WEBVTT 00:00:00.600 --> 00:00:04.254 If you grew up in Britain between 1976 and 2003, 00:00:04.294 --> 00:00:08.680 you might remember the sound before you knew what it was. 00:00:09.280 --> 00:00:13.530 A low, rolling thunder, somewhere above the rooftops. 00:00:13.920 --> 00:00:15.747 Conversations stopped. 00:00:15.787 --> 00:00:17.560 Heads tipped back. 00:00:17.600 --> 00:00:21.990 Somebody in the garden would say, "That's Concorde," the way you'd say it was 00:00:22.030 --> 00:00:22.880 raining. 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, 00:00:27.938 --> 00:00:30.510 going somewhere none of us had ever been. 00:00:31.110 --> 00:00:32.400 You never sat in it. 00:00:32.710 --> 00:00:34.537 Almost nobody did. 00:00:34.577 --> 00:00:38.670 A ticket cost more than a family holiday, and it didn't matter. 00:00:38.710 --> 00:00:40.640 Because it was ours. 00:00:40.763 --> 00:00:42.297 Well, half ours. 00:00:42.337 --> 00:00:45.257 We built it with the French, and we'll get to that. 00:00:45.297 --> 00:00:49.390 But when it went over, it felt as if the whole country had built it. 00:00:49.430 --> 00:00:52.099 And in a way, the whole country had paid for it. 00:00:52.699 --> 00:00:56.366 It crossed the Atlantic in about three and a half hours. 00:00:56.406 --> 00:01:00.939 For twenty-seven years, nothing else with passengers on board went faster. 00:01:01.539 --> 00:01:07.230 And on the twenty-fourth of October 2003, it came home for the last time. 00:01:09.430 --> 00:01:10.910 It was a Friday. 00:01:10.950 --> 00:01:13.310 An ordinary working Friday. 00:01:13.350 --> 00:01:17.070 But all around Heathrow, people were lining the fences. 00:01:17.110 --> 00:01:20.510 They stood on car park roofs and hotel balconies. 00:01:20.550 --> 00:01:23.150 They stood on the bonnets of their cars. 00:01:23.190 --> 00:01:28.270 Photographers with long lenses stood shoulder to shoulder with men in work jackets. 00:01:28.310 --> 00:01:30.590 Somebody had brought a flask of tea. 00:01:30.630 --> 00:01:32.510 Somebody had brought a flag. 00:01:32.550 --> 00:01:34.750 Some had taken the afternoon off. 00:01:34.790 --> 00:01:38.710 Some had brought their children, and told them: remember this. 00:01:39.310 --> 00:01:42.200 Nobody quite knew what to do with themselves. 00:01:42.590 --> 00:01:47.190 There was a hush, the kind you get before a kick-off, or a funeral. 00:01:47.230 --> 00:01:49.243 People checked their watches. 00:01:49.283 --> 00:01:50.870 People checked the sky. 00:01:50.910 --> 00:01:54.990 And then, out over the west, the sound began to build. 00:01:55.590 --> 00:01:56.960 Hold that moment. 00:01:57.270 --> 00:01:58.354 Just for a second. 00:01:58.954 --> 00:02:03.207 Because everyone along that fence knew how this story ended. 00:02:03.247 --> 00:02:08.167 What almost none of them knew was how close it came to never beginning at all. 00:02:08.207 --> 00:02:12.914 That a British government tried to walk away from it before it had even flown. 00:02:12.954 --> 00:02:16.994 That the airlines who queued up to buy it changed their minds. 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. 00:02:22.838 --> 00:02:25.918 They had come to say goodbye to the future. 00:02:25.958 --> 00:02:29.284 Hardly anyone there knew what it had cost us to get it. 00:02:45.284 --> 00:02:48.094 Three of them came in, one after another. 00:02:48.644 --> 00:02:51.934 Noses dropped, like a swan lowering its neck. 00:02:52.564 --> 00:02:56.524 That thunder, in your ribs before it reached your ears. 00:02:56.564 --> 00:02:58.204 The crowds cheered. 00:02:58.244 --> 00:02:59.341 Some of them cried. 00:02:59.941 --> 00:03:04.515 Then the engines wound down, and what was left was ordinary sky. 00:03:06.715 --> 00:03:10.755 It had flown faster than sound for twenty-seven years. 00:03:10.795 --> 00:03:12.918 It would never carry a passenger again. 00:03:13.518 --> 00:03:16.278 And here is the part that should bother us. 00:03:16.318 --> 00:03:20.758 In the nearly twenty-three years since, nothing has replaced it. 00:03:20.798 --> 00:03:22.118 Think about that. 00:03:22.158 --> 00:03:24.518 Everything else we own got faster. 