In December 1967, on an airfield in Toulouse, France, a hangar door swung ceremoniously upward to reveal a wonder of the age: the of Concorde.
An Anglo-French creation, this gorgeous, delta-winged, dart of an aircraft was capable of flying at twice the speed of sound. Its revolutionary aluminium alloy skin could expand by a third of a metre to cope with the frictional heating at such speeds. It was a true marvel of jet power, metallurgy and aerodynamics.
But despite its technical prowess, Concorde, with just 128 passenger seats, was a financial white elephant. Its “record as an aesthetic and technological triumph still tends to outweigh its monumental commercial failure”, writes James Hamilton-Paterson in his brief history of British aviation, Empire of the Clouds.
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The plane’s £1.1 billion, state-backed development, he says, meant that 34 million French and British families each paid £33 in taxes “to enable people like Mick Jagger to fly from London to New York in three-and-a-half hours instead of eight”.
Concorde was retired in 2003 after a fatal crash in Paris in 2000 and investigations revealing that safely maintaining the fleet would be unfeasibly expensive.
While the idea of a reprisal always lingered, only now does it look like becoming a reality with a growing roster of plans for new supersonic aircraft. Their real challenge isn’t to break the sound barrier, but to make doing so widely affordable rather than just a plaything of .
Demo flight
Among the most advanced visions is that of , based in Colorado. It is developing what looks like a scaled-down Concorde: a 55-seat, all-business-class, delta-wing airliner that’s set for service in the mid-2020s. It promises a quieter and quicker flight than the plane that inspired it.
Boom’s ambition is to provide fares . The project’s credibility was boosted this month with a $10 million investment , coming on top of 76 orders for the plane, including from Virgin Atlantic. Boom’s demo model is due to fly in 2018 – and it is not alone: Lockheed Martin and a bunch of partners, including Airbus, also on the drawing board.
But could conventional jets – even these superfast ones – ultimately end up kicked into the long grass by the new breed of space-flight firms? In September, SpaceX said its BFR rocket – ostensibly for Mars and moon missions – could provide anywhere-on-Earth, city-to-city transport .
And Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, focused on launching with its SpaceShipTwo reusable rocket plane, also has city-to-city travel on its radar. “One of the future applications of what we’re working towards is supersonic travel,” said a Virgin Galactic spokesperson.
So a supersonic revival is a done deal? One possible barrier to the spaceplane route could be the US Department of State. It may deem landing a rocket in Guangzhou or Vladivostok as breaching a ban on exporting rocket technology.
And more broadly, consumers might not be convinced that faster is necessarily better. For example, I find long-haul flights as they stand are the only time to get any real peace, where electronic missives can be held at bay so long as inflight Wi-Fi is declined. I doubt I’m alone in this view.
But none of this is likely to deter more supersonic dreams. As the White House demonstrated last week by ordering NASA to return to the moon, former glories seem hard to resist.
If we must relive them, let’s just hope that this time around the supersonic airliner is affordable.
