The Concorde Makers

For 27 years you could have breakfast in London and arrive in New York before you’d left, by the clock. Concorde crossed the Atlantic in about three and a half hours, cruising at twice the speed of sound on the edge of space, high enough that passengers could see the curve of the Earth. No airliner before or since has matched it in regular service.

Concorde wasn’t built by one company. It was built by two countries.

A treaty, not a business plan

In the late 1950s Britain and France were each studying supersonic airliners, and each realised the cost was too great to carry alone. On 29 November 1962 the two governments signed a treaty to build one together. The work was split between Britain’s British Aircraft Corporation (BAC) and France’s Sud Aviation, which became Aérospatiale in 1970. Its Olympus 593 engines came from Rolls-Royce and France’s SNECMA. There were two assembly lines, at Filton near Bristol and at Toulouse.

Because it was a treaty, neither government could easily pull out, which kept the programme alive through huge cost overruns. Even the name was a compromise: Britain dropped its preferred spelling “Concord” in favour of the French “Concorde”.

The engineering challenge

Flying at Mach 2 meant solving problems no airliner had faced. Friction with the air heated Concorde’s skin so much that the fuselage stretched by several inches in flight. Its slender delta wing worked well at supersonic speed but needed a very nose-high attitude for take-off and landing, so the nose was hinged to droop down, letting the pilots see the runway. Fuel was pumped between tanks during flight to shift the aircraft’s balance as it went supersonic.

The engines were turbojets with afterburners, which inject extra fuel into the exhaust for more thrust, used on take-off and to push through the sound barrier. They were extremely powerful and extremely thirsty.

Why only 20 were built

Concorde first flew from Toulouse on 2 March 1969, and dozens of airlines held options to buy it. Then the world changed. The 1973 oil crisis made its fuel consumption alarming. Its sonic boom meant it could only fly supersonic over the sea, ruling out most overland routes. And the Boeing 747 had just shown that the future of air travel was cheap seats, not fast ones. The options were cancelled one by one.

In the end, just 20 Concordes were built, including prototypes and pre-production aircraft. Only British Airways and Air France flew it in regular service, with seven each, starting on 21 January 1976.

The end

On 25 July 2000, Air France Flight 4590 crashed shortly after take-off from Paris. France’s investigation agency, the BEA, found that a tyre had burst after running over a strip of metal on the runway, and that debris had ruptured a fuel tank. The fleet was grounded and modified, with stronger tyres and fuel-tank liners, returning to service in 2001.

But demand for premium travel had weakened, the aircraft were ageing and maintenance support was ending. Air France retired Concorde in May 2003. British Airways flew its last commercial service on 24 October 2003, and the final Concorde flight landed at Filton, where many had been built, in November 2003.

BAC later became part of British Aerospace, and Aérospatiale part of Airbus. Concorde’s cooperative model, two nations sharing the work, became the template for Airbus itself.

Sources & Further Reading

• Concorde — Wikipedia ↗
• Who built Concorde — Heritage Concorde ↗
• What happened to the Concordes? — Smithsonian ↗
• Air France Flight 4590 — Wikipedia ↗