Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Concorde: The Fastest Passenger Airplane in the World

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

Almost as soon as Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947, people began thinking of ways to transport passengers at supersonic speeds. However, the challenges in creating a passenger aircraft that could travel at supersonic speeds were much greater than making a fighter aircraft that could do the same. In 1976, a British/French consortium launched the inaugural flight of the most successful supersonic passenger aircraft in history. Learn more about the Concorde Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Almost as soon as Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947, people began thinking of ways to transport passengers at supersonic speeds. However, the challenges in creating a passenger aircraft that could travel at supersonic speeds was much greater than making a fighter aircraft that could do the same. In 1976, a British and French consortium finally launched the inaugural flight of the most successful supersonic passenger aircraft in history. Learn more about the Concord on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Brilliant.org. Brilliant's mission is to inspire and develop people to achieve their goals in STEM, one person, one question, and one small commitment to learning at a time. They enable great teachers to illuminate the soul of math, science, and engineering through bite-sized interactive learning experiences. Their courses explore the laws that shape our world, elevating math and science from something to be feared to a delightful experience of guided discovery.

If you're interested in learning more about any STEM subject, go to everything-everywhere.com slash brilliant. Once again, that's everything-dash everywhere.com slash brilliant. When engineers began thinking about supersonic transportation in the 1950s, they faced a very difficult problem. Economics. Creating a plane which could fly faster than the speed of sound, even a large passenger aircraft, wasn't necessarily an engineering problem.

Yes, there were engineering challenges to be overcome, but that wasn't the biggest concern. The biggest problem was creating an aircraft that could be flown faster than the speed of sound economically. Airplanes flying beyond Mach 1 behave differently than planes traveling below Mach 1. The lift-to-drag ratio on a plane flying faster than the speed of sound is approximately half of what it is when it flies below it. That means to compensate, you need approximately twice the thrust, which means more fuel, which means more expensive engines, which means more money. In the early 1960s, executives from U.S. aerospace companies testified to Congress that there were no technical impediments to the production of supersonic

passenger aircraft. However, the American government's attention wasn't on faster passenger aircraft at the time. They were far more focused on military aircraft and on the space race with the Soviets. Sure, having passenger aircraft traveling over Mach 1 would be great and all, but they were trying to put someone on the moon. The space race has to be. had left the British sort of sitting on the sidelines. They had no space program, and their national pride was still stinging from their position as a world power being usurped by the United States and the Soviet Union. They saw the development of a passenger supersonic aircraft as a way to make a statement

and restore some national pride. It would show that the British could do something that the Americans could not. And make no mistake, the reasons for the development of the plane were almost totally political, a fact which has been corroborated many times over by the people who were responsible for the project. That being said, there was a general belief at the time that the future of passenger aircraft was going to be supersonic, and that the earlier the British could get in on the ground floor, the better the position they would be in in the long run in this market. In 1956, the British Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee was created. They quickly realized that the

cost of such an aircraft was going to be, pardon the pun, sky high. So they wanted to share costs and development with another country. They first hit up the Americans, who, as I mentioned before, wasn't really interested in pursuing this as a national policy. In 1962, they found a partner and signed the Anglo-French Concord Agreement. The name Concord comes from the Latin word for agreement, and from the Roman goddess Concordia, who was the goddess of agreement and harmony. The French had also been working on the supersonic transport problem for several years. When they compared notes, they realized that they had come to similar conclusions about it. but the design of the aircraft. There were two big design details which they agreed the plane had to have.

The first was a delta wing design, where rather than having two wings sticking off the sides of an aircraft, the entire aircraft was sort of a giant's felt triangle. The other was a droop nose. Because the plane would be traveling so fast, it had to be extremely aerodynamic, which meant a very long, slender nose of the plane. However, this prevented the pilots from seeing the runway. The solution was to have the nose droop down during takeoff and landing, and then straighten out while it's in the air. One of the other challenges which had to be addressed was heat. Flying at supersonic speeds, especially for extended periods of time, caused a great

deal of friction with the air. That would heat up the skin of the aircraft. The faster it flew, the hotter it would get. The skin of the Concord could reach 261 degrees Fahrenheit or 127 degrees Celsius at the nose, down to 196 Fahrenheit or 91 Celsius at the tail. Passengers could actually feel how hot the skin of the plane was by just touching the wall. It was the skin of the aircraft which actually limited the speed of the Concord de Mach 2. If it went any faster, the aluminum skin would start to weaken due to the heat.

Throughout the 1960s, the French and British engineers worked on solving a host of problems, and this included everything from radiation exposure, from cosmic rays, from flying at 60,000 feet, to the risks of extreme cabin depressurization at that altitude, to unique stresses the plane would encounter flying that fast. Finally, on March 6, 1969, they had a prototype ready to fly. It conducted a short subsonic flight between two airports near Bristol, England. But just as the Soviets beat the Americans to launching the first satellite and the first man into space, they also beat the British and French by flying the first supersonic transport. three months earlier, on December 31, 1968, the Soviets flew the Tupilov-T-U-144.

