Concorde, Superstar of Skies, to Take Final Bow

You can almost hear the shiver of pleasure in Christopher Orlebar’s voice as he recalls what he felt each time he pushed a supersonic Concorde through the sound barrier.

On the ground, the sonic boom would have been as loud as a thunderclap. But up in the sky, the retired pilot said, “there’s just the tiny burble of turbulence, just a ripple.”

Rocketing upward after takeoff, he always anticipated with excitement “the magical moment you’re cleared to climb and accelerate, and the air slips beneath you. You’re on the threshold of space, and even the clouds, which are now tiny beneath you, seem to slip by more quickly.”

Flying twice as high and more than twice as fast as a 747, a Concorde passenger looking down “might just be rewarded by the sight of a jumbo jet wending its weary way,” he said.

Not for much longer.

On Friday, British Airways is retiring the last of its five operational Concordes after its final flight from New York City to London. As the world celebrates the centenary of the Wright Brothers’ first controlled, powered flight, the age of supersonic commercial flights is coming to an end -- at least for now.

In the 1960s, the Concorde’s British and French makers thought that their elegant, needle-nosed plane would revolutionize long-distance travel, ushering in a new era of supersonic flight. But it passes without an heir.

Concorde took wing on its first test flight in 1969, the same year man reached the moon, and looked like the sleek symbol of a hope-filled, high-tech future.

Passengers said that 11 miles up, they felt a little bit like astronauts, able to make out the curvature of the Earth. Combined with the time difference, cruising speeds of 1,350 mph meant that westbound travelers got to New York more than an hour and a half before they left Europe.

It was a narrow plane that could only carry about 100 passengers. But it was a work of engineering art, built to stretch in the air to accommodate the stresses of supersonic flight. Its revolutionary “droop nose” lowered at landing for better visibility, making an incoming Concorde resemble a giant eagle about to pounce on prey.

But the idea of supersonic travel as the next big wave in aviation failed to become reality.

Barred from setting off sonic booms over land and limited by its short range, the Concorde mostly stuck to its trans-Atlantic routes. At $9,300 for a London-New York round trip, well above the first-class fare on a Boeing 747, it remained a luxury for the wealthy few.

There are many who won’t miss the Concorde.

The roar of its engines was louder than conventional jets, infuriating neighbors of airports it served and environmentalists railed against its pollution and massive fuel use -- about 95 gallons a minute, compared with 60 or less for a jumbo jet carrying up to four times more passengers.

Strong opposition in New York -- and a lawsuit that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled for the airlines -- meant that the Concorde wasn’t cleared to land at Kennedy International Airport until 1977.

The British and French governments hoped to sell hundreds of Concordes all over the world, but only 16 were ultimately built. All went to British Airways and Air France, which grounded its fleet for good in May.

They were moneymakers for the carriers for years, but the high cost of maintaining the aging planes, dwindling ticket sales and their huge appetite for fuel eventually made them glamorous white elephants. Aviation had gone in a different direction, with enormous jets like Boeing’s 747 helping make subsonic flying convenient and affordable for millions of passengers.

“In the late ‘60s, Europe gambled on speed, America gambled on size,” said Philip Butterworth-Hayes, editor of Jane’s Aircraft Component Manufacturers journal. And America won, he said. “Concorde was a technical cul-de-sac ... a dead-end street.”

Is there a future for civilian supersonic flight?

Hope may lie in research into quieting the sonic boom created by the shock wave from a plane passing overhead faster than 760 mph, the speed of sound. Solving that problem could open up lucrative overland routes. But the cost of designing new supersonic planes has frightened off most aircraft manufacturers.

Last year, Boeing mothballed plans for the Sonic Cruiser, a plane that would have flown close to the speed of sound, and replaced it on the drawing board with a more conventional, fuel-efficient jet, the 7E7. Japanese engineers are working on a supersonic aircraft they hope will halve the noise of the Concorde’s roaring engines, fly farther and emit less pollution. But the project suffered a setback when a scale model crashed last year during a test flight.

Butterworth-Hayes said the next phase of commercial supersonic travel will be radically different from the Concorde and is probably at least 20 years off. A new generation of engines could propel travelers into a low Earth orbit at “hypersonic” speeds -- getting them from London or New York to Australia in just a few hours, he said. Research on such engines is under way at NASA and in several European countries.

The Concorde was a political milestone as well as a technological one. Tony Benn, then Britain’s aviation minister, recalled the tensions that crackled across the English Channel during the project.

The work drew longtime allies and rivals France and Britain closer, but it was a cantankerous marriage, with the nations’ leaders even sniping over whether the name (which means harmony) should be spelled Concorde or Concord.

In the end, the project made the prickly alliance closer.

“We built our half in inches and the French in meters, and it fitted perfectly,” Benn said.

The Concorde began commercial service in 1976 with flights from London to Bahrain and Paris to Rio. Demand was weak and neither route lasted long -- the airlines quickly realized that the U.S. market was the real prize.

Once the oil crises of the 1970s passed, Air France and British Airways made handsome profits on Concorde’s day-to-day operations, drawing jet-set celebrities and time-is-money executives onto trans-Atlantic flights that averaged 3 hours and 20 minutes.

The beginning of the end came when a French Concorde crashed shortly after takeoff from Paris on July 25, 2000, killing 113 people and forcing the British and the French to ground their supersonic jets for more than a year. Investigators blamed the accident on pieces of a punctured tire pierced the fuel tanks and started a fire.

Concordes returned to service two months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, in the middle of one of aviation’s worst slumps and a miserable global economy. With ticket sales weak, the planes quickly became a heavy financial burden.

British Airways has drawn up a guest list for Friday’s final flight, and its descent at Heathrow airport will be televised in Britain.

Air France donated the oldest of its Concordes to the Smithsonian Institution for its National Air and Space Museum. The exhibit, marking the Wright Brothers centennial, will open Dec. 15.

Orlebar, the former pilot, said that although he’s confident there’s a future for supersonic travel, he’s sorry to see the Concorde go. After its final flight, “the world will be a bigger place.”