Demise of the Concorde Could Not Have Come Fast Enough

The recent decision by British Airways and Air France to retire their fleet of Concorde jets marks the end, at least for now, of mankind’s flirtation with supersonic air travel. But we need not mourn the Concorde’s passing. In fact, we should celebrate its demise -- as a victory for all that is good and slow.

The Concorde, with its needle nose and delta-shaped wing, looked fast standing still. In an age when airliners have become flying buses, Concorde oozed an air of sexy mystique. Concorde was cool.

At a news conference announcing the plane’s retirement, British Airways Chief Executive Rod Eddington boasted that “Concorde revolutionized the way people traveled.” He’s partly right. Concorde revolutionized the way a few very rich people traveled. The $12,672 fare for a round-trip New York-to-London ticket excluded the rest of us.

For those who could afford it, Concorde cut the flying time between New York and London (or Paris) by half, allowing passengers to have a power breakfast in London and then another in New York, on the same day. A time machine for the impatient rich, Concorde, in fact, wasn’t so much an airplane as a club. A very exclusive club whose members included Tiger Woods, Elizabeth Taylor, Madonna and Queen Elizabeth II.

The pop star Sting once cooed, “Flying at twice the speed of sound gives you a real buzz.” I briefly felt that buzz when I had a chance to fly Concorde (those in the know drop the “the”). The dirty little secret about Concorde is that the cabin was surprisingly cramped and the entire experience somehow felt rushed. Concorde was much more Alfa Romeo than Rolls-Royce. Yes, the food was gourmet and the Dom Perignon flowed like water, but who had the time to enjoy it?

Concorde may have been the darling of the rich and hurried, but it was also a noisy gas guzzler that never earned its keep. In the end, it was Osama bin Laden, the war on Iraq and a lethal crash in Paris in 2000 that conspired to finish off Concorde. The real reason for its demise, however, was something that economists call the law of diminishing returns. Simply put, we’re willing to pay a lot to get from New York to London in 6 1/2 hours but are reluctant to pay a whole lot more to shave off a few hours.

Faster, it turns out, is not always better. Personally, I actually enjoy a long flight. In fact, the longer the better. Despite the airlines’ best attempts to re-create our harried lives at 35,000 feet by installing e-mail, faxes and other “productivity devices,” an airplane cabin is still the last place where we can legitimately claim to be out of touch. I savor the experience of being suspended in time, somewhere between coming and going, neither here nor there.

The demise of Concorde is a victory for all of us who have been asking: What’s the rush? It is a victory for Italy’s slow-food movement, a victory for the inner Luddite in all of us and, most of all, a victory for sloth.

Speed machines like Concorde herald the promise of unimagined convenience (New York to London in three hours!), but the problem is that once the technology takes hold, the convenience becomes an expectation or, even worse, an obligation. That’s exactly what’s happened with overnight delivery and high-speed Internet access. We no longer marvel at the speed with which we can send a package from L.A. to New York or download a Web page. We expect these things to happen and are frustrated when they don’t.

Somewhere along the way, we have embraced speed without ever stopping to ponder one question: Why exactly is faster better? Speed is, after all, a commodity, and like any commodity you can have too little of it, but also too much. In almost every area of our lives, we suffer from a surplus of speed, not a shortage. The laptop computer that I am writing this article on probably has enough computing power to run a nuclear power plant.

But do I need all of that speed?

Our language, of course, celebrates speed. We’d rather be “quick as lightning” than “slow as molasses.” It’s time to change that. We need a new vocabulary that celebrates the joys of going slow. Example: “Hey, that was really slow thinking on your part. Congratulations.” The IRS could get in on the act by offering tax breaks to people who move slowly or companies that dawdle. The possibilities for this new Age of Slow are endless. We just need the time to think about it.

As for Concorde, we need not shed any tears. There is still a place for the flying ode to impatience. In a museum.