The T-U-144 was a really interesting aircraft, and it'll probably be worth its own episode at some later date. But as a commercial aircraft, it wasn't very successful. They only created 16 aircraft, but they flew only 55 flights with actual passengers, and it was retired by 1978. The prototype Concord made a public debut at the 1969 Paris Air Show, along. with the T-U-144. It made its first transatlantic crossing in 1971, and over the next several years it made appearances in the Middle East, and at the opening of the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. However, before it began service, it encountered major setbacks. Environmental concerns over sonic booms became a growing problem. The United States, India, and Malaysia, all banned

supersonic flights over their land. That limited the Concord, basically, to flights over the sea. Furthermore, at the 1973 Paris Air Show, a TU 144 crashed in a very public fashion, which soured most airlines on supersonic flights. Orders for the Concord were cancelled, and in the end, only British Airlines and Air France ended up buying the aircraft. The aircraft was manufactured in both the UK and France. A total of 20 were built, including prototypes that were never put into active service. The Concord entered commercial service on January 21, 1976. The first British Airways flight was from London to Bahrain, and the first Air France flight was from Paris to Rio. Over the next 27 years, the Concord was by far the fastest way to cross the Atlantic.

The Atlantic crossing eventually became the only real route for the aircraft. There was an attempt at creating a London-Sin-Sinapore route, but the Malayan Indian governments forbade supersonic flights over their country. Likewise, flights to Mexico City were tried, but they had to fly at subsonic speeds across the United States. The most popular routes were between Heathrow and JFK and Charles de Gaul and JFK. In addition to the previously mentioned Singapore, Rio, and Mexico City routes, there were also attempts at routes to Washington Dallas, Miami, and Barbados. Most of those routes were simply not viable. That being said, London or Paris to New York had quite a bit of demand.

The record for flying the Concord across Atlantic was set in 1996 when it flew from New York to London in two hours, 52 minutes, and 59 seconds. flying the other way from London to New York usually took about three hours and 30 minutes on average. The Concord developed a reputation for being a luxurious experience. The average price of a ticket, adjusted for inflation in today's currency, was anywhere between $3,000 and $12,000 per ticket. That being said, you were paying for speed, not luxury per se. The Concord was rather narrow, and the seats weren't like business class seats in today's airplanes. The food and the service were definitely first class.

but the plane was built to solve engineering challenges first, and the seats were an afterthought. There would often be multiple flights per day, so it wasn't unheard of for someone to fly across the Atlantic, have something to eat, and then be back home to sleep in their own bed. Even though it only had 100 seats, you would regularly find celebrities and millionaires on the flights. The end of the Concord began on July 25, 2000, when Air France Flight 4590 crashed after takeoff at Charles de Gaul Airport in Paris. A piece of debris on the runway punctured a tire, and the tire flew into one of the fuel tanks causing an explosion. The crash killed all 100 passengers and nine crew.

Prior to the crash, the Concord had one of the best safety records of any aircraft. There had been zero fatalities on any Concord flight since its first flight in 1976, up until the disaster in 2000. The crash dramatically decreased demand for the Concord, and a little over a year later, the September 11th attacks only made things worse. On April 10, 2003, Air France and British Airways simultaneously announced that they were retiring the Concord. It wasn't just soft demand for Concord flights that caused it to retirement. By 2003, the basic design of the aircraft was over 30 years old.

Aviation design and computer technology had advanced, and it just wasn't worth it to pay for maintenance to keep the planes flying. Virgin Airlines actually offered to buy the remaining Concord fleet, but there was no interest from Airbus, the manufacturer, in maintaining them. Today, 18 of the 20 concords which were built are on display. Most of them are in the UK or France, but there are three in the United States, one in Germany, and one in Barbados. Since the retirement of the Concord in 2003, there hasn't been a single commercial supersonic flight anywhere in the world, nor has another supersonic airline been built since the 1970s.

However, there are new companies that are trying to tackle the supersonic passenger market again. One company called Boom Supersonic just received an order for 15, supersonic jets from United, and they hope to start delivering passengers by 2029. One of the things that they hope to do with their new generation of supersonic planes is to lessen the power of sonic booms to allow the planes to finally fly over land. So maybe one day within the next 10 years, you'll be able to raise a glass of champagne to the Concord while traveling at Mach 2 somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.

The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over. over at patreon.com. There is content only available to supporters, merchandise, and even opportunities for a show producer credit. If you know someone you think would enjoy the show, please share it with them.

Also remember, if you leave a five-star review, I'll read your review on the show.