Tombstone for the Concorde Era

Tuesday’s crash of an Air France Concorde jet outside Paris, an accident that killed all 109 people on the craft and four on the ground, may herald the end of a technology that has little place in commercial aviation today. Until Tuesday, this Concorde and its sister supersonic jetliners had posted an enviable safety record. It is likely to be weeks if not months before the exact cause of the crash of Flight 4590 is known, but it’s safe to say the 12 jets remaining in the active Concorde fleet are anachronisms of the skies.

Commercial aviation, after arriving at a crossroad, is heading in two directions at once. The “RJs,” small regional jets with 50 seats or somewhat more, are rapidly replacing old turboprop planes and offering the convenience of nonstop flights that avoid crowded hub airports. At the other end of the scale is Europe’s Airbus Industrie’s “cruise ship of the sky,” the yet-to-be-produced A3XX double-decker, with 550 to 555 seats. Should orders build for what would be the largest commercial jet in history, America’s Boeing has a counterweight on the drawing boards, a stretch 747 that could carry 500 passengers. Mid-size single-aisle airplanes--717s, 737s and 757s and the like--would fill much of the gap.

With the number of commercial aircraft in the skies expected to double within the next 20 years, and with congestion and delays at the world’s major airports a sharply growing problem, the industry demands jets that can ferry more passengers and provide improved service between smaller airports at subsonic speeds. As Federal Aviation Administrator Jane Garvey has put it, jet aircraft have become the “Greyhound buses of the skies.”

That puts a big squeeze on the 1950s/1960s-era technology of the super-fast but inefficient supersonic passenger jet, a craft that never really caught on.

A subsonic jumbo jet carries four times as many passengers as the Concorde and uses the same amount of fuel. Supersonic jetliners require more than three times as many hours of maintenance after every flight. In addition, the Concorde jets, though few in numbers, are criticized in environmental circles for belching exhaust at altitudes where ozone depletion is a concern. Small wonder that the Concorde appears to have little future.

Speed is giving way to capacity, efficiency and versatility. The supersonic transport’s small footprint on aviation history is fading in the aftermath of the calamity outside Paris.