Concorde E-Book

Jonathan Glancey

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 456

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In Concorde, Jonathan Glancey tells the story of this magnificent and hugely popular aircraft anew, taking the reader from the moment Captain Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in 1947 through to the last commercial flight of the supersonic airliner in 2003. It is a tale of national rivalries, technological leaps, daring prototypes, tightrope politics, and a dream of a Dan Dare future never quite realized. Jonathan Glancey traces the development of Concorde not just through existing material and archives, but through interviews with those who lived with the supersonic project from its inception. The result is a compelling mix of overt technological optimism, a belief that Britain and France were major players in the world of civil as well as military aviation, and faith in an ever faster, ever more sophisticated future. This is a celebration, as well as a thoroughly researched history, of a truly brilliant machine that became a sky god of its era.

Leseprobe

CONCORDE

By the same author

Harrier

Giants of Steam

Spitfire: The Biography

Nagaland: A Journey to India’s Forgotten Frontier

Tornado: 21st Century Steam

The Story of Architecture

London: Bread and Circuses

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Jonathan Glancey, 2015

The moral right of Jonathan Glancey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78239-107-4

E-book ISBN: 978-1-78239-108-1

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78239-109-8

Printed in Great Britain

ENDPAPER IMAGE: Concorde’s final voyage, 24 October 2003(Bruno Vincent/Getty Images)

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

  1 HATCHING A SPEEDBIRD

  2 THE SOUND BARRIER

  3 CHASING THE DREAM

  4 THE RIVALS

  5 CLEARED FOR TAKE-OFF

  6 THE SERVICE RECORD

  7 UNPREMEDITATED ART

  8 PHOENIX RISING

  9 SUPERFAST FUTURES

10 AN END TO ADVENTURE

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

Section One

Miles M.52 (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

Papier mâché and sticky tape models (SSPL/Getty Images)

Handley Page design (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

HP.115 (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

BAC 221 (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

Concorde 001 at the Paris Air Show, 1967 (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

Concorde 001 on its first flight, 2 March 1969 (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

Concorde 002 lands after its maiden flight, 9 April 1969 (SSPL/Getty Images)

Andre Turcat and Brian Trubshaw (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

Air France Concorde cockpit (Jean-Claude Deutsch/Paris Match via Getty Images)

Concorde assembly at Aerospatiale, Toulouse (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

Concorde with a Citroën DS (magiccarpics.com)

Tu-144 prototype (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

Boeing 2707-300 mock-up (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

Concorde over Trafalgar Square (Central Press/Getty Images)

Section Two

Portrait of Sir Morien Morgan by John Ward (1976) (Courtesy of The Master, Fellows and Scholars of Downing College in the University of Cambridge)

Concorde wind tunnel models (SSPL/Getty Images)

Vortex pattern (Photo12/UIG via Getty Images)

Concorde afterburners (© Reuters/Corbis)

Concorde flying overhead (Allan Burney/Barcroft Media/Getty Images)

Concorde G-BOAG salutes QE2 with Red Arrow Hawks (Adrian Meredith Photography)

Concorde aircraft in formation (Adrian Meredith Photography)

Concorde G-BOAA with Mk IIa Spitfire P7350 (Adrian Meredith Photography)

Concorde’s mach-meter (Martyn Hayhow/AFP/Getty Images)

Concorde G-BOAF flies over Clifton Suspension Bridge (Adrian Meredith Photography)

Virgin Galactic’s White Knight Two (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)

X-43A (Tom Tschida/Nasa Photo via Getty Images)

Snow Goose (Delmas Lehman/Shutterstock)

Concorde’s final flight (Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images)

‘What man-made machine will ever achieve the complete perfection of even the goose’s wing?’Abbas Ibn Firnas, 852 AD

‘It’s a lovely shape – one feels that if God wanted aircraft to fly he would have meant them to be this shape.’Sir Morien Morgan, 1964

‘A very friendly boom, like a pair of gleeful handclaps.’Sir James Lighthill, 1971

‘I am pretty satisfied that the airlines do not want it and that the people of the world do not want it.’Jeremiah Dempsey, Aer Lingus, 1964

INTRODUCTION

ON a looming day of low cloud and swept snow in February 1969, test pilot Jack Waddell lifted a massive Boeing 747 into the air above Everett, Washington. The maiden flight of the Jumbo Jet lasted eighty-five minutes. The aircraft was, Waddell told waiting journalists on landing, ‘ridiculously easy to fly, a pilot’s dream . . .’

The following month, on a dull and damp day in southern France, Concorde 001 reached for the clouds brooding over Toulouse. André Turcat had the dream job of piloting this pencil-thin machine, a supersonic rapier to Boeing’s subsonic broadsword. Keeping Concorde’s drooping nose-cone and stork-like undercarriage down throughout the twenty-seven-minute rite of passage, Turcat returned to tell a packed press conference, ‘Finally the big bird flies, and I can say . . . it flies pretty well.’

These two first flights a few weeks apart were to change the way we fly and see the world forever. Boeing executives, who had staked their company’s future on the Jumbo Jet, had kept a weather eye on the development of the exquisite Anglo-French Concorde. At that moment, just months before NASA rocketed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the Moon and safely back to Earth, it looked as if supersonic was the way to go, with commercial space travel not so very far into the future. Only the year before, in 1968, cinema audiences had watched the luminous image of a remarkably convincing Pan American Space Clipper waltzing towards an orbiting space station, complete with a Hilton Hotel, in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Concorde was a small, if significant, step for civil aviation; soon enough, we would all be hurtling around the world, immaculately dressed and impeccably served, in luxurious aircraft even faster than Turcat’s ‘big bird’.

