1 00:00:00,600 --> 00:00:04,254 If you grew up in Britain between 1976 and 2003, 2 00:00:04,294 --> 00:00:08,680 you might remember the sound before you knew what it was. 3 00:00:09,280 --> 00:00:13,530 A low, rolling thunder, somewhere above the rooftops. 4 00:00:13,920 --> 00:00:15,747 Conversations stopped. 5 00:00:15,787 --> 00:00:17,560 Heads tipped back. 6 00:00:17,600 --> 00:00:21,990 Somebody in the garden would say, "That's Concorde," the way you'd say it was 7 00:00:22,030 --> 00:00:22,880 raining. 8 00:00:22,920 --> 00:00:27,898 And if you were quick, there it was: a white dart with a Union flag on its tail, 9 00:00:27,938 --> 00:00:30,510 going somewhere none of us had ever been. 10 00:00:31,110 --> 00:00:32,400 You never sat in it. 11 00:00:32,710 --> 00:00:34,537 Almost nobody did. 12 00:00:34,577 --> 00:00:38,670 A ticket cost more than a family holiday, and it didn't matter. 13 00:00:38,710 --> 00:00:40,640 Because it was ours. 14 00:00:40,763 --> 00:00:42,297 Well, half ours. 15 00:00:42,337 --> 00:00:45,257 We built it with the French, and we'll get to that. 16 00:00:45,297 --> 00:00:49,390 But when it went over, it felt as if the whole country had built it. 17 00:00:49,430 --> 00:00:52,099 And in a way, the whole country had paid for it. 18 00:00:52,699 --> 00:00:56,366 It crossed the Atlantic in about three and a half hours. 19 00:00:56,406 --> 00:01:00,939 For twenty-seven years, nothing else with passengers on board went faster. 20 00:01:01,539 --> 00:01:07,230 And on the twenty-fourth of October 2003, it came home for the last time. 21 00:01:09,430 --> 00:01:10,910 It was a Friday. 22 00:01:10,950 --> 00:01:13,310 An ordinary working Friday. 23 00:01:13,350 --> 00:01:17,070 But all around Heathrow, people were lining the fences. 24 00:01:17,110 --> 00:01:20,510 They stood on car park roofs and hotel balconies. 25 00:01:20,550 --> 00:01:23,150 They stood on the bonnets of their cars. 26 00:01:23,190 --> 00:01:28,270 Photographers with long lenses stood shoulder to shoulder with men in work jackets. 27 00:01:28,310 --> 00:01:30,590 Somebody had brought a flask of tea. 28 00:01:30,630 --> 00:01:32,510 Somebody had brought a flag. 29 00:01:32,550 --> 00:01:34,750 Some had taken the afternoon off. 30 00:01:34,790 --> 00:01:38,710 Some had brought their children, and told them: remember this. 31 00:01:39,310 --> 00:01:42,200 Nobody quite knew what to do with themselves. 32 00:01:42,590 --> 00:01:47,190 There was a hush, the kind you get before a kick-off, or a funeral. 33 00:01:47,230 --> 00:01:49,243 People checked their watches. 34 00:01:49,283 --> 00:01:50,870 People checked the sky. 35 00:01:50,910 --> 00:01:54,990 And then, out over the west, the sound began to build. 36 00:01:55,590 --> 00:01:56,960 Hold that moment. 37 00:01:57,270 --> 00:01:58,354 Just for a second. 38 00:01:58,954 --> 00:02:03,207 Because everyone along that fence knew how this story ended. 39 00:02:03,247 --> 00:02:08,167 What almost none of them knew was how close it came to never beginning at all. 40 00:02:08,207 --> 00:02:12,914 That a British government tried to walk away from it before it had even flown. 41 00:02:12,954 --> 00:02:16,994 That the airlines who queued up to buy it changed their minds. 42 00:02:17,034 --> 00:02:22,238 That it was bound by a promise nobody could break, and a bill nobody wanted to pay. 43 00:02:22,838 --> 00:02:25,918 They had come to say goodbye to the future. 44 00:02:25,958 --> 00:02:29,284 Hardly anyone there knew what it had cost us to get it. 45 00:02:45,284 --> 00:02:48,094 Three of them came in, one after another. 46 00:02:48,644 --> 00:02:51,934 Noses dropped, like a swan lowering its neck. 47 00:02:52,564 --> 00:02:56,524 That thunder, in your ribs before it reached your ears. 48 00:02:56,564 --> 00:02:58,204 The crowds cheered. 49 00:02:58,244 --> 00:02:59,341 Some of them cried. 50 00:02:59,941 --> 00:03:04,515 Then the engines wound down, and what was left was ordinary sky. 51 00:03:06,715 --> 00:03:10,755 It had flown faster than sound for twenty-seven years. 52 00:03:10,795 --> 00:03:12,918 It would never carry a passenger again. 53 00:03:13,518 --> 00:03:16,278 And here is the part that should bother us. 54 00:03:16,318 --> 00:03:20,758 In the nearly twenty-three years since, nothing has replaced it. 55 00:03:20,798 --> 00:03:22,118 Think about that. 56 00:03:22,158 --> 00:03:24,518 Everything else we own got faster. 