00:03:24.558 --> 00:03:25.505 Our phones. 00:03:25.545 --> 00:03:26.465 Our trains. 00:03:26.505 --> 00:03:27.771 Our broadband. 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. 00:03:34.678 --> 00:03:36.948 So how did Britain lose the future? 00:03:37.548 --> 00:03:39.708 Not in one disaster. 00:03:39.748 --> 00:03:41.668 Not through one villain. 00:03:41.708 --> 00:03:46.992 It began in 1962, in a country of black-and-white television and coal fires, 00:03:47.032 --> 00:03:50.355 a country that had just watched its empire fade, 00:03:50.395 --> 00:03:55.719 and had decided to build an aeroplane that flew at twice the speed of sound. 00:03:56.319 --> 00:03:57.319 Why? 00:03:57.359 --> 00:03:58.897 Nobody could quite say. 00:03:59.497 --> 00:04:01.455 But...we built it anyway. 00:04:05.055 --> 00:04:07.854 Go back to the autumn of 1962. 00:04:08.454 --> 00:04:14.254 Britain is a country of black-and-white television, Sunday roasts and coal fires. 00:04:14.294 --> 00:04:17.614 The Beatles have just released their first single. 00:04:17.654 --> 00:04:22.310 A few weeks earlier, the world came within days of nuclear war, 00:04:22.350 --> 00:04:23.827 and everybody knows it. 00:04:23.867 --> 00:04:28.574 And the empire is going, quietly, one flag at a time. 00:04:28.614 --> 00:04:31.963 A certain kind of man, in a certain kind of office, 00:04:32.003 --> 00:04:35.790 is asking an uncomfortable question: what are we for now? 00:04:36.390 --> 00:04:39.470 The answer they settled on was the future. 00:04:39.510 --> 00:04:42.874 And in 1962, the future was fast. 00:04:43.474 --> 00:04:46.394 Remember how young the jet age was. 00:04:46.434 --> 00:04:50.981 Ordinary passengers had only been flying in jets for about ten years. 00:04:51.021 --> 00:04:54.550 The sound barrier had been broken fifteen years earlier, 00:04:54.590 --> 00:04:58.714 and military pilots were already flying at twice the speed of sound. 00:04:58.754 --> 00:05:02.214 It seemed obvious, to engineers and ministers alike, 00:05:02.254 --> 00:05:05.301 that the next step was to put passengers in one. 00:05:05.341 --> 00:05:09.554 Whoever got there first would own the skies for a generation. 00:05:10.154 --> 00:05:11.764 And it was a race. 00:05:12.114 --> 00:05:15.981 The Americans were planning a supersonic airliner of their own. 00:05:16.021 --> 00:05:21.203 The Soviets were building one too, and would fly it first, in 1968, 00:05:21.243 --> 00:05:25.554 to the delight of cartoonists who nicknamed it Concordski. 00:05:25.594 --> 00:05:30.354 Nobody wanted to be the country that watched someone else's aeroplane cross the sky. 00:05:30.394 --> 00:05:34.381 In those days, being first still felt like it mattered. 00:05:34.421 --> 00:05:37.233 It felt like proof that you were still a great power. 00:05:37.833 --> 00:05:43.953 In Bristol, at Filton, engineers had been sketching a supersonic airliner for years. 00:05:43.993 --> 00:05:48.886 Across the Channel, in Toulouse, the French were doing exactly the same. 00:05:48.926 --> 00:05:51.126 Both came to the same conclusion. 00:05:51.166 --> 00:05:55.673 It would cost a fortune, and neither country could afford it alone. 00:05:56.273 --> 00:05:59.681 So on the twenty-ninth of November 1962, 00:05:59.721 --> 00:06:03.993 two old rivals signed a treaty to build it together. 00:06:04.033 --> 00:06:09.852 Two countries, two languages, two engineering cultures, one aeroplane. 00:06:12.052 --> 00:06:16.465 There was one thing in that treaty that mattered more than anything else. 00:06:16.505 --> 00:06:19.132 And it was something that wasn't there. 00:06:19.172 --> 00:06:21.132 There was no way out. 00:06:21.172 --> 00:06:25.131 Neither government could walk away without paying the other for the privilege. 00:06:25.731 --> 00:06:29.451 The first estimate was about seventy million pounds. 00:06:29.491 --> 00:06:33.051 By the end, the bill was well over a billion. 00:06:33.091 --> 00:06:35.131 Ministers wanted to cancel it. 00:06:35.171 --> 00:06:37.104 More than once, they tried. 