Boeing imagined it could sell 400 747s as airliners before the market was saturated. It would then focus on production of freighter versions of the new jet. And, when the world’s leading airlines had bought fully into Concorde and the passenger Jumbo was made redundant, those first 400 747s could also be converted into freighters. In the event, some 1,500 747s had been built by mid-2014, with more to come. Air China took delivery of its first 747-8 Intercontinental in September 2014; this stretched version of the successful 747-400 can seat 467 passengers in a three-class configuration and fly 8,000 miles without stopping to refuel. In fact, in 2015 hundreds of 747s were in regular service and, given that an average Jumbo has a life of forty years – it can last for very many more – the latest versions could still be in service until the mid-2050s. Although no-one can predict with certainty just how long the Jumbo will ride the world’s airwaves – reports of its demise were rife in 2015 – it might just fly on until its centenary in 2065.

Designed, built and tested at a spanking pace, the mighty aircraft made its first fare-paying flight, with Pan Am, from New York’s JFK to London’s Heathrow Airport on 22 January 1970. While the flight was delayed in and out of London by technical glitches, the Jumbo, with its spacious cabins, stable ride and all the positive associations the Boeing name brought, was adopted wholeheartedly by airlines and passengers alike. Within a year of its launch, seventeen airlines were operating 747s and seven million people had flown on a Jumbo. Pan Am’s 1966 order alone, for twenty-five 747s, had been bigger than those for all Concorde aircraft.

Concorde’s gestation had been slightly longer than that of the 747, which had been built on the shoulders of Boeing’s first jetliner, the elegant and supremely successful 707, first flown in 1958 and for many, then as now, an emblem of the Jet Age. Concorde was something altogether new. Its genesis can be dated officially to November 1956, when the Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee (STAC) first met in London. Eight years later, Julian Amery, the British minister of aviation, and Geoffroy de Courcel, the French ambassador to the Court of St James’s, signed an Anglo-French treaty to develop and produce a ‘civil supersonic transport aircraft’. The first metal was cut in 1965, although it was to be another ten years before Air France took delivery of its first Concorde in December 1975, followed by British Airways in January 1976.

By this time, however, Pan Am and TWA had decided not to take up options to buy Concorde, and other airlines that had seemed so keen on the supersonic airliner were also beginning to waver as the Oil Crisis hit business confidence, especially in the transport industries. Air France responded in 1974 with a headline-stealing transatlantic demonstration flight. On 17 June, the fourth Concorde built and the second pre-production aircraft took off from Boston’s Logan Airport for Paris Orly at the same time as the airline’s scheduled 0822 (Eastern Standard Time) 747 flight from Orly to Boston. Then sporting Air France livery on one side and British Airways on the other, F-WTSA passed high over the Boeing across the Atlantic. It spent sixty-eight minutes on the ground at Orly before heading back west to Boston, where it arrived eleven minutes ahead of the regular 747 flight.

Politics and environmental concerns – some genuine, others spoilers – held Concorde flights to and from London and Paris and New York at bay until November 1977. This was the route Concorde was destined to fly, and it was essential for it to do so to pay its way – the aircraft’s limited range meant that, unlike the Jumbo, it was unable to fly non-stop across the Pacific. As it was, the 747 was still very much in production when scheduled Concorde flights came to an end on 24 October 2003. The last of three flights into Heathrow at 4 p.m. that day, BA002 from JFK, was flown by G-BOAG, one of the last of a grand total of twenty Concorde aircraft, of which just fourteen entered service, seven each with Air France and British Airways.

Before that final flight left New York, pilot Mike Bannister gave passengers a crisp and moving pep talk. He told us that Concorde ‘could do things no other aircraft can do’, and that ‘We’re going to take you to the edge of space, where the sky gets darker, where you can see the curvature of the Earth. We’re going to travel across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound, faster than a rifle bullet, twenty-three miles every minute. We’re going to travel so fast, we’re moving faster than the Earth rotates, and the world will be watching us.’ He also reminded his passengers that Concorde was the world’s only supersonic airliner.

And therein lay the tragic nature of an otherwise sublime and magisterial aircraft: Concorde was one of a kind. For all the talk in those heady Space Age days of sensationally fast transglobal and even interplanetary flight, the Boeing 747 paved the earthly skyways for low-cost, mass-passenger flight. Just two months before Air France and British Airways began regular transatlantic Concorde flights, Laker Airways launched its budget Skytrain service from London Gatwick to New York with a clutch of wide-bodied McDonnell Douglas DC-10s. Fares were very low indeed. They helped to open up a new market of young and eager travellers for whom a champagne-and-caviar flight aboard a 100-seat skyrocket flying twice as fast and twice as high above them would be out of the question for many years and, possibly, for their entire lives. And at much the same time, it was easy enough to fly short-haul trips – London to Rome, for example – on legs of long-distance flights operated by Boeing 747s for precious little money. What fun it was as a student to fly Japan Air Lines on this very route when there were plenty of seats to fill on a 747 and to be treated like a young emperor and served delicious food in the company of polite and well-dressed passengers.

In 2003, when 99 per cent of commercial flights were made in subsonic aircraft, a return trip across the Atlantic by Concorde cost a staggering £8,000. A first-class flight by 747 cost at least half of this. And, because there were just fourteen Concorde aircraft, they needed special attention, parts, labour and crews. The managements of both British Airways and Air France had increasingly, and unsurprisingly, come to see aircraft as coaches with wings, and built either by Boeing or the new interloper Airbus, and they had less and less time for an aircraft that was too individual by half. Indeed, the singularity of Concorde was underlined by the way in which people would point up from London streets as one of the supersonic jets, with the voice of Jove, descended over the city towards Heathrow and say, ‘Look, there’s Concorde,’ as if there was just one of these commanding aircraft, a lone eagle among gaggles of budget-airline geese. (Which is perhaps why, according to one of its most experienced pilots, the plural should never be ‘Concordes’ but always ‘Concorde aircraft’.)