57 00:03:24,558 --> 00:03:25,505 Our phones. 58 00:03:25,545 --> 00:03:26,465 Our trains. 59 00:03:26,505 --> 00:03:27,771 Our broadband. 60 00:03:27,811 --> 00:03:34,078 But the flight from London to New York takes twice as long today as it did in 1976. 61 00:03:34,678 --> 00:03:36,948 So how did Britain lose the future? 62 00:03:37,548 --> 00:03:39,708 Not in one disaster. 63 00:03:39,748 --> 00:03:41,668 Not through one villain. 64 00:03:41,708 --> 00:03:46,992 It began in 1962, in a country of black-and-white television and coal fires, 65 00:03:47,032 --> 00:03:50,355 a country that had just watched its empire fade, 66 00:03:50,395 --> 00:03:55,719 and had decided to build an aeroplane that flew at twice the speed of sound. 67 00:03:56,319 --> 00:03:57,319 Why? 68 00:03:57,359 --> 00:03:58,897 Nobody could quite say. 69 00:03:59,497 --> 00:04:01,455 But...we built it anyway. 70 00:04:05,055 --> 00:04:07,854 Go back to the autumn of 1962. 71 00:04:08,454 --> 00:04:14,254 Britain is a country of black-and-white television, Sunday roasts and coal fires. 72 00:04:14,294 --> 00:04:17,614 The Beatles have just released their first single. 73 00:04:17,654 --> 00:04:22,310 A few weeks earlier, the world came within days of nuclear war, 74 00:04:22,350 --> 00:04:23,827 and everybody knows it. 75 00:04:23,867 --> 00:04:28,574 And the empire is going, quietly, one flag at a time. 76 00:04:28,614 --> 00:04:31,963 A certain kind of man, in a certain kind of office, 77 00:04:32,003 --> 00:04:35,790 is asking an uncomfortable question: what are we for now? 78 00:04:36,390 --> 00:04:39,470 The answer they settled on was the future. 79 00:04:39,510 --> 00:04:42,874 And in 1962, the future was fast. 80 00:04:43,474 --> 00:04:46,394 Remember how young the jet age was. 81 00:04:46,434 --> 00:04:50,981 Ordinary passengers had only been flying in jets for about ten years. 82 00:04:51,021 --> 00:04:54,550 The sound barrier had been broken fifteen years earlier, 83 00:04:54,590 --> 00:04:58,714 and military pilots were already flying at twice the speed of sound. 84 00:04:58,754 --> 00:05:02,214 It seemed obvious, to engineers and ministers alike, 85 00:05:02,254 --> 00:05:05,301 that the next step was to put passengers in one. 86 00:05:05,341 --> 00:05:09,554 Whoever got there first would own the skies for a generation. 87 00:05:10,154 --> 00:05:11,764 And it was a race. 88 00:05:12,114 --> 00:05:15,981 The Americans were planning a supersonic airliner of their own. 89 00:05:16,021 --> 00:05:21,203 The Soviets were building one too, and would fly it first, in 1968, 90 00:05:21,243 --> 00:05:25,554 to the delight of cartoonists who nicknamed it Concordski. 91 00:05:25,594 --> 00:05:30,354 Nobody wanted to be the country that watched someone else's aeroplane cross the sky. 92 00:05:30,394 --> 00:05:34,381 In those days, being first still felt like it mattered. 93 00:05:34,421 --> 00:05:37,233 It felt like proof that you were still a great power. 94 00:05:37,833 --> 00:05:43,953 In Bristol, at Filton, engineers had been sketching a supersonic airliner for years. 95 00:05:43,993 --> 00:05:48,886 Across the Channel, in Toulouse, the French were doing exactly the same. 96 00:05:48,926 --> 00:05:51,126 Both came to the same conclusion. 97 00:05:51,166 --> 00:05:55,673 It would cost a fortune, and neither country could afford it alone. 98 00:05:56,273 --> 00:05:59,681 So on the twenty-ninth of November 1962, 99 00:05:59,721 --> 00:06:03,993 two old rivals signed a treaty to build it together. 100 00:06:04,033 --> 00:06:09,852 Two countries, two languages, two engineering cultures, one aeroplane. 101 00:06:12,052 --> 00:06:16,465 There was one thing in that treaty that mattered more than anything else. 102 00:06:16,505 --> 00:06:19,132 And it was something that wasn't there. 103 00:06:19,172 --> 00:06:21,132 There was no way out. 104 00:06:21,172 --> 00:06:25,131 Neither government could walk away without paying the other for the privilege. 105 00:06:25,731 --> 00:06:29,451 The first estimate was about seventy million pounds. 106 00:06:29,491 --> 00:06:33,051 By the end, the bill was well over a billion. 107 00:06:33,091 --> 00:06:35,131 Ministers wanted to cancel it. 108 00:06:35,171 --> 00:06:37,104 More than once, they tried. 