Concorde crash ends 24-year safety record

By Jonathan Glancey

LONDON: The timing was uncanny. On Tuesday, little more than 24 hours after news of cracks in Concorde's wings emerged, an Air France Concorde crashed shortly after take-off from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris on a charter flight to New York. Engine failure, structural failure or sabotage, it does not matter. Lives have been lost. For the Anglo-French Concorde fleet and those who have maintained, flown and believed in this beautiful and gloriously redundant aircraft, it must seem like the end of a flawed 40-year dream.

Concorde has enjoyed a perfect safety record for 24 years in service and has been involved in no major scares since its tyres blew out during a bad landing on its British maiden flight in March 1969. Last night British Airways was at pains to stress that the supersonic aircraft that roar across the Atlantic as fast as the fastest jet fighters are safe.

Brave words and doubtless true, yet Concorde, for all its noisy and gas-guzzling magnificence, has been marginalized as never before. It is not just the French plane's fatal fall from grace; on Tuesday the Dubai-based Emirates airline pledged US$1.5 billion for the purchase of the first five Airbus 3XX double- deckers. Seating up to 656 passengers, these planes promise to be easy on fuel, easy on the eardrums and, above all, easy on passengers' credit cards. They look, though, like barrage balloons compared to the sylph-like Concorde.

Concorde has been a glorious anachronism since it first flew in commercial service. The dream of supersonic international flight was already all but over: the Boeing 747 Jumbo jet took off shortly before Concorde, bringing cheap fares, if no increase in speed, over the previous generation of 707s, DC8s and VC10s.

The Jumbo ushered in an era of cheap, reliable and profitable mass intercontinental travel. More than a 1,000 Jumbos have been sold, compared to just 14 of a total 20 Concordes built.

At current prices each Concorde cost the British taxpayer $1.5billion, the price of 10 Jumbos. Each Concorde passenger has been subsidized to the tune of approximately $5,000. Each has unwittingly consumed 250 gallons of kerosene on every transatlantic flight and been willing to pay a pound a mile for the privilege of flying in an aircraft that soars twice as high and more than twice as fast as the Boeing, McDonell-Douglas and Airbus crowd.

Concorde is the only time machine that civilians are able to experience: a Concorde lifting off from Heathrow lands passengers at New York's JFK airport 90 minutes before they take off -- local time of course, but the effect is magical. As is the aircraft itself. Only the most churlish or ecologically correct will deny the captivating aesthetic of this Anglo-French beauty as it struts on long hydraulic legs between crowds of dumpy, 300- seaters. Cruising at 60,000 feet, the passengers shoe-horned into Concorde's dinky cabin can see the curvature of the earth below. This is the territory of Chuck Yeager, Top Guns, Valkyries and God.

Concorde, although an Anglo-French project, was perhaps the peak of Britain's post-war drive to prove that it could still make it big, fast, nuclear and supersonic in a world increasingly dominated by Soviet satellites, the NASA space program and the transistor technology dawning in the Land of the Rising Sun.

A brilliant team of engineers, including at least one from Werner Von Braun's Nazi rocket team, produced this jet-age fighter stretched into a civilian plane.

Back-of-shed, pipe-smoking British boffin know-how at Farnborough met the best of French engineering at Toulouse and, in the process, created a machine that looked like a stylized stork on the ground, an origami arrow in the stratosphere.

In flight, Concorde exhibits a fitness for purpose and absolute beauty rivaled by only the most perfect works of art.

It is let down, not of course in terms of performance, by its formidable and deafening four Olympus engines. Derived from military prototypes, there was nothing else to match them at the time that the Anglo-French agreement which breathed Concorde into life was signed in November 1962.

But ecology was not on the menu as the recipe for this great adventure in the sky was written. In a blaze of white-hot technology, Concorde took to the sky at the tail end of Harold Wilson's second Labour government. Like the Channel tunnel, the droop-nosed aircraft was a legend in its own design-time.

Concorde was alone in a sky dominated by solid, competent, economical jets, and was easy prey to critics. Yes it is a plane for the rich and showy. It is unlikely to be replaced in any recognizable shape or form. Yet to lose Concorde, will, when the day comes for the final and hopefully safe landing, be like losing the British Telecom tower in London, the Eiffel tower, and the Empire State building in New York.

-- Guardian News Service