And yet, even if the odds had been stacked against Concorde – and there had been naysayers from the 1960s onwards – the aircraft itself was a soul-stirring achievement and a glorious design. The product of intense research and development, it was a mechanical and scientific marvel. It was also, quite simply, very beautiful indeed. The engineers who created Concorde gave us a machine that caught the imagination of artists, architects, writers, photographers and filmmakers worldwide and across several generations.

It really was something to have shaped a machine that could fly so high and so fast for so long without it spilling a drop of passengers’ drinks. Concorde flew largely above turbulence while setting and smashing records. It treated runways like a fashion model parading aloofly along catwalks. It could outfly a jet fighter, cruising serenely at Mach 2 for oceanic spells. From 1976 to 2003, Concorde was civil aviation’s most compelling wonder. It has yet to be replaced.

ONE

HATCHING A SPEEDBIRD

WHEN was Concorde conceived? The idea of supersonic airliners had been brewing for at least a decade in Britain, France, Germany, the United States and the Soviet Union before decisive action was taken in London on Monday, 1 October 1956. On that momentous day, Sir Cyril Musgrave, permanent secretary of the Ministry of Supply, chaired a meeting in Shell-Mex House, the imposing Art Deco building fronting the Strand and overlooking Westminster and the Thames. It was the most notable work of Ernest Joseph, a founding member of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, an architect who had done much to find homes for Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the lead-up to the Second World War.

It was the fight against Hitler that had seen the Ministry of Supply and the Ministry of Aviation move into this gloriously optimistic building in the 1940s. It was the fight against Hitler that had also, of course, all but bankrupted Britain, although not in terms of new ideas, new science, technology and highly advanced aircraft. Britain’s initial lead in the development and operation of jet airliners, however, had been scuppered following a sequence of disastrous accidents with the de Havilland Comet, the world’s first jet airliner. Flown as early as 1949, the Comet took the world of civil or commercial aviation by storm. It could fly considerably faster than the very best contemporary piston-engine airliners and turboprops, and it could fly much higher, above turbulence, and therefore far more smoothly than its rivals. It also looked like the future of long-distance passenger flight.

Sadly, the Comet suffered three fatal crashes, due to structural fatigue, within two years of entering service with BOAC in May 1952. The Comet was grounded, not to fly again until 1958, when it worked the first scheduled transatlantic jetliner service with BOAC. But this was also the year Boeing’s highly successful, and indeed epoch-making, 707 jetliner made its debut with Pan Am. The Comet’s transatlantic triumph was short-lived. The rival Douglas DC-8 entered service with United and Delta airlines the following year. Boeing was to build no fewer than 1,010 707s, and Douglas 556 DC-8s. The total number of Comets built, including prototypes, was just 114. As Sir Cyril Musgrave recalled, ‘All the major airlines were buying the 707 or the DC-8 and there was no point in developing another subsonic plane. We felt we had to go above the speed of sound, or leave it.’

This was the gist of that October meeting in Shell-Mex House. It was attended by representatives of Britain’s leading aircraft manufacturers, its two state-owned airlines, BOAC and BEA, high-ranking civil servants from the Ministries of Transport and Civil Aviation and, crucially, by Morien Morgan, a deputy director of the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), Farnborough. Engineers and aerodynamicists at the RAE had been holding more or less formal meetings concerning commercial supersonic flight over the previous two years. In fact, the October meeting had been prompted by their concerns. Britain, a pioneer – the pioneer – of civil jet aviation, was being left behind by the Americans. In terms of economics, the future of its aircraft industry, the financial welfare of its airlines, and not least of national prestige, Britain needed to do something, and quickly. And the best thing it could do was to leap ahead of other nations by designing and building a new generation of Mach-2 airliners.

This was thrilling stuff and, as far as Musgrave’s historic meeting in Shell-Mex House was concerned, entirely the right stuff. The meeting itself concluded with a decision to set up a Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee (STAC) with Morien Morgan as chairman. Matters supersonic moved apace. The first meeting of STAC was held in the Ministry of Supply’s offices at St Giles Court, close to the junction of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road, just over a month later, on Monday, 5 November 1956. This was Guy Fawkes or Fireworks Day, an appropriate moment perhaps to light the blue touch paper that would send the world’s first and, to date, only supersonic airliner rocketing into high and sustained Mach-2 flight. There was, though, much to do before that. Politicians of both main parties, along with aircraft manufacturers and airlines, had to work together. The aircraft that was to become Concorde would always require considerable direction and finance from the state. Private industry alone could never have brought the project, and the adventure, to fruition.

At that 5 November meeting, Morgan needed to bring everyone who might be involved in the project together. At the time, Britain was still home to a large number of competing aircraft and aeroengine manufacturers. Sitting around the table and looking into the glum, lavatory-tiled courtyards of the glum St Giles Court building – an early 1950s scheme since demolished and replaced by bright new offices, cafés and bars by the Genoese architect Renzo Piano in the colours of a packet of Refreshers – were representatives of A. V. Roe, Armstrong Whitworth, Bristol, de Havilland, Handley Page, Short Brothers and Vickers Armstrong, along with four engine manufacturers including Rolls-Royce.

A technical committee and seven sub-committees were set up with the manufacturers agreeing to co-operate fully in this flag-waving national enterprise. If only that meeting had been filmed. How utterly fascinating it would be to see men who had lived through both World Wars, dressed in hefty three-piece suits and ties, puffing on pipes and cigarettes and working their way through cups of tea and perhaps a plate of biscuits – food rationing had only finally been abolished in 1954 – in an office where the sound of rattling, pinging typewriters mingled with the ‘ring-ring’ of sturdy desk-top GPO telephones, and observe them creating a world of aviation that, for the public at least, was the stuff of science fiction.