109 00:06:37,144 --> 00:06:40,390 But you can't tear up a treaty on a Friday afternoon, 110 00:06:40,430 --> 00:06:44,251 and nobody wanted to be the government that walked out on France. 111 00:06:44,291 --> 00:06:47,480 Nobody wanted to be the minister who killed the future, either. 112 00:06:48,080 --> 00:06:53,447 Within weeks of the signing, the French president vetoed Britain's bid to join the 113 00:06:53,487 --> 00:06:54,200 Common Market. 114 00:06:54,240 --> 00:06:57,720 The two countries were barely on speaking terms. 115 00:06:57,760 --> 00:07:01,516 And still the drawing offices in Bristol and Toulouse carried on. 116 00:07:02,116 --> 00:07:03,806 So the work went on. 117 00:07:04,196 --> 00:07:08,156 Tens of thousands of people, on both sides of the Channel. 118 00:07:08,196 --> 00:07:11,569 Drawings crossing the water in two languages. 119 00:07:11,609 --> 00:07:13,943 There was even a row over the name. 120 00:07:13,983 --> 00:07:18,206 The British spelled it Concord, the French spelled it Concorde. 121 00:07:18,996 --> 00:07:22,079 In 1967, the minister of the day, Tony Benn, 122 00:07:22,119 --> 00:07:26,054 announced that Britain would accept the French spelling, 123 00:07:26,094 --> 00:07:31,418 and explained that the E stood for Excellence, England, Europe and Entente. 124 00:07:32,018 --> 00:07:34,508 Meanwhile, the world was queuing up. 125 00:07:34,978 --> 00:07:38,028 Airlines on every continent put down deposits. 126 00:07:38,458 --> 00:07:39,298 Pan Am. 127 00:07:39,338 --> 00:07:40,338 Qantas. 128 00:07:40,378 --> 00:07:41,468 Dozens of others. 129 00:07:42,018 --> 00:07:46,340 More than a hundred options, for a machine that existed only on paper. 130 00:07:46,940 --> 00:07:48,390 That was the promise. 131 00:07:48,780 --> 00:07:53,318 Britain and France, side by side, putting the future in the sky. 132 00:07:53,918 --> 00:07:55,528 But promises are cheap. 133 00:07:55,918 --> 00:08:01,905 The expensive part was an aeroplane that had to survive twice the speed of sound. 134 00:08:01,945 --> 00:08:03,363 So who actually built it? 135 00:08:06,963 --> 00:08:10,164 Picture a drawing office at Filton in the sixties. 136 00:08:10,554 --> 00:08:11,684 Slide rules. 137 00:08:11,834 --> 00:08:12,964 Cigarette smoke. 138 00:08:13,354 --> 00:08:17,506 Hundreds of engineers, nearly all of them men, in shirtsleeves, 139 00:08:17,546 --> 00:08:22,004 bent over drawing boards, solving a problem nobody had ever solved. 140 00:08:22,634 --> 00:08:26,790 Most of the sums were done on paper, and on computers that filled a room. 141 00:08:27,390 --> 00:08:32,630 Because at twice the speed of sound, the air itself becomes a furnace. 142 00:08:32,670 --> 00:08:36,133 It piles up against the nose and the edges of the wings, 143 00:08:36,173 --> 00:08:41,110 and heats the skin of the aircraft until you could not hold your hand against it. 144 00:08:41,150 --> 00:08:45,270 At cruise, the nose reached well over a hundred degrees. 145 00:08:45,310 --> 00:08:48,208 Even the windows in the cabin went warm to the touch. 146 00:08:48,808 --> 00:08:50,418 And the metal grew. 147 00:08:50,808 --> 00:08:55,408 On a long flight, the whole aircraft stretched by around ten inches. 148 00:08:55,448 --> 00:08:58,235 The engineers simply built that in. 149 00:08:58,275 --> 00:09:01,941 And here's the Ordinary Detail the crews loved to tell. 150 00:09:01,981 --> 00:09:06,021 Behind the flight engineer's panel, a gap opened up in flight. 151 00:09:06,061 --> 00:09:11,072 They used to wedge a cap into it, and by the time they landed, it was gripped tight. 152 00:09:11,672 --> 00:09:13,042 It was breathing. 153 00:09:13,312 --> 00:09:15,015 A machine that breathed. 154 00:09:15,615 --> 00:09:20,679 Behind the two pilots sat a third crew member, the flight engineer, 155 00:09:20,719 --> 00:09:23,175 facing sideways at a wall of dials. 156 00:09:23,215 --> 00:09:25,575 One of his jobs was the fuel. 157 00:09:25,615 --> 00:09:29,345 As she accelerated, the balance of the aircraft shifted, 158 00:09:29,385 --> 00:09:33,991 so he pumped fuel from tank to tank, to the back, then forward again, 159 00:09:34,031 --> 00:09:35,975 all the way across the Atlantic. 160 00:09:36,015 --> 00:09:38,895 Even the fuel was part of the flying. 161 00:09:38,935 --> 00:09:41,546 Nobody had ever asked a crew to do that before. 162 00:09:43,746 --> 00:09:45,626 Then there was the shape. 