Concorde

Last Day

0:01If you grew up in Britain between 1976 and 2003, you might remember the sound before you knew what it was.

0:09A low, rolling thunder, somewhere above the rooftops. Conversations stopped. Heads tipped back. Somebody in the garden would say, "That's Concorde," the way you'd say it was raining. And if you were quick, there it was: a white dart with a Union flag on its tail, going somewhere none of us had ever been.

0:31You never sat in it. Almost nobody did. A ticket cost more than a family holiday, and it didn't matter. Because it was ours. Well, half ours. We built it with the French, and we'll get to that. But when it went over, it felt as if the whole country had built it. And in a way, the whole country had paid for it.

0:53It crossed the Atlantic in about three and a half hours. For twenty-seven years, nothing else with passengers on board went faster.

1:02And on the twenty-fourth of October 2003, it came home for the last time.

1:09It was a Friday. An ordinary working Friday. But all around Heathrow, people were lining the fences. They stood on car park roofs and hotel balconies. They stood on the bonnets of their cars. Photographers with long lenses stood shoulder to shoulder with men in work jackets. Somebody had brought a flask of tea. Somebody had brought a flag. Some had taken the afternoon off. Some had brought their children, and told them: remember this.

1:39Nobody quite knew what to do with themselves. There was a hush, the kind you get before a kick-off, or a funeral. People checked their watches. People checked the sky. And then, out over the west, the sound began to build.

1:56Hold that moment. Just for a second.

1:59Because everyone along that fence knew how this story ended. What almost none of them knew was how close it came to never beginning at all. That a British government tried to walk away from it before it had even flown. That the airlines who queued up to buy it changed their minds. That it was bound by a promise nobody could break, and a bill nobody wanted to pay.

2:23They had come to say goodbye to the future. Hardly anyone there knew what it had cost us to get it.

2:45Three of them came in, one after another. Noses dropped, like a swan lowering its neck. That thunder, in your ribs before it reached your ears. The crowds cheered. Some of them cried.

3:00Then the engines wound down, and what was left was ordinary sky.

3:07It had flown faster than sound for twenty-seven years. It would never carry a passenger again.

3:14And here is the part that should bother us. In the nearly twenty-three years since, nothing has replaced it. Think about that. Everything else we own got faster. Our phones. Our trains. Our broadband. But the flight from London to New York takes twice as long today as it did in 1976.

3:35So how did Britain lose the future?

3:38Not in one disaster. Not through one villain. It began in 1962, in a country of black-and-white television and coal fires, a country that had just watched its empire fade, and had decided to build an aeroplane that flew at twice the speed of sound.

3:56Why? Nobody could quite say.

3:59But...we built it anyway.

The Promise

4:05Go back to the autumn of 1962.

4:08Britain is a country of black-and-white television, Sunday roasts and coal fires. The Beatles have just released their first single. A few weeks earlier, the world came within days of nuclear war, and everybody knows it. And the empire is going, quietly, one flag at a time. A certain kind of man, in a certain kind of office, is asking an uncomfortable question: what are we for now?

4:36The answer they settled on was the future. And in 1962, the future was fast.

4:43Remember how young the jet age was. Ordinary passengers had only been flying in jets for about ten years. The sound barrier had been broken fifteen years earlier, and military pilots were already flying at twice the speed of sound. It seemed obvious, to engineers and ministers alike, that the next step was to put passengers in one. Whoever got there first would own the skies for a generation.

5:10And it was a race. The Americans were planning a supersonic airliner of their own. The Soviets were building one too, and would fly it first, in 1968, to the delight of cartoonists who nicknamed it Concordski. Nobody wanted to be the country that watched someone else's aeroplane cross the sky. In those days, being first still felt like it mattered. It felt like proof that you were still a great power.

5:38In Bristol, at Filton, engineers had been sketching a supersonic airliner for years. Across the Channel, in Toulouse, the French were doing exactly the same. Both came to the same conclusion. It would cost a fortune, and neither country could afford it alone.

5:56So on the twenty-ninth of November 1962, two old rivals signed a treaty to build it together. Two countries, two languages, two engineering cultures, one aeroplane.

6:12There was one thing in that treaty that mattered more than anything else. And it was something that wasn't there. There was no way out. Neither government could walk away without paying the other for the privilege.