As they plotted the course of what was to become Concorde that day, the London outside the windows of St Giles Court – whether down at ground level or up in the air above the smog and, later on, the pungent smoke from bonfires and fireworks – could hardly have seemed more different from the realm of gleaming white airliners cruising at Mach 2 in the mind’s eyes of Morgan and the members of his new committee and subcommittees.

As they framed the future, The Bristolian was scurrying up to Paddington from Bristol Temple Meads. With a four-cylinder Great Western King or Castle class 4-6-0 at the head of the seven coaches, the flyer, which left Bristol at 4.30 p.m., would average 67 mph over the 118-mile trip, sometimes reaching speeds of up to or just over 100 mph. This was Britain’s fastest train, relying on a form of traction developed by the Stephensons and harking back to Trevithick, Watt and Newcomen. The empty stock of The Bristolian might well have been taken away for cleaning at Old Oak Common by engine number 3409, the last of a class of 210 Great Western pannier tanks, built – well after the nationalization of the railways – at the Yorkshire Engine Company, Sheffield, a month before the inaugural meeting of STAC. Main-line steam locomotives to standard British Railways specifications were to be in production for another four years. The government might have published its £1.2bn Modernization Plan for BR in January 1955, but Britain’s railways, and especially its fastest and most prestigious long-distance trains, were decidedly – and happily for enthusiasts – the preserve of reciprocating steam traction.

Railways were often the quickest and most attractive way to travel in a pre-motorway era and long before bypasses allowed motorists to escape the appalling congestion encountered in the narrow streets of old towns straddling arterial roads. Pre-Beeching and the slashing cuts made to Britain’s railway network in the following decade, rail travel could be either frustratingly or charmingly slow. While Morgan and his nascent team were bringing together the know-how, materials and science to make sustained supersonic flight a reality, the journey by train from London to, for example, Lyme Regis on Dorset’s appropriately named Jurassic Coast was completed with a change of trains from the mile-a-minute Atlantic Coast Express at Axminster, Devon, followed by a delightful crawl, at an average speed of a little under 20 mph, up and down a ruling gradient of 1 in 40 and around improbably tight curves in a pair of veteran carriages, all cart-spring suspension and horsehair-stuffed seats, tugged along by one of three surviving former London & South Western Railway Atlantic tank locomotives built in the early 1880s, some twenty years before Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful powered flight. Meanwhile, with the exception of a clutch of hard-to-come-by Aston Martins, Bentleys, Jaguars and highly taxed exotica such as Ferraris and Maseratis, most new British cars were hard-pressed to cruise much above 55 mph. When the first section of the London-to-Leeds M1 motorway opened in 1959, breakdowns and complete engine meltdowns came thick and fast as drivers floored the throttles of cars that were never intended to travel at speed over long distances.

Looking down from windows facing the street from St Giles Court, members of Morgan’s committee might have spotted some of the first of London’s new Routemaster buses, an up-to-date design despite its elegantly conservative appearance, making use of lightweight aluminium construction and knowledge gained by London Transport engineers from the wartime aero industry. If they walked back through Soho on their way home, they might have heard some of the latest sounds seeping out from the new 2i’s coffee bar on Old Compton Street. This is where, among many others, Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard made their names. Elvis Presley had yet to get to the Number One slot in the British charts, but rock ’n’ roll was on the up and up.

Even if mid-1950s Britain was still a world of gas lamps, coal dust, Ascot heaters, weekly baths with three inches of tepid water, few fridges, even less in the way of central heating, ice on the inside of bedroom windows in winter, whistling milkmen, cloth caps, musty overcoats, trolleybuses and tungsten lamps, Children’s Favourites with Uncle Mac and Mrs Dale’s Diary on the Home Service and sterling films such as Reach for the Sky and Battle of the River Plate, the winds of change were blowing ever harder above and below the surface of a superficially old-fashioned country that, by the skin of its teeth, had pulled through the Second World War.

This, 1956, was the year that the first delta-wing Avro Vulcan strategic bombers arrived at RAF Waddington and that the Royal Air Force retired its last Lancaster heavy bomber. In France, the prototype Dassault Mirage III, a superb and long-lived tailless, delta-wing supersonic interceptor, made its maiden flight. And on 10 March, as if to blow the piston engine era away for good, Peter Twiss took the exquisite Fairey Delta 2, a supersonic research aircraft first flown in 1954, past 1,000 mph – the first aircraft to reach this speed – and on to a record-breaking 1,132 mph, or Mach 1.7. Flying westwards over the West Sussex coast, Twiss noted that the sun appeared to be moving backwards in the sky: he was, he liked to say, flying faster than the sun. The mercurial Fairey Delta 2 was later modified to play an important role in the development of Concorde. (See Chapter Three.) Morien Morgan and his fellow scientists and engineers at Farnborough would, however, have been all too aware that the Ministry of Aviation had reported thirty claims for damages in the old-fashioned and deeply Conservative Worthing area immediately after Twiss had shot through the sound barrier. His flight encouraged a future ban on supersonic flight over Britain.