163 00:09:45,666 --> 00:09:49,493 The slender delta wing, the long white arrow. 164 00:09:49,533 --> 00:09:52,853 Brilliant at speed, awkward when slow. 165 00:09:52,893 --> 00:09:57,786 To land, the nose had to point up, and the pilots couldn't see the runway. 166 00:09:57,826 --> 00:10:00,186 So they built a nose that bent. 167 00:10:00,226 --> 00:10:05,633 At take-off and landing, it drooped, and a visor slid up and down in front of the 168 00:10:05,673 --> 00:10:05,973 glass. 169 00:10:05,906 --> 00:10:08,266 Like a swan lowering its neck. 170 00:10:08,306 --> 00:10:10,513 Nothing else in the sky moved like that. 171 00:10:11,113 --> 00:10:16,460 Driving it were four Olympus engines, built by Rolls-Royce and the French firm 172 00:10:16,500 --> 00:10:20,433 Snecma, and descended from the engines of the Vulcan bomber. 173 00:10:20,473 --> 00:10:23,073 Each had an afterburner for take-off. 174 00:10:23,113 --> 00:10:26,433 At full power, the noise was colossal. 175 00:10:26,473 --> 00:10:29,568 At speed, the shape of the intakes did much of the work, 176 00:10:29,608 --> 00:10:32,015 and the afterburners could be switched off. 177 00:10:32,615 --> 00:10:36,610 Inside, the windows were not much bigger than a playing card, 178 00:10:36,650 --> 00:10:39,642 because at that height every opening was a risk. 179 00:10:39,682 --> 00:10:43,295 The paint was white, because white keeps the heat down. 180 00:10:43,335 --> 00:10:45,935 Every single detail had a reason. 181 00:10:45,975 --> 00:10:47,935 Nothing was there for show. 182 00:10:47,975 --> 00:10:52,295 And somehow, the whole thing still looked like a work of art. 183 00:10:52,895 --> 00:10:55,095 Thousands of people worked on it. 184 00:10:55,135 --> 00:10:56,215 In Bristol. 185 00:10:56,255 --> 00:10:57,255 In Derby. 186 00:10:57,295 --> 00:10:58,375 In Weybridge. 187 00:10:58,415 --> 00:10:59,735 In Toulouse. 188 00:10:59,775 --> 00:11:03,631 Each of them knew they were part of something that would be in the history books. 189 00:11:04,231 --> 00:11:09,770 On the ninth of April 1969, the British prototype lifted off from Filton, 190 00:11:09,810 --> 00:11:12,561 with Brian Trubshaw at the controls. 191 00:11:13,271 --> 00:11:17,311 A month earlier, the French prototype had flown in Toulouse. 192 00:11:17,351 --> 00:11:20,218 A crowd gathered at the airfield to watch. 193 00:11:20,258 --> 00:11:25,212 And for a few minutes, the argument about cost and noise simply stopped. 194 00:11:25,812 --> 00:11:26,940 We built it. 195 00:11:27,540 --> 00:11:30,967 But the world outside the drawing office was changing. 196 00:11:31,007 --> 00:11:36,460 The oil crisis was coming, and fuel was about to get a great deal more expensive. 197 00:11:36,500 --> 00:11:40,460 Neighbours near airports were starting to complain about the noise. 198 00:11:40,500 --> 00:11:45,358 And quietly, one by one, the airlines began to cancel their orders. 199 00:11:45,958 --> 00:11:49,198 In the end, only two stayed the course. 200 00:11:49,238 --> 00:11:51,998 British Airways, and Air France. 201 00:11:52,038 --> 00:11:57,158 Twenty Concordes were built, and only fourteen of them ever carried passengers. 202 00:11:57,758 --> 00:12:00,957 So what was it like, for the few who flew her? 203 00:12:04,557 --> 00:12:10,647 On the twenty-first of January 1976, Concorde carried its first passengers. 204 00:12:11,037 --> 00:12:14,223 A British Airways flight left Heathrow for Bahrain, 205 00:12:14,263 --> 00:12:17,047 and an Air France flight left Paris for Rio. 206 00:12:17,437 --> 00:12:21,099 Two take-offs at the same moment, and the world watched. 207 00:12:21,699 --> 00:12:27,259 The New York service followed the next year, after months of rows over the noise. 208 00:12:27,299 --> 00:12:30,851 And then it began, the flight everyone remembers. 209 00:12:31,451 --> 00:12:33,971 You didn't simply board Concorde. 210 00:12:34,011 --> 00:12:35,384 You arrived. 211 00:12:35,424 --> 00:12:37,784 There was a special lounge at Heathrow. 212 00:12:37,824 --> 00:12:41,011 There was champagne in your hand before you'd sat down. 213 00:12:41,051 --> 00:12:46,371 Then a walk down a narrow aisle, into a cabin that was smaller than you'd expected. 214 00:12:46,411 --> 00:12:49,304 A hundred seats, two on each side. 215 00:12:49,344 --> 00:12:50,291 Pale leather. 216 00:12:50,331 --> 00:12:51,758 Tiny windows. 