6:26The first estimate was about seventy million pounds. By the end, the bill was well over a billion. Ministers wanted to cancel it. More than once, they tried. But you can't tear up a treaty on a Friday afternoon, and nobody wanted to be the government that walked out on France. Nobody wanted to be the minister who killed the future, either.

6:48Within weeks of the signing, the French president vetoed Britain's bid to join the Common Market. The two countries were barely on speaking terms. And still the drawing offices in Bristol and Toulouse carried on.

7:02So the work went on. Tens of thousands of people, on both sides of the Channel. Drawings crossing the water in two languages. There was even a row over the name. The British spelled it Concord, the French spelled it Concorde. In 1967, the minister of the day, Tony Benn, announced that Britain would accept the French spelling, and explained that the E stood for Excellence, England, Europe and Entente.

7:32Meanwhile, the world was queuing up. Airlines on every continent put down deposits. Pan Am. Qantas. Dozens of others. More than a hundred options, for a machine that existed only on paper.

7:47That was the promise. Britain and France, side by side, putting the future in the sky.

7:54But promises are cheap. The expensive part was an aeroplane that had to survive twice the speed of sound. So who actually built it?

The Makers

8:07Picture a drawing office at Filton in the sixties. Slide rules. Cigarette smoke. Hundreds of engineers, nearly all of them men, in shirtsleeves, bent over drawing boards, solving a problem nobody had ever solved. Most of the sums were done on paper, and on computers that filled a room.

8:27Because at twice the speed of sound, the air itself becomes a furnace. It piles up against the nose and the edges of the wings, and heats the skin of the aircraft until you could not hold your hand against it. At cruise, the nose reached well over a hundred degrees. Even the windows in the cabin went warm to the touch.

8:49And the metal grew. On a long flight, the whole aircraft stretched by around ten inches. The engineers simply built that in. And here's the Ordinary Detail the crews loved to tell. Behind the flight engineer's panel, a gap opened up in flight. They used to wedge a cap into it, and by the time they landed, it was gripped tight.

9:12It was breathing. A machine that breathed.

9:16Behind the two pilots sat a third crew member, the flight engineer, facing sideways at a wall of dials. One of his jobs was the fuel. As she accelerated, the balance of the aircraft shifted, so he pumped fuel from tank to tank, to the back, then forward again, all the way across the Atlantic. Even the fuel was part of the flying. Nobody had ever asked a crew to do that before.

9:44Then there was the shape. The slender delta wing, the long white arrow. Brilliant at speed, awkward when slow. To land, the nose had to point up, and the pilots couldn't see the runway. So they built a nose that bent. At take-off and landing, it drooped, and a visor slid up and down in front of the glass. Like a swan lowering its neck. Nothing else in the sky moved like that.

10:11Driving it were four Olympus engines, built by Rolls-Royce and the French firm Snecma, and descended from the engines of the Vulcan bomber. Each had an afterburner for take-off. At full power, the noise was colossal. At speed, the shape of the intakes did much of the work, and the afterburners could be switched off.

10:33Inside, the windows were not much bigger than a playing card, because at that height every opening was a risk. The paint was white, because white keeps the heat down. Every single detail had a reason. Nothing was there for show. And somehow, the whole thing still looked like a work of art.

10:53Thousands of people worked on it. In Bristol. In Derby. In Weybridge. In Toulouse. Each of them knew they were part of something that would be in the history books.

11:04On the ninth of April 1969, the British prototype lifted off from Filton, with Brian Trubshaw at the controls. A month earlier, the French prototype had flown in Toulouse. A crowd gathered at the airfield to watch. And for a few minutes, the argument about cost and noise simply stopped.

11:26We built it.

11:28But the world outside the drawing office was changing. The oil crisis was coming, and fuel was about to get a great deal more expensive. Neighbours near airports were starting to complain about the noise. And quietly, one by one, the airlines began to cancel their orders.

11:46In the end, only two stayed the course. British Airways, and Air France. Twenty Concordes were built, and only fourteen of them ever carried passengers.

11:58So what was it like, for the few who flew her?

The Golden Age

12:05On the twenty-first of January 1976, Concorde carried its first passengers. A British Airways flight left Heathrow for Bahrain, and an Air France flight left Paris for Rio. Two take-offs at the same moment, and the world watched.

12:22The New York service followed the next year, after months of rows over the noise. And then it began, the flight everyone remembers.