Conservation was becoming an important issue. The Clean Air Act, the designation of the Gower Peninsula as Britain’s first official Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and increasing concerns over the ruthless demolition of historic buildings and even entire city centres, along with sonic booms, all highlighted the fact that the Modern World came at a price. The aerospace industry, however, guzzled fuel unrepentantly as it stretched the design and performance of a new generation of jets and rocket planes, some of which were morphing into spaceships, to remarkable heights. On 7 September, the USAF’s Captain Iven C. Kincheloe, a Korean War ace, became the first pilot to climb above 100,000 ft at the controls of the Bell X-2 rocket plane. Kincheloe was to die in a crash two years later piloting a new supersonic Lockheed F-104A Starfighter. But despite a mounting number of fatalities, a wide public was clearly excited by the feats of rocket planes, by the burgeoning American and Russian space programmes and by a spate of science-fiction books, films and comics that encouraged even that most railway-minded publisher, Ian Allan, to produce an ABC book of Rockets and Space Travel, price 3/-.

Closer to the ground, civil aviation was on the cusp of change. With the Comet temporarily out of action, the Atlantic was crossed slowly, if in some style, by piston-engine airliners, notably the Boeing Stratocruiser with its lower-deck cocktail bar, Lockheed’s Super Constellation and the Douglas DC-7. Flight times from New York to London were around the fourteen-hour mark, although transatlantic crossings could either be a little faster or quite a bit slower than this depending on wind direction and speed. From 1958, jets were able to more than halve this time. Concorde, of course, was to be twice as fast again.

From 25 September 1956, there was an even quicker way of crossing the Atlantic, albeit in a different medium, that of pure communication. This was the day TAT-1, the transatlantic telephone cable between Britain and the United States, was inaugurated. In the first twenty-four hours, 588 calls were made from London to the United States. The virtual world was on its way, even if computers were still the stuff of tall, whirring and bleeping cabinets molly-coddled in special, air-conditioned rooms. Although Concorde was to be in part a product of the computer era, it also belonged very much to an analogue age where the slide-rule ruled.

This, however, really was an era of radical change in Britain, let alone the United States and the rest of Europe, with the age of steam, slide-rules, analogue instruments, cinemas, open windows and men in hats rapidly moving into that of nuclear power, computers, jets, television, air-conditioning, informal manners and, for a dizzy spell between Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation in 1953 and the Oil Crisis twenty years later, what might justifiably be called a barely mitigated neophilia. The exploits of supersonic jets in the air were mirrored on the ground by new forms of radical architecture, furniture, fashion, materials and art. In the summer of 1956, London’s Whitechapel Gallery played host to ‘This is Tomorrow’, a collaborative show by young artists and architects heralding Pop Art. And more importantly, perhaps, to everyday households and to Britain’s future as a nation of shoppers rather than makers, and even while the Queen opened the world’s first large-scale nuclear power station at Calder Hall on the Cumberland coast and the Cuban revolutionaries embarked from Mexico on board the motor boat Granma to overthrow the vicious and criminal US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, Tesco opened its first self-service store in a converted cinema in Maldon, Essex.

Meanwhile, new forms of music and noise, from rock ’n’ roll and avant-garde orchestral works to the breaking of the sound barrier itself, were changing the soundtrack of Britain, Europe and the United States, if not the Soviet Union. In 1956, both Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis made their names with challenging electronic music that broke far from the norms of orchestral scores and sounds. Even composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams, who had made his name before the First World War with music based on the melodies of age-old English folk songs, experimented boldly; his 1956 A Vision of Aeroplanes for organ and choir is a powerful, unexpected piece, which, along with excerpts from Olivier Messiaen’s contemporary Oiseaux Exotiques, might form a suitable score for some future documentary film on the life and times of Concorde.

As it was, a very different form of music was on offer in central London on 5 November 1956. Among those billed to star in the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium that evening were Gracie Fields and Liberace, the showman American pianist who was reaching the peak of his wildly ostentatious, star-spangled career. The grand finale would have seen the entire cast, including Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, John Mills and the Crazy Gang, dressed in Liberace suits. But the Queen cancelled. This was the very day British and French paratroopers had landed in Egypt and were fighting their way to Port Said in response to President Gamel Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. This was indeed a crisis, with Moscow threatening to take retaliatory military action and Washington refusing to support the Anglo-French venture.

The then British prime minister, Anthony Eden, had wanted to secure the vital trade route of the Suez Canal, to guarantee supplies of oil, to get rid of Nasser, and to restrict Soviet influence in the Middle East. He was to fail on all four counts. As Eden’s biographer D. R. Thorpe has pointed out, ‘It was a truly tragic end to his premiership, and one that came to assume a disproportionate importance in any assessment of his career.’ It was certainly a blow for Liberace in London. He broke down in tears while rehearsing when he learned the show had been cancelled, but Gracie Fields made everyone a nice cup of tea and the crisis on stage blew over.

The Suez Crisis, however, was a fiasco. The British and French backed off and, in January the following year, Anthony Eden resigned. His place was taken by the arch-modernizer Harold Macmillan. Three months later, Macmillan’s minister of defence, Duncan Sandys, published his infamous White Paper, Defence: Outline of Future Policy, which aimed to trim £100m from Britain’s defence budget. Among its proposals was an effective end to new jet fighters for the RAF; these were to be replaced by Bloodhound ground-to-air missiles. Along with cuts that led to the cancellation of a number of promising military aircraft and ultimately to the loss of 70,000 skilled jobs, the White Paper also promoted far-reaching mergers within the British aviation industry. From the very beginning then, in this era of rapid change, Morien Morgan and his gifted team must have known that an expensive, long-term project for a radical new type of airliner to be funded by the British government would be liable at any time to social fads and follies as well as to the self-aggrandizing dreams and unreliable whims of politicians.