00:06:37.144 --> 00:06:40.390 But you can't tear up a treaty on a Friday afternoon, 00:06:40.430 --> 00:06:44.251 and nobody wanted to be the government that walked out on France. 00:06:44.291 --> 00:06:47.480 Nobody wanted to be the minister who killed the future, either. 00:06:48.080 --> 00:06:53.447 Within weeks of the signing, the French president vetoed Britain's bid to join the 00:06:53.487 --> 00:06:54.200 Common Market. 00:06:54.240 --> 00:06:57.720 The two countries were barely on speaking terms. 00:06:57.760 --> 00:07:01.516 And still the drawing offices in Bristol and Toulouse carried on. 00:07:02.116 --> 00:07:03.806 So the work went on. 00:07:04.196 --> 00:07:08.156 Tens of thousands of people, on both sides of the Channel. 00:07:08.196 --> 00:07:11.569 Drawings crossing the water in two languages. 00:07:11.609 --> 00:07:13.943 There was even a row over the name. 00:07:13.983 --> 00:07:18.206 The British spelled it Concord, the French spelled it Concorde. 00:07:18.996 --> 00:07:22.079 In 1967, the minister of the day, Tony Benn, 00:07:22.119 --> 00:07:26.054 announced that Britain would accept the French spelling, 00:07:26.094 --> 00:07:31.418 and explained that the E stood for Excellence, England, Europe and Entente. 00:07:32.018 --> 00:07:34.508 Meanwhile, the world was queuing up. 00:07:34.978 --> 00:07:38.028 Airlines on every continent put down deposits. 00:07:38.458 --> 00:07:39.298 Pan Am. 00:07:39.338 --> 00:07:40.338 Qantas. 00:07:40.378 --> 00:07:41.468 Dozens of others. 00:07:42.018 --> 00:07:46.340 More than a hundred options, for a machine that existed only on paper. 00:07:46.940 --> 00:07:48.390 That was the promise. 00:07:48.780 --> 00:07:53.318 Britain and France, side by side, putting the future in the sky. 00:07:53.918 --> 00:07:55.528 But promises are cheap. 00:07:55.918 --> 00:08:01.905 The expensive part was an aeroplane that had to survive twice the speed of sound. 00:08:01.945 --> 00:08:03.363 So who actually built it? 00:08:06.963 --> 00:08:10.164 Picture a drawing office at Filton in the sixties. 00:08:10.554 --> 00:08:11.684 Slide rules. 00:08:11.834 --> 00:08:12.964 Cigarette smoke. 00:08:13.354 --> 00:08:17.506 Hundreds of engineers, nearly all of them men, in shirtsleeves, 00:08:17.546 --> 00:08:22.004 bent over drawing boards, solving a problem nobody had ever solved. 00:08:22.634 --> 00:08:26.790 Most of the sums were done on paper, and on computers that filled a room. 00:08:27.390 --> 00:08:32.630 Because at twice the speed of sound, the air itself becomes a furnace. 00:08:32.670 --> 00:08:36.133 It piles up against the nose and the edges of the wings, 00:08:36.173 --> 00:08:41.110 and heats the skin of the aircraft until you could not hold your hand against it. 00:08:41.150 --> 00:08:45.270 At cruise, the nose reached well over a hundred degrees. 00:08:45.310 --> 00:08:48.208 Even the windows in the cabin went warm to the touch. 00:08:48.808 --> 00:08:50.418 And the metal grew. 00:08:50.808 --> 00:08:55.408 On a long flight, the whole aircraft stretched by around ten inches. 00:08:55.448 --> 00:08:58.235 The engineers simply built that in. 00:08:58.275 --> 00:09:01.941 And here's the Ordinary Detail the crews loved to tell. 00:09:01.981 --> 00:09:06.021 Behind the flight engineer's panel, a gap opened up in flight. 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. 00:09:11.672 --> 00:09:13.042 It was breathing. 00:09:13.312 --> 00:09:15.015 A machine that breathed. 00:09:15.615 --> 00:09:20.679 Behind the two pilots sat a third crew member, the flight engineer, 00:09:20.719 --> 00:09:23.175 facing sideways at a wall of dials. 00:09:23.215 --> 00:09:25.575 One of his jobs was the fuel. 00:09:25.615 --> 00:09:29.345 As she accelerated, the balance of the aircraft shifted, 00:09:29.385 --> 00:09:33.991 so he pumped fuel from tank to tank, to the back, then forward again, 00:09:34.031 --> 00:09:35.975 all the way across the Atlantic. 00:09:36.015 --> 00:09:38.895 Even the fuel was part of the flying. 00:09:38.935 --> 00:09:41.546 Nobody had ever asked a crew to do that before. 