According to Benjamin Franklin, nothing in this world is certain except death,
taxes, and the irrepressible advance of human technology.
OK, so I made that last one up, but you have to admit, it's hard to argue.
Year after year, the phone in your pocket is pumped with pixels and sharper cameras,
your laptop gets a faster processor and extra memory, your car gets safer and more efficient,
and yet another FIFA game is released that's an absolute minimum 1% better than its predecessor.
Then again, perhaps there's a good reason Mr. Franklin chose not to include my addendum with
his famous quote - you know, aside from the fact he died 232 years before I suggested
it. Because it turns out that technology hasn’t always progressed so predictably.
Take a look at these two pictures. One of these aeroplanes is a cutting-edge machine introduced
to the market in 2018. The other was designed in the 50s and made its maiden flight in 1969,
4 months before Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon.
OK, so there's a fair chance you know which is which here - Concorde is arguably the
most iconic aircraft ever built. But just pretend you didn't for a second.
If you'd never seen these two planes before, which would you think was *half a century* newer?
I know which I'd go for. There's something undeniably futuristic about Concorde's alpha
wings and sharply pointed nose, but the differences are more than just hull-deep.
The Airbus A330neo has a maximum speed of 570 miles per hour and a cruising altitude of 41,450
feet. Concorde, on the other hand - this ancient relic that predates the personal computer - flew
50% higher and more than twice as fast. If you were to hop a plane from London to New
York today, the trip would take you around 8 hours. Concorde could do it in under 3.
This is a plane that flew so high its passengers could see the curvature of the earth, and so fast,
it tore through the air quicker than a 9mm bullet fired from a handgun.
So, just what the hell's going on here? How could a 60-year-old plane possibly surpass a much more
advanced one that’s only a few years old? And why did it ultimately get mothballed? Why,
60 years on, can I not fly on a commercial craft as fast as the mighty Concorde?
If you're already familiar with this story, you might think you know why
Concorde failed - because of safety concerns following the high profile crash of Air France
flight 4590 in the year 2000. But it turns out that's a common misconception - prior to that
infamous incident, Concorde was arguably the safest plane in the entire world,
without a single fatal accident in its entire 30 years of service.
So if safety wasn't the issue, what was?
The short answer to that question is the sticky science of air resistance, sonic booms,
Osama bin Laden, and the internet. As for the long answer, well. I'll see what I can do.
Right from its inception, the development of Concorde was a colossal pain in the arse. A
joint venture between France and Britain, it was supposed to be an airborne technological statement
that would be the envy of the world. But creating a commercial aeroplane capable of cruising at
twice the speed of sound turned out to be far more complicated than anyone had anticipated.
A plethora of technical hurdles stood in the way, and some impressive engineering was required to
leap over them, including: the development of Concorde's distinctive 'droop nose' to improve
pilot visibility during landing; the creation of the first carbon-based brakes ever used in
an aircraft to help handle high landing speeds; and numerous structural innovations designed to
cope with the extreme forces that passed through the plane's frame when manoeuvring at high speed.
Then there was the fact that Concorde flew so fast its outer surface heated up considerably during
flight, through friction with the surrounding air. Despite cruising at 60,000 feet where
typical temperatures are -55 degrees celsius, when Concorde landed it was warm to the touch.
Innovative solutions were developed to cool the plane inside and out, including the use
of onboard fuel as a heat sink for the heat generated by the air conditioning system.
All told, thousands of different challenges had to be overcome to get Concorde off the ground,
and the technical wizardry required to do so cost money. A *lot* of money. By
the time Concorde was finally fit to fly, it was one of the most over budget
projects of all time. Projected to cost £70 million - it ended up exceeding 2 billion.
But even with all that money spent and all those technical
problems abra kadabra'd out of existence, Concorde's issues were only just beginning.
In the early days of the project, the public were incredibly excited about the prospect of this new,
revolutionary form of air travel. But their excitement soon gave way to dismay
when people finally saw - or should I say, heard Concorde for the first time.
To this day, it remains one of the loudest commercial aeroplanes ever built.
Its colossal cacophony came chiefly from its 4 Rolls Royce after-burning turbojet engines,
which were loud enough to rattle windows and set off car alarms near runways.
That certainly sucked if you lived near a major airport, but it was the other
instrument in Concorde's infernal orchestra that really upset people - the infamous sonic boom.