12:31You didn't simply board Concorde. You arrived. There was a special lounge at Heathrow. There was champagne in your hand before you'd sat down. Then a walk down a narrow aisle, into a cabin that was smaller than you'd expected. A hundred seats, two on each side. Pale leather. Tiny windows. A menu with caviar on it.

12:54The Ordinary Detail: a return ticket cost about as much as a small car.

13:00Then the take-off. The afterburners lit, and a giant hand pressed you back into your seat. In less than a minute, you were in the air. The nose lifted. London fell away.

13:12Out over the Atlantic, the pilot pushed the throttle forward, and the aircraft accelerated through the speed of sound. You hardly felt it. A nudge. A shiver. That's all. After all that noise and effort, the quiet was the surprise.

13:31But look out of the window. The sky had darkened to a deep violet. You were at sixty thousand feet, twice as high as a normal airliner. Put your hand against the glass and it was warm. And if you looked along the horizon, you could see the curve of the Earth.

13:48At the front of the cabin, a little display counted up. Mach 1.5. Mach 1.8. Mach 2.

13:57Three and a half hours to New York. Sometimes less. Leave London at half past ten in the morning, and by the clock on the wall you landed in New York before you'd left. You'd barely finished the champagne.

14:11Who flew her? Film stars. Rock stars. Prime ministers. Bankers with deadlines. And now and then, a couple who'd saved for years for one perfect flight. In the winter, she flew to Barbados, where the very rich went for Christmas. And in July 1985, a drummer called Phil Collins played Live Aid at Wembley in the afternoon, then flew Concorde across the Atlantic and played again in Philadelphia that same night. Two continents, one day. Only one aeroplane in the world could have made that possible.

14:47She was never cheap, and she was never quiet. She couldn't even go supersonic over land, because of the sonic boom, so every flight began with a long, polite crawl out over the sea. But once she was out there, nothing on earth was faster.

15:03And we loved her. Not because we flew her. Most of us never would. We loved her because she was ours, and she looked like tomorrow.

15:13For people under her flight path, she was a clock. The morning departure left Heathrow at about half past ten, and across west London, some people set their watches by it. The windows hummed. The tea in the cup rippled. And you stopped what you were doing, every single day, to look up.

15:33At airshows, it was the same. Every summer, the crowd waited for one thing. Not the display teams, not the old bombers. Concorde, taking off with the afterburners blazing, a wall of sound rolling across the field, parents with their hands over their children's ears, and the children grinning anyway.

15:54The crews talked about her the way sailors talk about a ship. They said she wanted to fly. She came in to land steep and fast, nose high, and then the nose dropped so the pilots could see the runway. And every time she touched down, somewhere on the ground, someone who'd just watched her do it said: there she goes.

16:16In June 2002, for the Queen's Golden Jubilee, Concorde flew over Buckingham Palace in a flypast, with the Red Arrows, and the crowds on the Mall looked up and cheered. It was the one time the whole country looked up at the same moment, and nobody had to be told why. Every nation has a few machines it falls in love with. A steam engine. A spitfire. A red double-decker. Concorde was the last one we gave our hearts to.

16:47For twenty-odd years, it worked. Concorde wasn't just an aeroplane. She was a symbol of Britain at its most ambitious, and its most stylish.

16:58We built it anyway. And for a while, it was ours.

17:02Then came a summer afternoon in Paris.

The Turn

17:08On the twenty-fifth of July 2000, an Air France Concorde sat at the end of a runway at Charles de Gaulle Airport, near Paris. A hundred passengers, most of them on their way to a holiday cruise. Nine crew.

17:23As it thundered down the runway, a tyre hit a strip of metal that had fallen from another aircraft. The tyre burst. A piece of rubber slammed into a fuel tank, and fuel poured out and caught fire.

17:37The crew fought it. By every account, everything they did was right. But there was no runway left, and no time. A couple of minutes after take-off, the aircraft came down on a hotel just outside the airport.

17:52All 109 people on board died, along with four on the ground. It was the first fatal crash in Concorde's history, after nearly twenty-five years of flying.

18:04The whole fleet was grounded. For about fifteen months, engineers rebuilt her. Stronger tyres. Fuel tanks lined with Kevlar. In November 2001, she flew again, to cheers.

