Ogival delta wings. Square-shaped air inlets that look like steampunk-esque blast shields. The now meme-ified ‘droop snoot’. A supersonic civilian aircraft.
Sounding like something straight out of a scifi movie? This engineering marvel is very much something from the real world–one you can still see at Air Museums in France & Great Britain. A product of national ambitions, innovative zeal, the plane before its time, the legendary Concorde.
This extraordinary machine was the result of an Anglo-French venture keen on displaying their unity and technological prowess, supported by government funding and supplemented by technical knowledge of the WWII planes; in fact the Concorde’s engines (the Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593) was built based off of those of the British warplane, the Avro Vulcan. The moveable ‘droop snoot’ that provided special heat shields usually found on rockets, the 13 fuel tanks that held upto 119,000 L of fuel (as compared to Boeing 787’s 34,000 L, the world’s longest commercial flight), the special heat resisting alloy the plane itself was made of (Hiduminium RR58) are few features that make the plane’s technical design stand out.
The Concorde(which literally means harmony or union in French & English) was marketed for its speed & comfort, mainly targeting business sectors, as a futuristic plane that could take them across the Atlantic in 3 hours such that they could visit London and Paris & get back home to New York in the same day. Besides, at the time, air travel was seen as a symbol of power and prestige, which aligned well with the businessman’s mindset. The idea was that the rich would subsidise the plane through frequent travel and the Concorde would gradually be made available to the middle class.
Considering the marketing and development that went into the project and the potential of the same, the question arises as to how the venture went wrong. The heights and speeds at which the jet travelled often took a toll on passengers’ bodies, usually leaving them worn out after a flight, forcing them to take up precious time to recuperate before they carried on with their businesses. Some argued that this completely defeated the purpose of the Concorde, which was to save time by paying exorbitant amounts of money–in other words, it violated the very premise of its existence and the promise of luxury it had made.
Speed and fuel efficiency do not go hand in hand–even for the Olympus 593, which was the most fuel efficient engine for its time. The jet guzzled enormous amounts of fuel and aviation fuel does not come cheap. Maintenance costs were also high–owing to the frequent replacements of sealants and such due to the atmospheric conditions the jet travelled in. These operating costs resulted in expensive tickets that were prohibitively high for several potential customers. A former pilot stated that even during its heyday, the Concorde never reached its maximum passenger capacity, that the market simply wasn’t there. Environmental concerns regarding emissions at high atmospheric levels and the sonic booms produced by the jet travelling at Mach-2 also contributed to public criticism. This was then followed by the 9/11 incident that shook the aviation industry and hampered business even more. The final straw is often thought to be the Air France Concorde crash in the year 2000.
The legacy the model has left behind is unprecedented in aviation history. The jet’s design, sleek & stylish, boasts supremacy over all civilian crafts that followed. It took the limits of civilian aviation to new heights–literally, with civilians being able to venture into the boundaries of space itself(and even see the curvature of the earth from their windows, something usually only possible from satellites or rocket ships). It’s safe to say that the jet has earned itself a place in the annals of technology and history–proof that development doesn’t always progress in a linear line but with backtracks and loops and sometimes at twice the speed of sound.