to accommodate his ample frame.

The first Concorde took off 33 years ago. When Britain and France conceived the idea of a joint venture, they saw a market for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Concordes among airlines hungry to attract big-spending passengers.

It was a plane for the future, and its creation employed the best of British and French brains and designers.

For Britain it was a successor to the Comet, which pioneered jet air travel but flew into oblivion after a series of fatigue-related accidents.

The trouble for the supersonic Concorde was that although it first flew just before the prototype Boeing 747, the jumbo - carrying a far greater payload - went quickly into production.

It was another nine years before the Concorde entered service.

And when the British and French Governments threw in the towel and wrote off the cost of the development, only 14 had been delivered for service.

Each cost the British taxpayers what is reckoned at today's prices to have been the equivalent of £1 billion ($3.28 billion).

Britain and France started working separately on building supersonic aircraft in 1956. Their ideas were so similar that they joined forces in 1962.

Concorde prototype 001 was jointly built. A second prototype, the British-built 002, made its maiden flight from Filton aerodrome, Bristol, on April 9, 1969.

Two months earlier, the Soviet Union rushed into production with an aircraft which seemed to be a triumph of industrial espionage.

But the TU-144, nicknamed "Concordski," crashed at the 1976 Paris Airshow.

The Americans also tried to produce such an airliner but cancelled the project because of technological difficulties.

A small number of TU-144s did fly on the internal Moscow-Tashkent route, but soon disappeared from public view. Rumours of crashes were never confirmed.

Until yesterday, the Concorde had a very good safety record - one blown tyre in 1979.

A safety scare this week relating to wing cracks was the latest in a series of minor incidents involving Concorde over the past 12 years.

Most related to small-scale fissures in wing, window or roof components, none of which was thought to endanger the aircraft.

A more persistent problem emerged with the aircraft's rudder, which disintegrated at 18,000m on a British Airways flight from London to New York in 1991, after two similar incidents over the previous two years.

A fourth rudder failure occurred in 1998, although detailed investigations uncovered no inherent fault.

Previous instances of failure in the four engines have been extremely rare, although one occurred six months ago in a London-bound service.

Pilots generally regard mid-flight engine failures as controllable, and the aircraft landed normally. Another BA Concorde turned back to Heathrow the next day after a fire alarm went off.

One of the reasons airlines have been talking of keeping Concordes flying until at least 2015 is that their flying hours are very low for their age.

They have carried 2.5 million passengers since 1976. But BA's seven Concordes are airborne, on average, for just over two hours each day.

On a typical day, more than 1200 Boeing 747s will be flying in some part of the world. The number of Concordes aloft may be no more than three.

Its difficulties started early. The United States at first refused to allow the noisy aircraft to land. So the commercial services that began on January 21, 1976 were on BOAC (now British Airways) from Heathrow to Bahrain and Air France from Paris to Rio de Janeiro.

A year later, Washington relented and allowed flights. But it was several more years before New York would let the Concorde in.

Bahrain, Dakar, Dallas, Miami and Singapore each enjoyed a brief supersonic affair before the truths of aviation economics asserted themselves.

Now the only scheduled services link Paris and London with JFK Airport in New York.

To help pay the enormous costs of maintaining the Concorde, the aircraft are also used for joy flights like the one which ended in tragedy yesterday.

Concorde is what aviation engineers call a "hangar queen." It spends inordinate hours out of service being cossetted, checked and maintained by a small army of specially trained technicians.

The 185-tonne Concorde can cross the Atlantic at an average speed of more than 2000 km/h, twice the speed of sound, at 18,000m. At full speed, its 60m length stretches another 15 to 20cm as its airframe heats up.

But it is allowed to go supersonic only over water because of the sonic boom.

Sporadic, half-hearted attempts were made during the 1990s to develop a successor to Concorde.

But aerospace engineers can see no way to reconcile supersonic speed with moderate noise and acceptable operating costs.

Little research is now being done, and engineers say a new supersonic airliner will not appear until well into the century.

The big problem is that such aircraft are inevitably expensive and noisy.

They have to be long and skinny to minimise drag, so not many seats will fit in, resulting in a lot of expensive machinery for a few passengers.

And that noise! Concorde, with afterburners, has a deafening roar.

A few years ago, engineers thought it might be possible to get it down to the level of today's sub-sonic engines.

Then regulators reduced the noise from these engines, and no one could see how to get supersonic engine noise down that far.

These days, the world has many more rich people than when Concorde was conceived. Yet Air France and British Airways still cannot justify more than three transatlantic flights a day.

As the Airbus A3XX100, the new super carrier being planned by the four-nation Airbus Industrie, has shown, the future of aviation lies with accountants, not dreamers.

Sources: Independent, NZPA, Catherine Field


How many Concordes are there?


After debate this year with expert readers and the director of the Imperial War Museum at Duxford in Cambridge, the Herald's Q and A column said that, counting prototypes and pre-production models, 20 Concordes were made.

One is at Duxford and one at the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton in Somerset.

France also has various models on display or in storage.

Ten Concordes were built at Toulouse in France and 10 at Filton, near Bristol.

A total of 16 production aircraft were built. Two are stored. British Airways has seven, all still in use.

Air France also had seven but one was used for spare parts and finally broken up in 1995.