217 00:12:51,798 --> 00:12:53,527 A menu with caviar on it. 218 00:12:54,127 --> 00:12:59,211 The Ordinary Detail: a return ticket cost about as much as a small car. 219 00:12:59,811 --> 00:13:01,181 Then the take-off. 220 00:13:01,531 --> 00:13:06,411 The afterburners lit, and a giant hand pressed you back into your seat. 221 00:13:06,451 --> 00:13:08,998 In less than a minute, you were in the air. 222 00:13:09,038 --> 00:13:10,411 The nose lifted. 223 00:13:10,451 --> 00:13:11,721 London fell away. 224 00:13:12,321 --> 00:13:16,415 Out over the Atlantic, the pilot pushed the throttle forward, 225 00:13:16,455 --> 00:13:20,068 and the aircraft accelerated through the speed of sound. 226 00:13:20,108 --> 00:13:21,641 You hardly felt it. 227 00:13:21,681 --> 00:13:22,681 A nudge. 228 00:13:22,721 --> 00:13:23,748 A shiver. 229 00:13:23,788 --> 00:13:25,001 That's all. 230 00:13:25,041 --> 00:13:29,058 After all that noise and effort, the quiet was the surprise. 231 00:13:31,258 --> 00:13:32,788 But look out of the window. 232 00:13:33,098 --> 00:13:36,258 The sky had darkened to a deep violet. 233 00:13:36,298 --> 00:13:40,738 You were at sixty thousand feet, twice as high as a normal airliner. 234 00:13:40,778 --> 00:13:43,751 Put your hand against the glass and it was warm. 235 00:13:43,791 --> 00:13:47,635 And if you looked along the horizon, you could see the curve of the Earth. 236 00:13:48,235 --> 00:13:51,605 At the front of the cabin, a little display counted up. 237 00:13:52,075 --> 00:13:53,955 Mach 1.5. 238 00:13:53,995 --> 00:13:55,795 Mach 1.8. 239 00:13:55,835 --> 00:13:56,835 Mach 2. 240 00:13:57,343 --> 00:13:59,433 Three and a half hours to New York. 241 00:13:59,903 --> 00:14:00,903 Sometimes less. 242 00:14:01,343 --> 00:14:04,124 Leave London at half past ten in the morning, 243 00:14:04,164 --> 00:14:08,316 and by the clock on the wall you landed in New York before you'd left. 244 00:14:08,356 --> 00:14:10,113 You'd barely finished the champagne. 245 00:14:10,713 --> 00:14:11,763 Who flew her? 246 00:14:12,153 --> 00:14:13,283 Film stars. 247 00:14:13,553 --> 00:14:14,553 Rock stars. 248 00:14:14,833 --> 00:14:15,843 Prime ministers. 249 00:14:16,233 --> 00:14:18,113 Bankers with deadlines. 250 00:14:18,153 --> 00:14:23,286 And now and then, a couple who'd saved for years for one perfect flight. 251 00:14:23,326 --> 00:14:28,246 In the winter, she flew to Barbados, where the very rich went for Christmas. 252 00:14:28,286 --> 00:14:33,946 And in July 1985, a drummer called Phil Collins played Live Aid at Wembley in the 253 00:14:33,986 --> 00:14:39,717 afternoon, then flew Concorde across the Atlantic and played again in Philadelphia 254 00:14:39,757 --> 00:14:40,673 that same night. 255 00:14:40,713 --> 00:14:43,073 Two continents, one day. 256 00:14:43,113 --> 00:14:46,087 Only one aeroplane in the world could have made that possible. 257 00:14:46,687 --> 00:14:50,034 She was never cheap, and she was never quiet. 258 00:14:50,074 --> 00:14:54,763 She couldn't even go supersonic over land, because of the sonic boom, 259 00:14:54,803 --> 00:14:59,074 so every flight began with a long, polite crawl out over the sea. 260 00:14:59,114 --> 00:15:02,327 But once she was out there, nothing on earth was faster. 261 00:15:02,927 --> 00:15:04,377 And we loved her. 262 00:15:04,767 --> 00:15:06,217 Not because we flew her. 263 00:15:06,567 --> 00:15:07,897 Most of us never would. 264 00:15:08,367 --> 00:15:12,688 We loved her because she was ours, and she looked like tomorrow. 265 00:15:13,288 --> 00:15:16,955 For people under her flight path, she was a clock. 266 00:15:16,995 --> 00:15:20,873 The morning departure left Heathrow at about half past ten, 267 00:15:20,913 --> 00:15:24,661 and across west London, some people set their watches by it. 268 00:15:24,701 --> 00:15:26,315 The windows hummed. 269 00:15:26,355 --> 00:15:28,395 The tea in the cup rippled. 270 00:15:28,435 --> 00:15:32,289 And you stopped what you were doing, every single day, to look up. 271 00:15:32,889 --> 00:15:34,979 At airshows, it was the same. 272 00:15:35,609 --> 00:15:39,009 Every summer, the crowd waited for one thing. 273 00:15:39,049 --> 00:15:42,209 Not the display teams, not the old bombers. 274 00:15:42,249 --> 00:15:45,488 Concorde, taking off with the afterburners blazing, 275 00:15:45,528 --> 00:15:48,124 a wall of sound rolling across the field, 276 00:15:48,164 --> 00:15:51,467 parents with their hands over their children's ears, 277 00:15:51,507 --> 00:15:53,629 and the children grinning anyway. 