00:09:43.746 --> 00:09:45.626 Then there was the shape. 00:09:45.666 --> 00:09:49.493 The slender delta wing, the long white arrow. 00:09:49.533 --> 00:09:52.853 Brilliant at speed, awkward when slow. 00:09:52.893 --> 00:09:57.786 To land, the nose had to point up, and the pilots couldn't see the runway. 00:09:57.826 --> 00:10:00.186 So they built a nose that bent. 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 00:10:05.673 --> 00:10:05.973 glass. 00:10:05.906 --> 00:10:08.266 Like a swan lowering its neck. 00:10:08.306 --> 00:10:10.513 Nothing else in the sky moved like that. 00:10:11.113 --> 00:10:16.460 Driving it were four Olympus engines, built by Rolls-Royce and the French firm 00:10:16.500 --> 00:10:20.433 Snecma, and descended from the engines of the Vulcan bomber. 00:10:20.473 --> 00:10:23.073 Each had an afterburner for take-off. 00:10:23.113 --> 00:10:26.433 At full power, the noise was colossal. 00:10:26.473 --> 00:10:29.568 At speed, the shape of the intakes did much of the work, 00:10:29.608 --> 00:10:32.015 and the afterburners could be switched off. 00:10:32.615 --> 00:10:36.610 Inside, the windows were not much bigger than a playing card, 00:10:36.650 --> 00:10:39.642 because at that height every opening was a risk. 00:10:39.682 --> 00:10:43.295 The paint was white, because white keeps the heat down. 00:10:43.335 --> 00:10:45.935 Every single detail had a reason. 00:10:45.975 --> 00:10:47.935 Nothing was there for show. 00:10:47.975 --> 00:10:52.295 And somehow, the whole thing still looked like a work of art. 00:10:52.895 --> 00:10:55.095 Thousands of people worked on it. 00:10:55.135 --> 00:10:56.215 In Bristol. 00:10:56.255 --> 00:10:57.255 In Derby. 00:10:57.295 --> 00:10:58.375 In Weybridge. 00:10:58.415 --> 00:10:59.735 In Toulouse. 00:10:59.775 --> 00:11:03.631 Each of them knew they were part of something that would be in the history books. 00:11:04.231 --> 00:11:09.770 On the ninth of April 1969, the British prototype lifted off from Filton, 00:11:09.810 --> 00:11:12.561 with Brian Trubshaw at the controls. 00:11:13.271 --> 00:11:17.311 A month earlier, the French prototype had flown in Toulouse. 00:11:17.351 --> 00:11:20.218 A crowd gathered at the airfield to watch. 00:11:20.258 --> 00:11:25.212 And for a few minutes, the argument about cost and noise simply stopped. 00:11:25.812 --> 00:11:26.940 We built it. 00:11:27.540 --> 00:11:30.967 But the world outside the drawing office was changing. 00:11:31.007 --> 00:11:36.460 The oil crisis was coming, and fuel was about to get a great deal more expensive. 00:11:36.500 --> 00:11:40.460 Neighbours near airports were starting to complain about the noise. 00:11:40.500 --> 00:11:45.358 And quietly, one by one, the airlines began to cancel their orders. 00:11:45.958 --> 00:11:49.198 In the end, only two stayed the course. 00:11:49.238 --> 00:11:51.998 British Airways, and Air France. 00:11:52.038 --> 00:11:57.158 Twenty Concordes were built, and only fourteen of them ever carried passengers. 00:11:57.758 --> 00:12:00.957 So what was it like, for the few who flew her? 00:12:04.557 --> 00:12:10.647 On the twenty-first of January 1976, Concorde carried its first passengers. 00:12:11.037 --> 00:12:14.223 A British Airways flight left Heathrow for Bahrain, 00:12:14.263 --> 00:12:17.047 and an Air France flight left Paris for Rio. 00:12:17.437 --> 00:12:21.099 Two take-offs at the same moment, and the world watched. 00:12:21.699 --> 00:12:27.259 The New York service followed the next year, after months of rows over the noise. 00:12:27.299 --> 00:12:30.851 And then it began, the flight everyone remembers. 00:12:31.451 --> 00:12:33.971 You didn't simply board Concorde. 00:12:34.011 --> 00:12:35.384 You arrived. 00:12:35.424 --> 00:12:37.784 There was a special lounge at Heathrow. 00:12:37.824 --> 00:12:41.011 There was champagne in your hand before you'd sat down. 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. 00:12:46.411 --> 00:12:49.304 A hundred seats, two on each side. 00:12:49.344 --> 00:12:50.291 Pale leather. 00:12:50.331 --> 00:12:51.758 Tiny windows. 