Morien Bedford Morgan – ‘Morgan the Supersonic’ and the ‘Father of Concorde’ – was born in Bridgend, South Wales in 1912. The son of a local draper and grandson of John Bedford, a Birmingham-born ironmaster, he progressed from a local primary school to St Catherine’s College, Cambridge. In 1935, after an apprenticeship with the engineering firm Mather and Platt in Manchester, Morgan joined the Aerodynamics Department of the RAE at Farnborough, where he developed an expertise in aircraft control, handling and stability. Many wartime aircraft, including the Spitfire, benefited from his research work, as did pilots, of course, to whose suggestions he listened carefully and respectfully. Indeed, to understand their concerns fully as well as to experience aircraft behaviour in flight, in 1944 Morgan gained a pilot’s licence.

Noted for his charm, eloquence and love of music, he had the ability to get on with just about anyone – politicians, engineers, civil servants, mechanics, trade unionists, academics, the media, the English and the French – a virtue that helped immeasurably in the development of Concorde. He was, Professor John ‘Shon’ Ffowcs Williams, who worked on the aero-acoustics of Concorde, told the BBC in 2012, ‘an ebullient sort of a chap who would talk the hind legs off a donkey’.

‘He just loved aeroplanes,’ according to his daughter, Deryn Watson, Professor of Information Technology and Education at King’s College, London. ‘We would go on holiday and I’d end up wondering why we were sitting in a field having a picnic in some obscure part of Switzerland – it was because he wanted to watch some particular airplanes flying. He was very direct and straightforward. He had no side to him at all. He always had a twinkle in his eye and smoked a pipe non-stop.’

Morgan would get through many tins of tobacco over the next two and a half years as his committee and sub-committees got to work proving that a civil supersonic transport was technically possible and commercially viable. Brian Trubshaw, Concorde’s chief test pilot, summed up those long months of work by recalling that they ‘covered every aspect of aerodynamics including handling qualities, structures, systems, propulsion, economic and social impact (sonic boom and noise), the effect of kinetic heating, flight controls . . . vibrations and flutter, and operational flexibility.’

Altogether some 400 papers were submitted to STAC, all-day symposia were held at RAE Farnborough and each idea put forward was scrutinized through the lens of safety as well as practicality and desirability. A number of key questions arose, notably those concerning the shape of the various aircraft and especially that of their wings. What type of wing could balance the need for a supersonic airliner to scythe smoothly through the air at high speed and the low-speed flight that would allow it to operate safely from conventional airports? This, after all, was not some kind of rocket plane, but a civilized and commercially successful airliner. It would, for example, have to take its place in queues of aircraft landing at busy airports, so it would need to fly slowly at low altitudes as well as streaking across the Atlantic at up to 60,000 ft.

Meanwhile, an outline of a research programme for two lines of development was agreed, one for a 100-seat, Mach-1.2 (800-mph) machine for distances of up to 1,500 miles for service, presumably, with BEA and other short- to mid-haul airlines, the other a 150-seat, Mach-1.8 (1,200-mph) aircraft with a range of 3,500 miles for intercontinental airlines including BOAC. A third version with a cruising speed of Mach 3 was ruled out for the time being as too complex and expensive. Because of the tremendous heat build-up at this great speed, the aircraft’s fuselage would need to be made from titanium rather than proven and much less expensive aluminium. But by 1960, STAC, which funded research into supersonic design by British aircraft manufacturers, had chosen Bristol’s 223 proposal as the basis for what would eventually become Concorde.

From then on, the actual design and construction of Concorde was not too lengthy a process given the novelty and complexity of the aircraft’s design and the sheer challenge it presented all those concerned with its development. What held it back from earning its living in airline service was the need to test the airliner exhaustively, and politics, of both lobby groups and national governments. Politics were so important a part of the Concorde story from its inception because it was clear that no one country – or certainly no single European country – was able to fund such a radical aircraft from its own coffers.

After Duncan Sandys had toured Europe looking for partners to divvy up the cost of a supersonic airliner, Britain turned to France. In terms of research and development into supersonic flight, France had been making great strides. There was also shared technology. Sud Aviation flew its first Caravelle, an eighty-seat short-to-medium-range jet with engines mounted aft of the passenger cabin, in May 1955. These engines were Rolls-Royce Avons, powerful and reliable jet equivalents of the British company’s famous Merlin piston engine, while the French aircraft had also adopted its nose section and cockpit from the de Havilland Comet. It was clear to STAC that a partnership with the French was on the cards.

There also had been discussions led by Peter Thorneycroft, Sandys’s successor at the Ministry of Aviation, regarding collaboration with the Americans, yet Washington was keen to go its own way and had its own Mach-3 agenda, one pursued from 1955 with the development of what was to be the thrilling North American XB-70 Valkyrie long-range bomber. The B-70 project itself was cancelled in 1961 – the newly developed ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) was a cheaper and probably more effective long-range weapon – but the XB-70 would nonetheless prove the technology necessary to build a very fast American airliner. Two examples were built, and the first made its debut flight in 1964. One was destroyed in a mid-air collision in 1966, and the other retired shortly before Concorde first flew. It can be seen today in the National Museum of the US Air Force, six miles from Dayton, Ohio, birthplace of Orville Wright, the first pilot of a successful powered aircraft.

For Morien Morgan, partnership with the French proved just the ticket. In later years he said, ‘In aeronautical design and research a combination of Gallic fervour and British phlegm produces pretty impressive results by any standards.’ This, though, is jumping the gun. By the time STAC produced its report for the Ministry of Supply in March 1959, Britain and France were still going their separate ways, the French keen on the idea of a mid-range supersonic airliner – a Super Caravelle that would glide in debonair style across continental Europe – while the British were set, as the Americans were to be, on a transatlantic aircraft, believing – correctly – that it was on longer routes that a Mach-2 airliner’s speed would pay off in terms of profitability.