278 00:15:54,229 --> 00:15:58,296 The crews talked about her the way sailors talk about a ship. 279 00:15:58,336 --> 00:16:01,016 They said she wanted to fly. 280 00:16:01,056 --> 00:16:04,207 She came in to land steep and fast, nose high, 281 00:16:04,247 --> 00:16:08,269 and then the nose dropped so the pilots could see the runway. 282 00:16:08,309 --> 00:16:11,735 And every time she touched down, somewhere on the ground, 283 00:16:11,775 --> 00:16:15,301 someone who'd just watched her do it said: there she goes. 284 00:16:15,901 --> 00:16:19,355 In June 2002, for the Queen's Golden Jubilee, 285 00:16:19,395 --> 00:16:24,867 Concorde flew over Buckingham Palace in a flypast, with the Red Arrows, 286 00:16:24,907 --> 00:16:28,501 and the crowds on the Mall looked up and cheered. 287 00:16:28,541 --> 00:16:33,371 It was the one time the whole country looked up at the same moment, 288 00:16:33,411 --> 00:16:35,381 and nobody had to be told why. 289 00:16:35,421 --> 00:16:38,954 Every nation has a few machines it falls in love with. 290 00:16:38,994 --> 00:16:40,341 A steam engine. 291 00:16:40,381 --> 00:16:41,701 A spitfire. 292 00:16:41,741 --> 00:16:43,621 A red double-decker. 293 00:16:43,661 --> 00:16:46,454 Concorde was the last one we gave our hearts to. 294 00:16:47,054 --> 00:16:49,544 For twenty-odd years, it worked. 295 00:16:50,054 --> 00:16:52,264 Concorde wasn't just an aeroplane. 296 00:16:52,574 --> 00:16:57,272 She was a symbol of Britain at its most ambitious, and its most stylish. 297 00:16:57,872 --> 00:16:59,539 We built it anyway. 298 00:16:59,579 --> 00:17:01,534 And for a while, it was ours. 299 00:17:02,134 --> 00:17:04,796 Then came a summer afternoon in Paris. 300 00:17:08,396 --> 00:17:13,932 On the twenty-fifth of July 2000, an Air France Concorde sat at the end of a runway 301 00:17:13,972 --> 00:17:16,726 at Charles de Gaulle Airport, near Paris. 302 00:17:17,276 --> 00:17:21,366 A hundred passengers, most of them on their way to a holiday cruise. 303 00:17:21,916 --> 00:17:22,916 Nine crew. 304 00:17:23,433 --> 00:17:28,823 As it thundered down the runway, a tyre hit a strip of metal that had fallen from 305 00:17:28,863 --> 00:17:29,820 another aircraft. 306 00:17:29,860 --> 00:17:31,473 The tyre burst. 307 00:17:31,513 --> 00:17:36,557 A piece of rubber slammed into a fuel tank, and fuel poured out and caught fire. 308 00:17:37,157 --> 00:17:38,957 The crew fought it. 309 00:17:38,997 --> 00:17:42,290 By every account, everything they did was right. 310 00:17:42,330 --> 00:17:45,650 But there was no runway left, and no time. 311 00:17:45,690 --> 00:17:50,540 A couple of minutes after take-off, the aircraft came down on a hotel just outside 312 00:17:50,580 --> 00:17:51,580 the airport. 313 00:17:51,896 --> 00:17:57,296 All 109 people on board died, along with four on the ground. 314 00:17:57,336 --> 00:18:00,485 It was the first fatal crash in Concorde's history, 315 00:18:00,525 --> 00:18:03,088 after nearly twenty-five years of flying. 316 00:18:03,688 --> 00:18:05,698 The whole fleet was grounded. 317 00:18:06,128 --> 00:18:09,648 For about fifteen months, engineers rebuilt her. 318 00:18:09,688 --> 00:18:11,221 Stronger tyres. 319 00:18:11,261 --> 00:18:13,488 Fuel tanks lined with Kevlar. 320 00:18:13,528 --> 00:18:17,683 In November 2001, she flew again, to cheers. 321 00:18:19,883 --> 00:18:22,163 But the world had moved on. 322 00:18:22,203 --> 00:18:27,891 Two months before she returned, the attacks of the eleventh of September had emptied 323 00:18:27,931 --> 00:18:28,590 the skies. 324 00:18:28,630 --> 00:18:33,382 Business travellers, the people who filled her seats, stopped flying, 325 00:18:33,422 --> 00:18:36,990 or stopped paying for the very best seat on the plane. 326 00:18:37,030 --> 00:18:40,803 The older she got, the more she cost to keep in the air. 327 00:18:40,843 --> 00:18:43,284 And Airbus, who looked after the aircraft, 328 00:18:43,324 --> 00:18:45,923 made it clear they would not do so for ever. 329 00:18:46,523 --> 00:18:52,003 On the tenth of April 2003, both airlines announced the end. 330 00:18:52,043 --> 00:18:55,763 Seats on the last flights were snapped up within days. 331 00:18:55,803 --> 00:18:58,243 Air France flew its last in May. 332 00:18:58,283 --> 00:19:00,844 British Airways flew its last in October. 