18:20But the world had moved on. Two months before she returned, the attacks of the eleventh of September had emptied the skies. Business travellers, the people who filled her seats, stopped flying, or stopped paying for the very best seat on the plane. The older she got, the more she cost to keep in the air. And Airbus, who looked after the aircraft, made it clear they would not do so for ever.

18:47On the tenth of April 2003, both airlines announced the end. Seats on the last flights were snapped up within days. Air France flew its last in May. British Airways flew its last in October.

19:01Now here is where the title should make us uncomfortable. Because there was no single villain. There was the noise, which kept her off almost every route over land. There was the fuel, which she drank. There were the airlines, which never ordered more than a handful. There was the accident. There was the attack. And there was a balance sheet.

19:23Each of those reasons, taken alone, was reasonable. Taken together, they were the end.

19:29Add to that the plain, unglamorous problem of keeping her alive. Fourteen aircraft isn't a fleet. It's a boutique. Every flight needed a small army of engineers. Some parts were made in tiny quantities, because nobody else in the world needed them. When a supplier closed, or moved on, that was a part you couldn't simply order again. A machine built by the thousand can wait for a replacement. A machine built by the dozen can't.

19:59And there was something slower, underneath. Somewhere around the seventies, the world decided what it really wanted from flying. And it wasn't faster. It was cheaper. The jumbo jet had arrived, and with it, cheap tickets to Spain. Faster was a luxury. Cheaper was a revolution.

20:19Her fans say we gave up too easily. Her critics say she never made sense for anyone but the very rich, and that the taxpayer paid for a party most of us were never invited to. Both are partly right. That's what makes it hard.

20:35In the final weeks, something odd happened. People who had never flown her, and never would, began turning up at the airport just to see her go. The tickets for the last flights sold out almost at once. A country that had spent years arguing about the cost suddenly remembered what it felt like to look up.

20:56You know what happened next. So where did she go?

What Remains

21:03You can still visit her.

21:05At Filton, where the British story began, there's a Concorde in a hangar built just for her. She was the very last one ever to fly, landing there in November 2003. At Manchester Airport, you can stand under her wing. At Brooklands, in Surrey. At Edinburgh. In Barbados, where the winter sun-seekers once flew in. And across the Atlantic, in New York, and in Seattle.

21:32The last Concorde flight of all took place on the twenty-sixth of November 2003, a month after the farewell. She flew home to Filton, to the airfield where the first British prototype had lifted off thirty-four years earlier. A crowd was waiting there too. It was the kind of ending that nobody could have scripted. The aircraft landed where the story had begun, and then she stopped, and that was that.

22:00Walk up to the nose. Look up. Notice how small she is. And notice that she doesn't look old.

22:08That's the strange thing. Nearly twenty-three years on, Concorde still looks like tomorrow. And that's the sting.

22:16Today, London to New York takes about eight hours. Twice as long as it did in 1976. Plans for new supersonic airliners come and go. Some will probably fly. But none has yet carried a paying passenger across the Atlantic.

22:34Many of the engineers who built her are in their seventies and eighties now. Ask almost any of them, and they'll say the same thing. Not that it was perfect. That it was possible. That they spent their working lives on something that made people stop in the street and look up, and how many people can say that? Her shape is still on children's models, on tea towels, on the ceilings of a thousand bedrooms. She is, in the end, the one thing from that era that nobody has ever had to explain.

23:07So, back to the question. How did Britain lose the future?

23:12Here is the honest answer. We didn't lose it to anyone. Nobody took it from us. We built it. We flew it for twenty-seven years. And then, one careful decision after another, we chose something else. Cheaper tickets. Quieter skies. Safer sums. Every single one of those choices made sense. That is how you lose a future. Not with a bang. With a spreadsheet.

23:39And what we lost isn't really the speed. It's the nerve. The sort of country that signs a treaty, bends a nose, and builds a thing for the pure joy of seeing if it can be done.

23:52Tom Jones, no, not that one, said: "People say it was a waste of money. Maybe it was. But I was nine, in the back garden, and my dad lifted me onto his shoulders so I could see her go over. I've seen plenty of clever things since. None of them has ever made a whole street stop at the same moment."

24:13Concorde was noisy. She was expensive. Most of us never set foot inside her.

24:20And still, when she went over, we looked up. Because for twenty-seven years, two old rivals did something nobody thought was sensible, just because they could.

24:31And for a while… it was ours. And that was enough.