00:12:51.798 --> 00:12:53.527 A menu with caviar on it. 00:12:54.127 --> 00:12:59.211 The Ordinary Detail: a return ticket cost about as much as a small car. 00:12:59.811 --> 00:13:01.181 Then the take-off. 00:13:01.531 --> 00:13:06.411 The afterburners lit, and a giant hand pressed you back into your seat. 00:13:06.451 --> 00:13:08.998 In less than a minute, you were in the air. 00:13:09.038 --> 00:13:10.411 The nose lifted. 00:13:10.451 --> 00:13:11.721 London fell away. 00:13:12.321 --> 00:13:16.415 Out over the Atlantic, the pilot pushed the throttle forward, 00:13:16.455 --> 00:13:20.068 and the aircraft accelerated through the speed of sound. 00:13:20.108 --> 00:13:21.641 You hardly felt it. 00:13:21.681 --> 00:13:22.681 A nudge. 00:13:22.721 --> 00:13:23.748 A shiver. 00:13:23.788 --> 00:13:25.001 That's all. 00:13:25.041 --> 00:13:29.058 After all that noise and effort, the quiet was the surprise. 00:13:31.258 --> 00:13:32.788 But look out of the window. 00:13:33.098 --> 00:13:36.258 The sky had darkened to a deep violet. 00:13:36.298 --> 00:13:40.738 You were at sixty thousand feet, twice as high as a normal airliner. 00:13:40.778 --> 00:13:43.751 Put your hand against the glass and it was warm. 00:13:43.791 --> 00:13:47.635 And if you looked along the horizon, you could see the curve of the Earth. 00:13:48.235 --> 00:13:51.605 At the front of the cabin, a little display counted up. 00:13:52.075 --> 00:13:53.955 Mach 1.5. 00:13:53.995 --> 00:13:55.795 Mach 1.8. 00:13:55.835 --> 00:13:56.835 Mach 2. 00:13:57.343 --> 00:13:59.433 Three and a half hours to New York. 00:13:59.903 --> 00:14:00.903 Sometimes less. 00:14:01.343 --> 00:14:04.124 Leave London at half past ten in the morning, 00:14:04.164 --> 00:14:08.316 and by the clock on the wall you landed in New York before you'd left. 00:14:08.356 --> 00:14:10.113 You'd barely finished the champagne. 00:14:10.713 --> 00:14:11.763 Who flew her? 00:14:12.153 --> 00:14:13.283 Film stars. 00:14:13.553 --> 00:14:14.553 Rock stars. 00:14:14.833 --> 00:14:15.843 Prime ministers. 00:14:16.233 --> 00:14:18.113 Bankers with deadlines. 00:14:18.153 --> 00:14:23.286 And now and then, a couple who'd saved for years for one perfect flight. 00:14:23.326 --> 00:14:28.246 In the winter, she flew to Barbados, where the very rich went for Christmas. 00:14:28.286 --> 00:14:33.946 And in July 1985, a drummer called Phil Collins played Live Aid at Wembley in the 00:14:33.986 --> 00:14:39.717 afternoon, then flew Concorde across the Atlantic and played again in Philadelphia 00:14:39.757 --> 00:14:40.673 that same night. 00:14:40.713 --> 00:14:43.073 Two continents, one day. 00:14:43.113 --> 00:14:46.087 Only one aeroplane in the world could have made that possible. 00:14:46.687 --> 00:14:50.034 She was never cheap, and she was never quiet. 00:14:50.074 --> 00:14:54.763 She couldn't even go supersonic over land, because of the sonic boom, 00:14:54.803 --> 00:14:59.074 so every flight began with a long, polite crawl out over the sea. 00:14:59.114 --> 00:15:02.327 But once she was out there, nothing on earth was faster. 00:15:02.927 --> 00:15:04.377 And we loved her. 00:15:04.767 --> 00:15:06.217 Not because we flew her. 00:15:06.567 --> 00:15:07.897 Most of us never would. 00:15:08.367 --> 00:15:12.688 We loved her because she was ours, and she looked like tomorrow. 00:15:13.288 --> 00:15:16.955 For people under her flight path, she was a clock. 00:15:16.995 --> 00:15:20.873 The morning departure left Heathrow at about half past ten, 00:15:20.913 --> 00:15:24.661 and across west London, some people set their watches by it. 00:15:24.701 --> 00:15:26.315 The windows hummed. 00:15:26.355 --> 00:15:28.395 The tea in the cup rippled. 00:15:28.435 --> 00:15:32.289 And you stopped what you were doing, every single day, to look up. 00:15:32.889 --> 00:15:34.979 At airshows, it was the same. 00:15:35.609 --> 00:15:39.009 Every summer, the crowd waited for one thing. 00:15:39.049 --> 00:15:42.209 Not the display teams, not the old bombers. 