Concorde paraphernalia, always in high demand by collectors, is moving especially well these days. The two airlines have traditionally distributed parting gifts to the passengers, and all manner of Concorde-logo candlesnuffers, picture frames, dopp kits, and embossed Smythson of Bond Street leather notebooks have been fetching good money on eBay, along with the custom-designed tableware that Concorde customers have made a grand tradition of stealing. “On my very first Concorde flight,” says Lord Marshall, recalling a 1977 trip from Washington to Paris on Air France, “I was sitting next to an elderly French lady. When she finished her lunch, she opened her in-flight bag, and she tipped everything into it, literally everything: all the glasses, all the chinaware, all the cutlery. And when I finished, she looked at me and she said, ‘Aren’t you taking yours?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And she grabbed all of mine and stuffed it in her in-flight bag.” The larcenous old battle-ax had some prestigious company. Andy Warhol regularly stole Air France’s Raymond Loewy—designed Concorde flatware and encouraged others to do so “because it was collectible,” says the photographer and Warhol acolyte Christopher Makos. More recently, on his final British Airways Concorde flight, the couture designer Arnold Scaasi rounded up as many brushed-steel Terence Conran—designed logo napkin rings as he could, intended for a member of his staff who wanted souvenirs of the plane. “For $14,000, or whatever it is,” he says, “you should be able to take as many napkin rings as you want.”
But the death of the Concorde amounts to something far greater than a tchotchke rush, and transcends the usual mooning over the vanished elegance of travel, the lost days of Pan Am Clipper seaplanes and a Pennsylvania Station that didn’t resemble a toilet. The grounding of the world’s sole supersonic passenger jet represents something truly perverse in our sped-up day and age: a technological retrenchment. “It’s almost Luddite that something like this is coming to an end, a bit like making the wheel square,” says Sir David Frost, who reckons himself to be the most frequent of the Concorde’s frequent fliers (“around 20 return trips a year since 1977”). Even Lord Marshall, though not about to reverse his decision, seems authentically shaken by its implications. “It’s really very, very, very sad, a huge backward step for technology,” he says. “My personal guess is that, in the lifetimes of at least the adult community in the world today, they probably won’t see another supersonic commercial aircraft.”
The Concorde is shaping up to be a stolen glimpse of the future, a technology of tomorrow that aberrationally appeared in our lifetimes. Imagine if Nokia had distributed functional cell phones to a select, wealthy few in 1932 but withdrawn them in 1959 because they’d proved to be commercially unviable—and then re-introduced the phones successfully in the 1990s, by which time most of the original customers were dead. That’s what the history and future of supersonic civil transport is looking like. No one doubts that supersonic commercial flights will happen again someday, but the successor to the Concorde is, by the most optimistic estimates, decades, and not years, away. Four years ago, NASA scrapped its High Speed Civil Transport (H.S.C.T.) research program after Boeing, its commercial partner in the project and America’s sole manufacturer of large-capacity civil aircraft (having absorbed McDonnell Douglas in 1997), withdrew its funding. Though they’d already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in H.S.C.T. research, Boeing’s executives came to the conclusion that there was no ready market for next-generation supersonic aircraft.
The situation is pretty much the same at Airbus, Boeing’s main competitor, which is devoting its energies and resources to its new superjumbo jet, the A380, a double-decker, four-aisle, 555-seater that will start flying in 2006, and whose publicity materials boast of a capacious lower deck “on which lavatories, sleeper cabins, crew rest-areas, business centres—or even a crèche—can be placed.” (Presumably they mean a crèche in the British sense, i.e. a children’s nursery, though Airbus’s president’s first name is Noël.) “In the vast array of points we are considering technologically, supersonic is one, but a very small one,” says Gérard Blanc, Airbus’s executive vice president in charge of aircraft programs, whose responsibilities include the development of new product lines.
