Friday, October 24, 2003
Concorde flew for the last time on a scheduled, transatlantic flight today. From here on in, it's going to be consigned to museums, flight shows, and the history books. Since I grew up next to an airport (and I still live there -- except the airport moved away!), I've always been in love with planes and Concorde was always a special one. I mean, it was just DIFFERENT, you know? Boeings and Airbuses, they all look... the same, really (barring the 747, but Asia is so full of 747s that they're wholly unremarkable). Concorde was something else. It had that distinctive shape, the distinctive nose, and it travelled at twice the speed of sound. I'm a lover of super-cool tech facts, and Concorde is full of them. You may have heard that it's faster than a speeding bullet (it is), but did you know it's also faster than the rotation of the Earth? During one flight, they followed a solar eclipse for over an hour (normal solar eclipses are 3-6 minutes long) because it was the only plane fast enough to match the speed of the Earth and Sun. You may have heard that it can fly "at the edge of space", but did you know you're so high on Concorde that not only are you above all turbulence, but you can also see the curvature of the Earth? It's been said also that Concorde is effectively a big, 100-seater fighter jet... but did you know that those fighter jets can't maintain their supersonic speed for as long as Concorde can? And come on, how cool is it to be able to land in New York "before" you've taken off in London?
I never did fly on Concorde myself, but I always rather wanted to. It flew to HK a couple of times during my lifetime, and it's something you can't miss because it IS window-shatteringly loud. In Kingston, you could barely hear the roar of planes taking off from Heathrow -- you COULD hear them, but only as faint background noise. Concorde, however, made everyone stop and look up. It sounded like it was literally right there, even though it was actually further away than most planes passing overhead. And even if you knew it was a Concorde, people still stopped to look anyway. That is, I suppose, another of the minor things I miss about the UK: Driving to Heathrow, seeing all the Concordes in their hangars, and then passing by BA's giant Concorde model in the entrance to the airport itself. They really did love the Concorde there, far more than in France... which explains why BA is giving Concorde a huge send-off, while Air France quietly retired its own fleet months ago.
I guess the reason I'm talking so much about it and the reason I'm rather sad by its retirement is that I always did cling to the hope that Concorde was the future, and all planes would eventually do what Concorde does. Yeah, it had many drawbacks, but I figured we'd work around them. Not so. Any future planes on the drawing boards are purely larger capacity (see Airbus' 580-seater double-decker A380), or longer range (Boeing's new 777 can fly for 19 hours -- yes, NINETEEN). Concorde lost on both tallies, since it could only hold 100 passengers (in one "class" only, so no cheap economy tickets), could only fly a short range (hence the London-New York staple route), and did both so inefficiently that it burnt three times the fuel as a slower plane. I love flying, but flying for 19 hours would kill me... as would being stuck in a plane with 500 other economy passengers (sorry Airbus, I don't buy your story that a double-decker plane means we have room for casinos and gyms -- it means we have room for more economy seats). People just seem to have totally given up on supersonic travel. The best we got was Boeing working on a plane that was supposed to fly as-close-as-possible to Mach 1 without breaking it... which they scrapped. It's sad, because really a new Concorde (one that could fly further, in particular) would have revolutionised travel, just as the first promised. Can you imagine crossing the Pacific from Tokyo to Los Angeles in under six hours? The implications of travelling so fast across the International Date Line would be pretty insane, too. I wonder how many hours you'd "gain" from that?
Either way, it's all a pipe dream now, and will likely remain one until people get fed up of travelling for NINETEEN HOURS. Farewell Concorde. I hope we haven't seen the last of your kind.
Posted at 11:27 PM
