=20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SF Gate. The original article can be found on SFGate.com here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=3D/chronicle/archive/2003/04= /27/TR269529.DTL ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sunday, April 27, 2003 (SF Chronicle) Goodbye to high-flying luxury and a supersonic thrill John Flinn Through the porthole-style windows of the Concorde, the sky appears black and the edges of the horizon bow slightly downward. You're flying so high you can see the curvature of the planet. You're not quite "on the very edge of space," as British Airways likes to say, but you can definitely see it from there. As you streak across the upper reaches of the stratosphere at Mach 2, twice the speed of sound -- literally faster than a speeding bullet -- you cover 10 miles in the time it takes the flight attendant to top off your glass with 1988 Tattinger, Comtes de Champagne. Only astronauts and a handful of military pilots have flown faster and higher. Nobody's ever flown in grander style. And, soon, no one ever will again, at least not in our lifetimes. When A= ir France and British Airways announced they were permanently grounding the 12 remaining Concordes -- at the end of May and October, respectively -- they brought to a close one of the most romantic, sexy, pulse-quickening chapters in the history of travel. The supersonic jetliner was born in the 1960s, of the same shoot-for-the- stars-and-damn-the-expense spirit that led America to send men to the moon. "In a very real sense, Concorde was our Apollo program," Mike Bannister, British Airways' chief Concorde pilot, once told me. "It had -- actually, still has -- the same level of technical achievement and national pride." Britain and France agreed to jointly develop the supersonic jet in the fall of 1962, just as President John F. Kennedy was committing America to the moon landing. In 1969, while Apollo 11 was being fueled for its journey to the Sea of Tranquility, the Concorde undertook its maiden flight. It was an era when we all dared to dream big. When Boeing developed the first jumbo jet, the 747, in the mid-1960s, it was envisioned as a stopgap until the day, thought to be not far off, when all passenger service would go supersonic. In anticipation, the 747 was given its distinctive hump so it could be converted to cargo service. But noise and environmental concerns severely limited the Concorde's market, and the plodding, chubby jumbos quickly outshone the sexy Concorde on the airlines' ledger sheets. By one estimate, it costs five to eight times as much to fly a passenger across the Atlantic on the Concorde as it does on a modern jumbo. The bean counters won, as I suppose they always must. For now and the foreseeable future, slow and cheap, rather than fast and expensive, will rule the skies. I was fortunate to fly the Concorde from Heathrow to JFK in 1999, and th= at single, 3-hour, 14-minute flight was worth a lifetime of middle seats in coach class. Even before I boarded, there was the giddy anticipation that I'd be swapping bon mots with Sting or clinking Champagne glasses with Claudia Schieffer. "You're pretty much guaranteed to see someone you know -- a movie star or a rock star or a professional athlete," a frequent Concorde flier had told me. "Just the other day, I sat behind Eric Clapton." If there were any celebrities on my flight, I didn't recognize them. The= re were a lot of people with tanned, chiseled faces buried in the pages of the Financial Times -- superstars of the mergers-and-acquisitions world, perhaps, or cabinet ministers of small nations. But, alas, no Claudia Schiffers. After years of flying in cavernous jumbo jets, it was a shock to discover how small the dartlike Concorde was. It carries just 100 passengers. The sides of the fuselage curve in above the window seats, and, at 5 foot 8 inches, my head just about scraped the top. Its takeoff is about as close as civilians will ever get to being catapulted off an aircraft carrier. The Concorde's engines roared and the afterburners kicked in, and I was thrown back in my leather seat as we accelerated from 0 to 225 mph in 30 seconds. We didn't lumber off the ground like the ungainly jumbos do; we reared up on our back wheels and hurtled into the heavens, gaining altitude at a dizzying rate. It was loud inside the cabin. I could barely make out a word the flight attendant said over the howl of the afterburners. Apparently able to read minds, they kindly and wordlessly refilled my Champagne glass each time they passed by. A panel on the bulkhead announced our altitude and air speed. As it rose to Mach .95 -- just below the speed of sound -- I thought of Chuck Yeager in his shuddering X-1 rocket plane. "The consensus of aviators and engineers," Tom Wolfe wrote in "The Right Stuff," "was that the speed of sound was an absolute, like the firmness of the earth. The sound barrier was a farm you could b= uy in the sky." We surged ever faster, and I half expected to see stars turn into blurry streaks, Star Wars-style. As we burst through the sound barrier, though, there was no buffeting, no shuddering, no sonic boom we could hear. The only indication was the bulkhead panel that now read Mach 1. It was anticlimactic, really. We kept gaining speed and altitude until we topped out at Mach 2 -- 1,350 mph, twice the speed of sound -- and 58,200 feet, nearly twice the height jumbo jets fly. No movies are shown aboard the Concorde -- even if you could hear them above the engines' roar, there's no time -- but passengers are offered the finest four-course meals in the sky. Champagnes are rotated among selections that include vintage Dom Perignon and Cattier Clos du Moulin. I started with a bowl of Brazilian papaya with strawberries, raspberries and orange slices, followed by a little carrot-and-bran torte. For the main course I had a tiger prawn and mango salad with tamarind mint dressing, accompanied by a rich 1994 Meursault Domaine Ropiteau-Mignon. I seemed to be the only one dining. The other passengers around me, Concorde regulars all, waved off the food and bubbly in favor of Evian water. I tucked into the cheese course -- Double Gloucester and Italian Taleggio -- along with a velvety 1980 Chateau Petit Village claret. By the time the flight attendant came by with chocolate truffles, even I waved her off. In the autumn, on the evening flight from London to New York, Concorde passengers are treated to a sight no earthbound human has ever beheld: the sun rising in the west. The jet takes off in darkness, but travels so fast it catches up with the sun halfway across the Atlantic. In a similar vein, my morning flight actually traveled "backward" in tim= e: We rocketed off from Heathrow at 10:30 a.m, local time, and touched down at JFK at 9:44 a.m., local time -- a neat trick. But I was probably the only passenger on the plane who wished the flight could have lasted just a little longer. E-mail John Flinn at travel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx=20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2003 SF Chronicle