Blanc feels that speed is overrated, anyway, and that his company’s A380 represents the true future of commercial flight, where the priorities will be “cost, environment, and comfort.” Airbus pointedly advertises the A380 as a “green giant, more fuel-efficient than your car,” a line that could be construed as a rebuke of the 100-seat Concorde, which consumes about twice as much fuel on a transatlantic trip as a 400-seat 747 does. This, in turn, is one of the reasons that Concorde flights are so expensive: fuel accounts for a full one-third of the plane’s direct operating costs. As for comfort, the Concorde, with no first-class cabin and just one aisle down the middle, simply can’t measure up to the wide-bodies. “Time will not have the same value as before,” says Blanc of the A380-led future, “because there will be less disruption of your life, except for boarding and disembarking. You will rest, you will work, you will shower—you will be living your life as you would on the ground.” In this regard, he receives an endorsement from no less than the man who first broke the sound barrier, General Chuck Yeager, who as a young air-force test pilot took his rocket-powered Bell X-1 to Mach 1.07 on October 14, 1947. Yeager says he flew on the Concorde once, as a guest of the French government when he was being honored by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, and he found it “very crowded. I didn’t like the trip as much as I do on a 747 or a big Airbus. It was uncomfortable, it didn’t save much time, and Mach Two didn’t mean anything to me. Hell, I’ve flown Mach Three.”
But Yeager and Blanc might be underestimating the romance that speed still holds for the civilian Samsonite schlepper, as well as the aeroerotic allure of the Concorde itself. (“The pleasure of flying in it is almost a carnal one,” said Joelle Cornet-Templet, the chief flight attendant of Air France’s Concorde fleet, when the airline terminated its supersonic service in May.) In the bulkhead of each of the Concorde’s two cabins are digital-display readouts of the aircraft’s altitude and speed (in both Mach units and miles per hour), and when, during my two recent Concorde flights, these displays hit MACH 1.0 and then MACH 2.0, the cabins broke out in delighted squeals and flashbulb pops; even the trio of bespoke-suit wearers behind me on the return leg—lawyers with the white-shoe firm of Willkie, Farr and Gallagher, and obvious regulars—provided an animated running commentary on the speed gauge’s upward climb. (Fran Lebowitz, the humorist and devoted Concorde-ophile, recalls remarking to Malcolm Forbes on her first Concorde flight, “Is that the meter? You know, $1,000, $2,000 . . . ”)
The Concorde offers the added benefit of the actual sensation of flight. The takeoff is noisier and faster than on other commercial aircraft—about 250 miles per hour on the runway, a good 50 to 70 miles faster than a regular jet—and the plane’s incline at liftoff and final descent is steeper. (This incline is the reason the plane has its famous retractable droop nose: the pilots lower the nose during takeoff and landing so they can clearly see the runway.) When the captain switches on the afterburners to take the plane supersonic, you feel a little nudge in the small of your back from the extra thrust. Nothing so kinetically exciting happens by the time you’re cruising at Mach Two, but that’s because the Concorde is flying at 55,000 to 60,000 feet, well above the weather systems roiling the earth below, and nearly five miles higher than any other plane. You’re literally up in the stratosphere, far up enough to note the earth’s curvature through your window, and the sky outside is a deep blue you don’t see from the ground, darkening spectrally toward the blackness of space.
Those involved in the hospitality end of the Concorde operation have shrewdly conjured a rarefied luxe world to complement the stratospheric wondrousness of the flight. David Stockton, the manager of food and beverage development at British Airways, says he and his panel of chefs make a point of basing Concorde meals around what he calls “high-value products,” and what a semiotician might call “luxury signifiers”: lobster, foie gras, guinea fowl, caviar. “Intensity of flavor is important, too,” he says. “On a normal aircraft, taste buds are dampened down 20 to 30 percent because of the pressurized cabin and the dryness of the air, and on Concorde even more so. So we really have to go for intensity—a morel velouté with corn-fed chicken, for example, or a ginger compote.” British Airways also keeps a special Concorde Cellar, from which it selects a red, a white, a champagne, and a port for each flight. I was stunned to see that the champagne they were pouring so freely was a 1986 Pol Roger Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill, a bottle of which would set you back almost $200 in a wineshop.
The Final Flight of the Concordes
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