As you probably know, a sonic boom is produced when you hold backwards for two seconds,
then tap forwards and punch... sorry, wrong video. As you probably know,
a sonic boom is produced when an object breaks the sound barrier.
What you may *not* know, is that the term itself is actually pretty misleading. A sonic boom isn't
a single sound that only triggers once, as the barrier is broken- it's a continuous
noise created by a shockwave that persists so long as the plane exceeds the speed of sound.
That might sound like semantics, but it’s actually an important distinction,
because it means the sonic boom produced by Concorde - which could be loud enough to
cause minor structural damage to buildings and even shatter glass - would be heard
by every single person within 30 miles of its entire flight path.
By the way, if you've ever noticed that sonic booms sound a lot like thunder,
that's because that's exactly what thunder *is*.
When lightning strikes it rapidly heats the surrounding air - creating a shockwave that
spreads faster than the speed of sound, which in turn creates a sonic boom.
Anyway, when the general public first began to realise that having a bunch of
Concordes flying around would make their lazy Sunday afternoon stroll in the park
feel more like a day at the shooting range, there were widespread protests.
Much like it did at the nose cone of a Concorde about to go supersonic, pressure began to mount,
and soon enough countries chose to close their airspace to supersonic travel. Concorde
could still fly at subsonic speeds overland and supersonic speeds over the ocean, but the overland
speed restrictions severely limited the potential routes it could fly faster than a regular plane.
On the back of all the hype, Concorde had taken over 100 orders through the 1960s.
But as the extent of the supersonic travel bans became clear,
those orders were cancelled at an alarming rate until only two airlines remained - Air France
and British Airways. And since they were the national airlines of the two countries
behind the entire Concorde project, it's safe to assume they didn't have much choice in the matter.
In the end, just 14 Concordes made it into service - 7 for Air France, and 7 for BA.
What was supposed to have been an exciting new dawn for air travel was now beginning to unravel..
It's widely believed that Concorde was never profitable, but that isn't actually true.
Concorde did indeed run at a loss for several years after its launch in 1976 - at one point
things got so bad the entire fleet was almost scrapped. But then some clever economist at
BA came up with a radical idea for how to make more money - they quadrupled their ticket prices.
By the late 1990s, a return flight from London to New York on Concorde was about
30 times more expensive than the cheapest alternative and twice the cost of flying
first class on a subsonic plane. But those who could afford it didn't care.
Concorde was, quite simply, the most glamorous way to get around. Buy yourself a ticket and
there was every chance you'd end up sitting next to a politician, a prominent CEO, a
Hollywood celebrity, or a really hard working drug dealer. For a few decades during the 80s and 90s,
anyone who was anyone was flying Concorde - multiple heads of state, at least one Pope,
Queen Elizabeth II, and even the olympic torch were all proud members of the 11 miles high club.
By the mid 80s, Concorde's unique brand of flight-based FOMO allowed both Air France
and BA to turn a solid profit, and Concorde continued to be a supersonic success for most
of the following two decades. But sadly, the good times were about to reach an abrupt end.
On the 25th July in the year 2000, Air France Flight 4590 took off from Charles de Gaulle
airport in Paris on its way to JFK International in New York. The trip was about 3625 miles all
told, but it only managed 5 before crashing into a hotel in a Parisian suburb. Both hotel and plane
were utterly obliterated, and all 109 people on board were killed, along with 5 on the ground.
Passenger plane crashes are rare so they tend to make the headlines. But when the
most prominent plane on the planet plummeted to the earth it was a global sensation.
The entire Concorde fleet - well, all 14 planes - was grounded while an investigation was carried
out into the cause of the crash. In the end, it was found that a strip of metal that had
fallen off a different aircraft had punctured one of the Concorde's tyres during takeoff,
which in turn caused a big chunk of debris to smash into the underside of one of the wings.
The impact caused a fuel leak, the fuel ignited,
and power to the left hand engines was lost, ultimately bringing the plane down.
It's a quirk of statistics that, by some measures, that one single crash turned
Concorde from the safest plane in the world to the most dangerous overnight. Before the year 2000,
Concorde had flown for more than 3 decades without a single fatal accident, until now.
But the crash wasn't curtains for Concorde. Safety improvements were made to the wheels
and fuel tanks, and they were soon back in the sky. To give you an idea of just
how famous Concorde was by this point, the first post-accident test flights were aired live on TV,
and crowds gathered at both the origin and destination airports.