00:15:42.249 --> 00:15:45.488 Concorde, taking off with the afterburners blazing, 00:15:45.528 --> 00:15:48.124 a wall of sound rolling across the field, 00:15:48.164 --> 00:15:51.467 parents with their hands over their children's ears, 00:15:51.507 --> 00:15:53.629 and the children grinning anyway. 00:15:54.229 --> 00:15:58.296 The crews talked about her the way sailors talk about a ship. 00:15:58.336 --> 00:16:01.016 They said she wanted to fly. 00:16:01.056 --> 00:16:04.207 She came in to land steep and fast, nose high, 00:16:04.247 --> 00:16:08.269 and then the nose dropped so the pilots could see the runway. 00:16:08.309 --> 00:16:11.735 And every time she touched down, somewhere on the ground, 00:16:11.775 --> 00:16:15.301 someone who'd just watched her do it said: there she goes. 00:16:15.901 --> 00:16:19.355 In June 2002, for the Queen's Golden Jubilee, 00:16:19.395 --> 00:16:24.867 Concorde flew over Buckingham Palace in a flypast, with the Red Arrows, 00:16:24.907 --> 00:16:28.501 and the crowds on the Mall looked up and cheered. 00:16:28.541 --> 00:16:33.371 It was the one time the whole country looked up at the same moment, 00:16:33.411 --> 00:16:35.381 and nobody had to be told why. 00:16:35.421 --> 00:16:38.954 Every nation has a few machines it falls in love with. 00:16:38.994 --> 00:16:40.341 A steam engine. 00:16:40.381 --> 00:16:41.701 A spitfire. 00:16:41.741 --> 00:16:43.621 A red double-decker. 00:16:43.661 --> 00:16:46.454 Concorde was the last one we gave our hearts to. 00:16:47.054 --> 00:16:49.544 For twenty-odd years, it worked. 00:16:50.054 --> 00:16:52.264 Concorde wasn't just an aeroplane. 00:16:52.574 --> 00:16:57.272 She was a symbol of Britain at its most ambitious, and its most stylish. 00:16:57.872 --> 00:16:59.539 We built it anyway. 00:16:59.579 --> 00:17:01.534 And for a while, it was ours. 00:17:02.134 --> 00:17:04.796 Then came a summer afternoon in Paris. 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 00:17:13.972 --> 00:17:16.726 at Charles de Gaulle Airport, near Paris. 00:17:17.276 --> 00:17:21.366 A hundred passengers, most of them on their way to a holiday cruise. 00:17:21.916 --> 00:17:22.916 Nine crew. 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 00:17:28.863 --> 00:17:29.820 another aircraft. 00:17:29.860 --> 00:17:31.473 The tyre burst. 00:17:31.513 --> 00:17:36.557 A piece of rubber slammed into a fuel tank, and fuel poured out and caught fire. 00:17:37.157 --> 00:17:38.957 The crew fought it. 00:17:38.997 --> 00:17:42.290 By every account, everything they did was right. 00:17:42.330 --> 00:17:45.650 But there was no runway left, and no time. 00:17:45.690 --> 00:17:50.540 A couple of minutes after take-off, the aircraft came down on a hotel just outside 00:17:50.580 --> 00:17:51.580 the airport. 00:17:51.896 --> 00:17:57.296 All 109 people on board died, along with four on the ground. 00:17:57.336 --> 00:18:00.485 It was the first fatal crash in Concorde's history, 00:18:00.525 --> 00:18:03.088 after nearly twenty-five years of flying. 00:18:03.688 --> 00:18:05.698 The whole fleet was grounded. 00:18:06.128 --> 00:18:09.648 For about fifteen months, engineers rebuilt her. 00:18:09.688 --> 00:18:11.221 Stronger tyres. 00:18:11.261 --> 00:18:13.488 Fuel tanks lined with Kevlar. 00:18:13.528 --> 00:18:17.683 In November 2001, she flew again, to cheers. 00:18:19.883 --> 00:18:22.163 But the world had moved on. 00:18:22.203 --> 00:18:27.891 Two months before she returned, the attacks of the eleventh of September had emptied 00:18:27.931 --> 00:18:28.590 the skies. 00:18:28.630 --> 00:18:33.382 Business travellers, the people who filled her seats, stopped flying, 00:18:33.422 --> 00:18:36.990 or stopped paying for the very best seat on the plane. 00:18:37.030 --> 00:18:40.803 The older she got, the more she cost to keep in the air. 00:18:40.843 --> 00:18:43.284 And Airbus, who looked after the aircraft, 00:18:43.324 --> 00:18:45.923 made it clear they would not do so for ever. 00:18:46.523 --> 00:18:52.003 On the tenth of April 2003, both airlines announced the end. 00:18:52.043 --> 00:18:55.763 Seats on the last flights were snapped up within days. 00:18:55.803 --> 00:18:58.243 Air France flew its last in May. 00:18:58.283 --> 00:19:00.844 British Airways flew its last in October. 