The STAC report was an enormous thing; attached to it were some 500 study documents. And despite what must have been many misgivings, it recommended the go-ahead for both a medium-range Mach-1.2 and a long-range Mach-1.8 airliner. Bristol was awarded the contract for the former, Hawker Siddeley that for the latter. Nor were all members of STAC perfectly happy with the report. Airline representatives serving Morgan’s committee were concerned with the uncertainty of the market for such aircraft, and, although their fears were to be justified, it was hard to take issue with their chairman’s stated belief that the proposed supersonic aircraft would be ‘of immense value to this country as an indication of our technical skill’. Morgan’s point was prescient. From 1945, Britain and Europe’s future as internationally competitive manufacturing bases depended increasingly on the technological sophistication as well as the quality of new products. Although his view was not stated in the STAC report, and nor did cost-benefit analyses feature, a supersonic airliner might be a good investment for Britain as a whole, even if it lost money.

There was, though, at least one major and highly controversial problem Morgan tended to gloss over, or believed would be solved soon enough. This was noise, and it led to a battle of wills over Concorde’s engines between Rolls-Royce and an Anglo-French alliance engineered by Sir Arnold Hall, the managing director of Bristol-Siddeley, between his company and Snecma (Société nationale d’études et de construction de moteurs d’aviation). A state-owned company from 1945, at the end of the war Snecma had co-opted 120 German BMW engineers who went on to develop the successful jet engine that powered the Dassault Mirage IIIA fighter and enabled it in 1958 to become the first European combat aircraft to exceed Mach 2 in level flight. From 1951, Snecma had been building Bristol Hercules engines under licence, so Hall had a head start when it came to discussing a joint engine design for what was to become Concorde with the French company.

The engine chosen, though, was a reworking – a considerable re-working, it is true – of the Bristol-Siddeley Olympus, an effective yet noisy and smoky twin-spool axial-flow turbojet first run in May 1950. Intended for the subsonic delta-wing Avro Vulcan V-bomber, it was tested on an English Electric Canberra long-range bomber and reconnaissance aircraft from August 1952. Was it the right engine for a supersonic airliner? Naturally, Rolls-Royce thought not. The company produced a hefty report for STAC, stressing the point that not only had the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey introduced a maximum noise level of 112 Perceived Noise Decibels (PNdb) at Idlewild Airport – from 1963, John F Kennedy, or JFK for short – but also that London’s Heathrow was likely to follow suit. ‘The next generation of subsonics,’ the report stated, ‘is being designed to be appreciably quieter – of the order of 100 PNdb – and this is the order to which the supersonic should be designed throughout.’

But the Olympus already existed and could be modified. Rolls-Royce would have to start more or less from scratch if it was to produce a rival engine, while Sir Arnold Hall had pulled off a diplomatic coup. It was, in fact, the twists and turns of Anglo-French relations that were to determine the fate of Concorde. While manufacturers were first off in this particular great game, national politicians were soon in on the act, as they had to be if the supersonic airliner was to have a chance of lifting off from drawing boards and the pages of reports.

Although the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, and the French president, General Charles de Gaulle, duly met in June 1962 to discuss matters European, the technical groundwork was prepared very effectively by talented British and French engineers, who were directed to do so from Whitehall. In October 1962, the technical directors and chief engineers of BAC Filton (Bristol had been merged with English Electric, Vickers-Armstrong and Hunting Aircraft into this new company in 1960) and Sud Aviation met in Paris to establish a design acceptable to all parties. These were Sir Archibald Russell and Dr William ‘Bill’ Strang from Filton and Pierre Satre and Lucien Servanty from Toulouse, where Sud Aviation was based. The one big compromise was an agreement to pursue both the short- and long-range version of the supersonic airliner, a decision – necessary at the time to keep all parties happy – that was to waste a lot of time and effort and fray tempers over the next few years.

It was the following month that the Rt Hon Julian Amery, the British minister of aviation, and His Excellency Geoffroy de Courcel, French ambassador, were to sit down together at a desk in Lancaster House, London – a grandiloquent late-flowering Neo-Classical design by Robert Smirke and Benjamin Dean Wyatt completed in 1840 by Charles Barry – and toy with a large model of the as yet unnamed supersonic airliner before signing an agreement between the British and French governments to fund its development and manufacture. A model of concision, the document was to lock both Paris and Westminster into what was to prove to be a very expensive enterprise indeed.

For the British, at this point anyway, the price was also expected to include the entry fee to the European Common Market. For the French, the financial contribution from Britain would help raise France’s technologically driven post-war profile and enable it to compete head-on with the Americans. As it turned out, the cost of the project rose quickly, doubling by the time Harold Wilson’s Labour government was elected to office in October 1964. Meanwhile, General de Gaulle had said ‘non’ to British membership of the European Common Market, while, to add fuel to the French president’s suspicion of Anglo-American relations, BOAC, a company that had been, at best, dubious about the idea of the Anglo-French project, placed options on six embryonic US supersonic airliners, believing even the 100-seat British design to be too small for the transatlantic market. How could the French trust the perfidious rosbifs?

For British politicians leading the case for the supersonic airliner – first referred to as Concorde in a speech given by de Gaulle on 13 January 1963 – it was a matter of all or bust. As Peter Gillman, the Observer journalist, wrote in Atlantic Monthly in 1977:

Julian Amery, the man who finally signed the Anglo-French treaty . . . was ambitious, politically adroit, and a gambler: three characteristics which were to see the project through. Soon after becoming minister, Amery sent his new parliamentary secretary at the ministry, Basil de Ferranti – whose family made electronic aviation equipment – to Farnborough to assess the project. Ferranti remembers being impressed by the argument that the plane would sell ‘either none at all or a hell of a lot’. The attitude he and Amery took was: ‘It is a gamble. But if we can do it with the French, it will halve the ante. So, let’s have a go.’