On September the 11th, 2001, a modified BA Concorde completed its first test flight with
a full complement of passengers on board. Yep, it was *that* September 11th - the
crucial test flight landed just hours before the World Trade Centre terrorist attacks.
The two events were obviously unrelated, but the combined effect of the high profile crash and the
sharp drop in demand for international travel after 9/11 saw Concorde's passenger numbers
nosedive. Of course, it was a rough time for the airline industry in general, not just Concorde,
and perhaps they might have been able to weather the storm had things gone a little differently.
But behind closed doors, the final nail was about to be hammered into the Concorde coffin.
Bear in mind that by this point Concorde was more than 30 years old. It sported
an entirely analogue cockpit and relied on a whole host of very complex, very out of date
systems. It was so complicated that it required an extra crewmember to fly - a dedicated Flight
Engineer - a role that modern aircraft at the time had long since done away with.
In 2003, Airbus - who by that time had acquired Aerospatiale, the French company that originally
manufactured Concorde alongside the British Aircraft Corporation - revealed that they would
no longer be making replacement parts for the ancient aircraft.
In other words, if Concorde was going to stay in the air,
it would need to be rebuilt from the inside out. With passenger numbers falling in the
wake of the double whammy of the famous crash and the World Trade Centre attacks,
it was an easy decision to retire the service altogether. In 2003, that's exactly what happened.
OK, so that explains why Concorde died. But why
have no other supersonic planes ever come to take its place?
First of all, while technology has come a long way in the twenty odd years since
Concorde was retired, physics has proven to be stubbornly unwilling to change - sonic booms
have refused to stop sonically booming, and while the likes of NASA and Lockheed Martin
are in the process of testing supersonic aircraft capable of dampening the effect,
there's no way to eliminate the noise entirely.
For that reason, overland commercial supersonic travel is still banned in most countries, which
continues to limit possible routes and therefore the commercial incentive just isn’t there.
And there's another problem.
As a plane’s speed increases, so too does drag - that's actually why we
started calling it the 'sound barrier' in the first place.
When pilots first had access to jet-propelled aircraft around the time of the Second World War,
they experienced such a dramatic increase in aerodynamic drag at high speed that it seemed
as though they were reaching a genuine speed barrier that couldn't be crossed.
Chuck Yeager proved that to be false on the 14th of October 1947 when he
broke the sound 'barrier' in the cockpit of the Bell X-1,
but the effect of drag at high speed still poses a problem even today.
Among other things, it makes flying at supersonic speeds seriously inefficient, which would inflate
ticket prices. And, in an industry that accounts for 2.5% of global CO2 emissions, it's an
environmental concern too - less efficiency equals more fuel burned per passenger mile.
And here’s a question for you - is supersonic flight even worth it?
Concorde operated in a time before humanity was ruled over by the omnipotent overlord that
calls itself The Internet. If you were a fat cat businessman in the 1980s, crossing the Atlantic in
3 hours instead of 8 meant less time disconnected from the real world. Close a multi-million dollar
deal or two in the time you saved by flying Concorde and the ticket paid for itself.
Thanks to the internet, these days that same
fat cat can cross the Atlantic in the lavishly luxurious first class
cabin of a regular aircraft without ever disconnecting from his virtual office.
Concorde was never particularly fancy on the inside because there simply wasn't
the space - the need for a hyper streamlined profile kept the internal dimensions firmly
on the tiny side. Now admittedly I don't know many fat cat businessmen,
but I'm guessing plenty would rather spend 8 hours feeling like God himself in Emirates
first class than 3 feeling like a slightly squashed Sonic on Concorde.
Despite everything I've said, there are still plans afoot to bring supersonic flight back from
the dead. Several different companies are working on overcoming the many issues associated with it,
with Boom Technology perhaps the most promising - call me old fashioned,
but to my mind it's a bit odd to name your product after its biggest drawback. American
Airlines recently put down a deposit on 20 of Boom's planned 'Overture' supersonic aircraft,
but as for whether or not that will actually come to anything, only time will tell.
As of today, a hyper-expensive, sonic-booming, jet-fuel guzzling supersonic jet whose tickets
can only be afforded by the world's richest people sounds like a distant and unlikely dream.
Then again, that's what they said about Concorde.
Thanks for watching.