00:19:01.444 --> 00:19:04.494 Now here is where the title should make us uncomfortable. 00:19:04.844 --> 00:19:07.297 Because there was no single villain. 00:19:07.337 --> 00:19:11.697 There was the noise, which kept her off almost every route over land. 00:19:11.737 --> 00:19:14.097 There was the fuel, which she drank. 00:19:14.137 --> 00:19:17.644 There were the airlines, which never ordered more than a handful. 00:19:17.684 --> 00:19:19.057 There was the accident. 00:19:19.097 --> 00:19:20.654 There was the attack. 00:19:20.724 --> 00:19:22.214 And there was a balance sheet. 00:19:22.814 --> 00:19:26.747 Each of those reasons, taken alone, was reasonable. 00:19:26.787 --> 00:19:28.781 Taken together, they were the end. 00:19:29.381 --> 00:19:33.791 Add to that the plain, unglamorous problem of keeping her alive. 00:19:34.381 --> 00:19:36.648 Fourteen aircraft isn't a fleet. 00:19:36.688 --> 00:19:38.061 It's a boutique. 00:19:38.101 --> 00:19:41.501 Every flight needed a small army of engineers. 00:19:41.541 --> 00:19:44.028 Some parts were made in tiny quantities, 00:19:44.068 --> 00:19:46.674 because nobody else in the world needed them. 00:19:46.714 --> 00:19:51.834 When a supplier closed, or moved on, that was a part you couldn't simply order 00:19:51.874 --> 00:19:52.174 again. 00:19:52.101 --> 00:19:55.874 A machine built by the thousand can wait for a replacement. 00:19:55.914 --> 00:19:58.255 A machine built by the dozen can't. 00:19:58.855 --> 00:20:01.882 And there was something slower, underneath. 00:20:01.922 --> 00:20:06.948 Somewhere around the seventies, the world decided what it really wanted from flying. 00:20:06.988 --> 00:20:08.655 And it wasn't faster. 00:20:08.695 --> 00:20:10.095 It was cheaper. 00:20:10.135 --> 00:20:14.575 The jumbo jet had arrived, and with it, cheap tickets to Spain. 00:20:14.615 --> 00:20:16.495 Faster was a luxury. 00:20:16.535 --> 00:20:18.312 Cheaper was a revolution. 00:20:18.912 --> 00:20:21.402 Her fans say we gave up too easily. 00:20:21.872 --> 00:20:26.352 Her critics say she never made sense for anyone but the very rich, 00:20:26.392 --> 00:20:31.322 and that the taxpayer paid for a party most of us were never invited to. 00:20:31.392 --> 00:20:33.112 Both are partly right. 00:20:33.152 --> 00:20:34.336 That's what makes it hard. 00:20:34.936 --> 00:20:38.336 In the final weeks, something odd happened. 00:20:38.376 --> 00:20:41.715 People who had never flown her, and never would, 00:20:41.755 --> 00:20:45.163 began turning up at the airport just to see her go. 00:20:45.203 --> 00:20:49.296 The tickets for the last flights sold out almost at once. 00:20:49.336 --> 00:20:54.272 A country that had spent years arguing about the cost suddenly remembered what it 00:20:54.312 --> 00:20:55.602 felt like to look up. 00:20:56.202 --> 00:20:57.812 You know what happened next. 00:20:58.282 --> 00:20:59.874 So where did she go? 00:21:03.474 --> 00:21:04.851 You can still visit her. 00:21:05.451 --> 00:21:08.335 At Filton, where the British story began, 00:21:08.375 --> 00:21:11.731 there's a Concorde in a hangar built just for her. 00:21:11.771 --> 00:21:17.891 She was the very last one ever to fly, landing there in November 2003. 00:21:17.931 --> 00:21:21.411 At Manchester Airport, you can stand under her wing. 00:21:21.451 --> 00:21:23.411 At Brooklands, in Surrey. 00:21:23.451 --> 00:21:24.771 At Edinburgh. 00:21:24.811 --> 00:21:28.451 In Barbados, where the winter sun-seekers once flew in. 00:21:28.491 --> 00:21:31.793 And across the Atlantic, in New York, and in Seattle. 00:21:32.393 --> 00:21:38.701 The last Concorde flight of all took place on the twenty-sixth of November 2003, 00:21:38.741 --> 00:21:40.673 a month after the farewell. 00:21:40.713 --> 00:21:45.835 She flew home to Filton, to the airfield where the first British prototype had 00:21:45.875 --> 00:21:48.193 lifted off thirty-four years earlier. 