333 00:19:01,444 --> 00:19:04,494 Now here is where the title should make us uncomfortable. 334 00:19:04,844 --> 00:19:07,297 Because there was no single villain. 335 00:19:07,337 --> 00:19:11,697 There was the noise, which kept her off almost every route over land. 336 00:19:11,737 --> 00:19:14,097 There was the fuel, which she drank. 337 00:19:14,137 --> 00:19:17,644 There were the airlines, which never ordered more than a handful. 338 00:19:17,684 --> 00:19:19,057 There was the accident. 339 00:19:19,097 --> 00:19:20,654 There was the attack. 340 00:19:20,724 --> 00:19:22,214 And there was a balance sheet. 341 00:19:22,814 --> 00:19:26,747 Each of those reasons, taken alone, was reasonable. 342 00:19:26,787 --> 00:19:28,781 Taken together, they were the end. 343 00:19:29,381 --> 00:19:33,791 Add to that the plain, unglamorous problem of keeping her alive. 344 00:19:34,381 --> 00:19:36,648 Fourteen aircraft isn't a fleet. 345 00:19:36,688 --> 00:19:38,061 It's a boutique. 346 00:19:38,101 --> 00:19:41,501 Every flight needed a small army of engineers. 347 00:19:41,541 --> 00:19:44,028 Some parts were made in tiny quantities, 348 00:19:44,068 --> 00:19:46,674 because nobody else in the world needed them. 349 00:19:46,714 --> 00:19:51,834 When a supplier closed, or moved on, that was a part you couldn't simply order 350 00:19:51,874 --> 00:19:52,174 again. 351 00:19:52,101 --> 00:19:55,874 A machine built by the thousand can wait for a replacement. 352 00:19:55,914 --> 00:19:58,255 A machine built by the dozen can't. 353 00:19:58,855 --> 00:20:01,882 And there was something slower, underneath. 354 00:20:01,922 --> 00:20:06,948 Somewhere around the seventies, the world decided what it really wanted from flying. 355 00:20:06,988 --> 00:20:08,655 And it wasn't faster. 356 00:20:08,695 --> 00:20:10,095 It was cheaper. 357 00:20:10,135 --> 00:20:14,575 The jumbo jet had arrived, and with it, cheap tickets to Spain. 358 00:20:14,615 --> 00:20:16,495 Faster was a luxury. 359 00:20:16,535 --> 00:20:18,312 Cheaper was a revolution. 360 00:20:18,912 --> 00:20:21,402 Her fans say we gave up too easily. 361 00:20:21,872 --> 00:20:26,352 Her critics say she never made sense for anyone but the very rich, 362 00:20:26,392 --> 00:20:31,322 and that the taxpayer paid for a party most of us were never invited to. 363 00:20:31,392 --> 00:20:33,112 Both are partly right. 364 00:20:33,152 --> 00:20:34,336 That's what makes it hard. 365 00:20:34,936 --> 00:20:38,336 In the final weeks, something odd happened. 366 00:20:38,376 --> 00:20:41,715 People who had never flown her, and never would, 367 00:20:41,755 --> 00:20:45,163 began turning up at the airport just to see her go. 368 00:20:45,203 --> 00:20:49,296 The tickets for the last flights sold out almost at once. 369 00:20:49,336 --> 00:20:54,272 A country that had spent years arguing about the cost suddenly remembered what it 370 00:20:54,312 --> 00:20:55,602 felt like to look up. 371 00:20:56,202 --> 00:20:57,812 You know what happened next. 372 00:20:58,282 --> 00:20:59,874 So where did she go? 373 00:21:03,474 --> 00:21:04,851 You can still visit her. 374 00:21:05,451 --> 00:21:08,335 At Filton, where the British story began, 375 00:21:08,375 --> 00:21:11,731 there's a Concorde in a hangar built just for her. 376 00:21:11,771 --> 00:21:17,891 She was the very last one ever to fly, landing there in November 2003. 377 00:21:17,931 --> 00:21:21,411 At Manchester Airport, you can stand under her wing. 378 00:21:21,451 --> 00:21:23,411 At Brooklands, in Surrey. 379 00:21:23,451 --> 00:21:24,771 At Edinburgh. 380 00:21:24,811 --> 00:21:28,451 In Barbados, where the winter sun-seekers once flew in. 381 00:21:28,491 --> 00:21:31,793 And across the Atlantic, in New York, and in Seattle. 382 00:21:32,393 --> 00:21:38,701 The last Concorde flight of all took place on the twenty-sixth of November 2003, 383 00:21:38,741 --> 00:21:40,673 a month after the farewell. 384 00:21:40,713 --> 00:21:45,835 She flew home to Filton, to the airfield where the first British prototype had 385 00:21:45,875 --> 00:21:48,193 lifted off thirty-four years earlier. 386 00:21:48,233 --> 00:21:50,273 A crowd was waiting there too. 387 00:21:50,313 --> 00:21:53,873 It was the kind of ending that nobody could have scripted. 