The Treasury in Whitehall was certainly dubious, and yet as Amery told the House of Commons in late November 1962, ‘This aircraft has every chance of securing a substantial part of the world market for supersonic airliners. This is a chance that will not return.’ And, just three weeks before the signing of the Anglo-French agreement, the deputy prime minister, Richard ‘Rab’ Butler, had signed off a report by the Cabinet Committee on Civil and Scientific Research and Development, which he chaired. Butler wrote:

We have not reached any final conclusion. This proposal may well constitute a natural and inevitable step in technological advance, offering the benefits of such advance and a moment of opportunity to enhance British and French prestige, but we may find in later years that United States industry ousts it with something better, and we are left with too small a market for our pains. And some of us believe that the right lines of technological advance for this country to exploit cannot be selected without regard to commercial prospects. On the other hand to decide not to venture in this field while America and perhaps Russia and France go ahead could well mean contracting out of the large passenger aircraft business.

Morgan and his committee had estimated the market as being somewhere between 150 and 500 aircraft, and that the project would be profitable if just thirty were sold. Amery, however, was to be proved right on both counts. The world market for supersonic airliners was fourteen, all of them Anglo-French Concorde aircraft. By 2015, the chance to build or buy a supersonic airliner had not returned. In 1962, however, work was finally to start on the world’s first such aircraft. And, for much of the British and no doubt the French public, too, there was pride in the fact that their countries were leading the way into this exciting new era when, soon enough, they would all have the opportunity to break the sound barrier.

TWO

THE SOUND BARRIER

THERE was no doubt about it. It might have been a popular misconception, yet as far as much of the British public was concerned, a British aircraft flown by a British pilot was the first to break the fabled sound barrier, a wall of air that somehow confronted aircraft as they approached Mach 1, the ratio of a moving object to that of the speed of sound, first observed and documented by the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach in the mid-1870s. Shock waves building up around an aircraft as it closed in on the seemingly malevolent barrier could, it was commonly thought, do all sorts of disturbing things to it. It might even break up.

The concept of the speed of sound itself was a matter of confusion. How fast was it? That depended, and still does, of course, on how low or how high an aircraft was above sea level. Sound travels at different speeds at different temperatures and, as every schoolchild should have known in the early 1950s, temperature drops with altitude. So, at sea level the speed of sound is approximately 760 mph, while at 20,000 ft it is 660 mph. Whatever the speed, this was very fast indeed in a Britain where few express trains averaged as much as 60 mph, with the occasional downhill burst of up to 100 mph, and when children sitting beside their father or mother at the wheel of upright cars would have been thrilled to see that same figure – 60 mph! – indicated on the speedometer.

In any case, the sound barrier had seemed insurmountable, even in very recent years. Writing in the October 1944 edition of Popular Science, the magazine’s aviation editor C. B. Colby did his best to answer the headline question: ‘Can we ever fly faster than the Speed of Sound?’ ‘Let’s take a plane weighing 10 tons with an engine of 5,000 hp flying at a speed of nearly 500 mph. At this speed, the air going over and around parts of the plane has already reached the speed of sound. Waves of compressibility appear in many places on its surface. These waves prevent the plane from going faster, for they need more power to drag them along through the air. We cannot just add another 1,000 hp and reach 600 mph. We will have to add 37,000 hp to get that additional 100 mph. This is obviously an impossibility . . .’

In a world of radial engines, of Wright Cyclones and Pratt & Whitney Double Wasps, and propellers this might have been true. But jet and rocket engines developed during and immediately after the Second World War gave the levels of thrust – quite different from horsepower, a measure of work done inside an engine – needed to go fast enough to break the sound barrier. Power, though, was not the only requirement. What was missing when Colby was writing in 1944, and even ten years later, was a full and practical understanding of the aerodynamic characteristics and qualities of a successful supersonic aircraft.

What gave British cinema audiences in the summer of 1952 the confidence that one of their aircraft was first to record Mach 1 and even beyond, however, was not the necessary understanding of science but The Sound Barrier, a tale of pluck, emotional reserve and derring-do directed by David Lean, of Brief Encounter and, later, Lawrence of Arabia fame, written by Terence Rattigan and starring Ralph Richardson, Ann Todd and Nigel Patrick, who played the role of an inevitably lantern-jawed test pilot killed in the attempt to break the sound barrier. In real life, Patrick had served in action in the Middle East, North Africa and Italy with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Fellow actor John Justin, another Dan Dare lookalike who in real life had learned to fly at the age of twelve in Argentina and served as a test pilot and flying instructor with the RAF in the Second World War, was seen later in the film diving triumphantly through the shocking turmoil of the sound barrier at the reversed controls of Prometheus, which was in fact a less than successful and accident-prone, subsonic Supermarine Swift single-seat jet fighter.

Captain Charles ‘Chuck’ Yeager of the USAF, a Second World War fighter ace, had, in fact, been the first through the sound barrier on 14 October 1947. His bright-orange, 3.5-ton Bell X-1 rocket plane Glamorous Glennis was dropped from the bomb bay of a modified B-29 Superfortress before shooting across a clear blue Californian sky in sustained level flight above the Mojave Desert at 45,000 ft and recording Mach 1.06 (700 mph). The experience had proved to be rather less dramatic than John Justin’s in The Sound Barrier. ‘I thought I was seeing things,’ said the laconic West Virginian some years later. ‘We were flying supersonic and it was as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Grandma could be sitting up there sipping lemonade.’ In years to come, Concorde passengers sipping champagne would be wholly unaware they had passed through the sound barrier unless the captain told them, which he always did, or else they looked up from their books or papers to the digital mach-meter at the front of the cabin.