00:21:48.233 --> 00:21:50.273 A crowd was waiting there too. 00:21:50.313 --> 00:21:53.873 It was the kind of ending that nobody could have scripted. 00:21:53.913 --> 00:21:57.963 The aircraft landed where the story had begun, and then she stopped, 00:21:58.003 --> 00:21:59.086 and that was that. 00:21:59.686 --> 00:22:01.136 Walk up to the nose. 00:22:01.526 --> 00:22:02.526 Look up. 00:22:02.806 --> 00:22:05.086 Notice how small she is. 00:22:05.126 --> 00:22:07.256 And notice that she doesn't look old. 00:22:07.856 --> 00:22:09.816 That's the strange thing. 00:22:09.856 --> 00:22:14.376 Nearly twenty-three years on, Concorde still looks like tomorrow. 00:22:14.416 --> 00:22:15.755 And that's the sting. 00:22:16.355 --> 00:22:19.965 Today, London to New York takes about eight hours. 00:22:20.355 --> 00:22:23.755 Twice as long as it did in 1976. 00:22:23.795 --> 00:22:27.515 Plans for new supersonic airliners come and go. 00:22:27.555 --> 00:22:29.595 Some will probably fly. 00:22:29.635 --> 00:22:33.715 But none has yet carried a paying passenger across the Atlantic. 00:22:34.315 --> 00:22:38.995 Many of the engineers who built her are in their seventies and eighties now. 00:22:39.035 --> 00:22:42.702 Ask almost any of them, and they'll say the same thing. 00:22:42.742 --> 00:22:44.328 Not that it was perfect. 00:22:44.368 --> 00:22:46.062 That it was possible. 00:22:46.102 --> 00:22:51.375 That they spent their working lives on something that made people stop in the street 00:22:51.415 --> 00:22:54.195 and look up, and how many people can say that? 00:22:54.235 --> 00:22:58.039 Her shape is still on children's models, on tea towels, 00:22:58.079 --> 00:23:00.595 on the ceilings of a thousand bedrooms. 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. 00:23:07.004 --> 00:23:08.934 So, back to the question. 00:23:09.444 --> 00:23:11.341 How did Britain lose the future? 00:23:11.941 --> 00:23:13.901 Here is the honest answer. 00:23:13.941 --> 00:23:16.061 We didn't lose it to anyone. 00:23:16.101 --> 00:23:17.941 Nobody took it from us. 00:23:17.981 --> 00:23:19.261 We built it. 00:23:19.301 --> 00:23:21.848 We flew it for twenty-seven years. 00:23:21.888 --> 00:23:26.781 And then, one careful decision after another, we chose something else. 00:23:26.821 --> 00:23:28.221 Cheaper tickets. 00:23:28.261 --> 00:23:29.701 Quieter skies. 00:23:29.741 --> 00:23:31.181 Safer sums. 00:23:31.221 --> 00:23:34.301 Every single one of those choices made sense. 00:23:34.341 --> 00:23:36.461 That is how you lose a future. 00:23:36.501 --> 00:23:37.768 Not with a bang. 00:23:37.808 --> 00:23:38.857 With a spreadsheet. 00:23:39.457 --> 00:23:42.457 And what we lost isn't really the speed. 00:23:42.497 --> 00:23:43.870 It's the nerve. 00:23:43.910 --> 00:23:47.189 The sort of country that signs a treaty, bends a nose, 00:23:47.229 --> 00:23:51.162 and builds a thing for the pure joy of seeing if it can be done. 00:23:51.762 --> 00:23:57.962 Tom Jones, no, not that one, said: "People say it was a waste of money. 00:23:58.002 --> 00:23:59.322 Maybe it was. 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 00:24:04.891 --> 00:24:06.202 could see her go over. 00:24:06.242 --> 00:24:08.922 I've seen plenty of clever things since. 00:24:08.962 --> 00:24:12.867 None of them has ever made a whole street stop at the same moment." 00:24:13.467 --> 00:24:15.187 Concorde was noisy. 00:24:15.227 --> 00:24:16.907 She was expensive. 00:24:16.947 --> 00:24:18.986 Most of us never set foot inside her. 00:24:19.586 --> 00:24:23.279 And still, when she went over, we looked up. 00:24:23.319 --> 00:24:28.069 Because for twenty-seven years, two old rivals did something nobody thought was 00:24:28.109 --> 00:24:30.170 sensible, just because they could. 00:24:30.770 --> 00:24:33.260 And for a while… it was ours. 00:24:33.570 --> 00:24:34.596 And that was enough. 00:24:37.096 --> 00:24:39.096 This has been What Britain Lost. 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. 00:24:44.363 --> 00:24:48.889 And stay with us: there's plenty more we thought would be here forever.