388 00:21:53,913 --> 00:21:57,963 The aircraft landed where the story had begun, and then she stopped, 389 00:21:58,003 --> 00:21:59,086 and that was that. 390 00:21:59,686 --> 00:22:01,136 Walk up to the nose. 391 00:22:01,526 --> 00:22:02,526 Look up. 392 00:22:02,806 --> 00:22:05,086 Notice how small she is. 393 00:22:05,126 --> 00:22:07,256 And notice that she doesn't look old. 394 00:22:07,856 --> 00:22:09,816 That's the strange thing. 395 00:22:09,856 --> 00:22:14,376 Nearly twenty-three years on, Concorde still looks like tomorrow. 396 00:22:14,416 --> 00:22:15,755 And that's the sting. 397 00:22:16,355 --> 00:22:19,965 Today, London to New York takes about eight hours. 398 00:22:20,355 --> 00:22:23,755 Twice as long as it did in 1976. 399 00:22:23,795 --> 00:22:27,515 Plans for new supersonic airliners come and go. 400 00:22:27,555 --> 00:22:29,595 Some will probably fly. 401 00:22:29,635 --> 00:22:33,715 But none has yet carried a paying passenger across the Atlantic. 402 00:22:34,315 --> 00:22:38,995 Many of the engineers who built her are in their seventies and eighties now. 403 00:22:39,035 --> 00:22:42,702 Ask almost any of them, and they'll say the same thing. 404 00:22:42,742 --> 00:22:44,328 Not that it was perfect. 405 00:22:44,368 --> 00:22:46,062 That it was possible. 406 00:22:46,102 --> 00:22:51,375 That they spent their working lives on something that made people stop in the street 407 00:22:51,415 --> 00:22:54,195 and look up, and how many people can say that? 408 00:22:54,235 --> 00:22:58,039 Her shape is still on children's models, on tea towels, 409 00:22:58,079 --> 00:23:00,595 on the ceilings of a thousand bedrooms. 410 00:23:00,635 --> 00:23:06,404 She is, in the end, the one thing from that era that nobody has ever had to explain. 411 00:23:07,004 --> 00:23:08,934 So, back to the question. 412 00:23:09,444 --> 00:23:11,341 How did Britain lose the future? 413 00:23:11,941 --> 00:23:13,901 Here is the honest answer. 414 00:23:13,941 --> 00:23:16,061 We didn't lose it to anyone. 415 00:23:16,101 --> 00:23:17,941 Nobody took it from us. 416 00:23:17,981 --> 00:23:19,261 We built it. 417 00:23:19,301 --> 00:23:21,848 We flew it for twenty-seven years. 418 00:23:21,888 --> 00:23:26,781 And then, one careful decision after another, we chose something else. 419 00:23:26,821 --> 00:23:28,221 Cheaper tickets. 420 00:23:28,261 --> 00:23:29,701 Quieter skies. 421 00:23:29,741 --> 00:23:31,181 Safer sums. 422 00:23:31,221 --> 00:23:34,301 Every single one of those choices made sense. 423 00:23:34,341 --> 00:23:36,461 That is how you lose a future. 424 00:23:36,501 --> 00:23:37,768 Not with a bang. 425 00:23:37,808 --> 00:23:38,857 With a spreadsheet. 426 00:23:39,457 --> 00:23:42,457 And what we lost isn't really the speed. 427 00:23:42,497 --> 00:23:43,870 It's the nerve. 428 00:23:43,910 --> 00:23:47,189 The sort of country that signs a treaty, bends a nose, 429 00:23:47,229 --> 00:23:51,162 and builds a thing for the pure joy of seeing if it can be done. 430 00:23:51,762 --> 00:23:57,962 Tom Jones, no, not that one, said: "People say it was a waste of money. 431 00:23:58,002 --> 00:23:59,322 Maybe it was. 432 00:23:59,362 --> 00:24:04,851 But I was nine, in the back garden, and my dad lifted me onto his shoulders so I 433 00:24:04,891 --> 00:24:06,202 could see her go over. 434 00:24:06,242 --> 00:24:08,922 I've seen plenty of clever things since. 435 00:24:08,962 --> 00:24:12,867 None of them has ever made a whole street stop at the same moment." 436 00:24:13,467 --> 00:24:15,187 Concorde was noisy. 437 00:24:15,227 --> 00:24:16,907 She was expensive. 438 00:24:16,947 --> 00:24:18,986 Most of us never set foot inside her. 439 00:24:19,586 --> 00:24:23,279 And still, when she went over, we looked up. 440 00:24:23,319 --> 00:24:28,069 Because for twenty-seven years, two old rivals did something nobody thought was 441 00:24:28,109 --> 00:24:30,170 sensible, just because they could. 442 00:24:30,770 --> 00:24:33,260 And for a while… it was ours. 443 00:24:33,570 --> 00:24:34,596 And that was enough. 444 00:24:37,096 --> 00:24:39,096 This has been What Britain Lost. 445 00:24:39,136 --> 00:24:44,323 If it took you back, tell us what you remember, in the comments or on our website. 446 00:24:44,363 --> 00:24:48,889 And stay with us: there's plenty more we thought would be here forever.