=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/news/archive/2003/10/18/i= nternational1337EDT0574.DTL ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Saturday, October 18, 2003 (AP) Concorde ready for its swan song, leaving foggy future for supersonic flight BETH GARDINER, Associated Press Writer (10-18) 10:37 PDT LONDON (AP) -- You can almost hear the shiver of pleasure in Christopher Orlebar's voice as he recalls what he felt each time he pushed a supersonic Concorde through the sound barrier. On the ground, the sonic boom would have been as loud as a thunderclap b= ut up in the sky, "There's just the tiny burble of turbulence, just a ripple," the retired pilot said. Rocketing upward after takeoff, he always anticipated with excitement "t= he magical moment you're cleared to climb and accelerate, and the air slips beneath you. You're on the threshold of space, and even the clouds, which are now tiny beneath you, seem to slip by more quickly." Flying twice as high and more than twice as fast as a Boeing 747, he sai= d, a Concorde passenger looking down "might just be rewarded by the sight of a jumbo jet wending its weary way." No more. On Friday, British Airways is retiring the last of its seven Concordes. As the world celebrates the centenary of the Wright Brothers' first controlled, powered flight, the age of supersonic commercial flights is coming to an end -- at least for now. The Concorde's British and French creators dreamed in the 1960s that the= ir elegant, needle-nosed plane would revolutionize long-distance travel, ushering in a new era of supersonic flight. But it passes without an heir, leaving the sound barrier to the world's air forces, and perhaps to those able to afford supersonic private jets that several companies are thinking about making. The Concorde took wing on its first test flight in 1969, the same year m= an reached the moon, and looked like the sleek symbol of a hope-filled, high-tech future. Passengers said that 11 miles up, they felt a little bit like astronauts, able to make out the curvature of the Earth. Combined with the time difference, cruising speeds of 1,350 mph meant westbound travelers got to New York more than an hour and a half before they left Europe. It was a narrow plane that could only carry about 100 passengers. But it was a work of engineering art, built to stretch several inches in the air to accommodate the stresses of supersonic flight. Its revolutionary nose was made to tilt downward at landing for better visibility, making an incoming Concorde resemble a giant eagle about to pounce on prey. But just as the dream of thousands of visitors following in Neil Armstrong's famous footsteps proved too optimistic, so the idea of supersonic travel as the next big wave in aviation failed to become reality. A technological marvel ultimately proved an economic dud that never recovered the billions in British and French taxpayers' money spent on its development. Barred from setting off sonic booms over land and limited by its short range, the Concorde mostly stuck to its trans-Atlantic back-and-forth. At $9,300 for a London-New York round trip, well above the first-class fare on a Boeing 747, it remained a luxury for the wealthy few. There are many who won't miss the Concorde. The roar of its engines, far louder than those of conventional jets, infuriated neighbors of the airports it served, and environmentalists railed against its pollution and massive fuel use -- an average of about 95 gallons a minute, compared with 60 or less for a jumbo jet carrying up to four times as many passengers. Strong opposition in New York -- and a lawsuit that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled for the airlines -- meant the Concorde wasn't cleared to land at Kennedy International Airport until 1977, nearly two years after it went into commercial service. The British and French governments hoped to sell hundreds of Concordes a= ll over the world, but only 16 were ultimately built. All went to BA and Air France, which grounded its fleet for good in May. They were moneymakers for the carriers for years, but the high cost of maintaining the aging planes, dwindling ticket sales and their huge appetite for fuel eventually made them glamorous white elephants. Aviation had gone in a different direction, with enormous jets like the 747 helping make subsonic flying convenient and affordable for millions of passengers. "In the late '60s, Europe gambled on speed, America gambled on size," sa= id Philip Butterworth-Hayes, editor of Jane's Aircraft Component Manufacturers journal. And America won, he said. "Concorde was a technical cul-de-sac ... a dead end street." Is there a future for civilian supersonic flight? Hope may lie in research into quieting the sonic boom created by the sho= ck wave from a plane passing overhead faster than 760 mph, the speed of sound. Solving that problem could open up lucrative overland routes. But the cost of designing new supersonic planes has frightened off most aircraft manufacturers. Airlines seem more interested in cheap, reliable planes than expensive, high-speed ones. Last year, Boeing mothballed plans for the Sonic Cruiser, a plane that would have flown close to the speed of sound, and replaced it on the drawing board with a more conventional, fuel-efficient jet, the 7E7. Japanese engineers are working on a supersonic aircraft they hope will halve the noise of the Concorde's roaring engines, fly farther and emit less pollution. The project suffered a setback when a scale model crashed last year during a test flight. Butterworth-Hayes said the next phase of commercial supersonic travel wi= ll be radically different from the Concorde and is probably at least 20 years off. A new generation of engines could propel travelers into a low Earth orbit at "hypersonic" speeds that would get them from London or New York to Australia in just a few hours, he said. Research on such engines is under way at NASA and in several European countries. The Concorde was a political milestone as well as a technological one. Tony Benn, then Britain's aviation minister, recalled the tensions that crackled across the English Channel during the project. The work drew longtime friends and rivals France and Britain closer, but it was a cantankerous marriage, with the nations' leaders even sniping over whether the name (which means harmony) should be spelled Concorde or Concord. They had agreed on including the "e," French-style, until French Preside= nt Charles de Gaulle backed out of a scheduled meeting with British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Benn said. Macmillan, feeling slighted, retaliated by rechristening the British half of the project with the English spelling, he recalled. Britain eventually relented and Concorde kept the "e." In the end, the project made the prickly alliance closer and helped pave the way for broader cooperation on Airbus, the European plane-making consortium. "We built our half in inches and the French in meters, and it fitted perfectly," said Benn. The Concorde began commercial service in 1976 with flights from London to Bahrain and France to Brazil, via Africa. Demand was weak and neither route lasted long; the airlines quickly realized the U.S. market was the real prize. Once the decade's oil crises passed, Air France and BA made handsome profits on their day-to-day operations of the plane for years, drawing jet-set celebrities and time-is-money executives onto trans-Atlantic flights that averaged three hours and twenty minutes. The beginning of the end came when an Air France Concorde crashed after takeoff from Paris on July 25, 2000, killing 113 people and forcing both airlines to ground their supersonic jets for more than a year. Investigators blamed the accident on pieces of a punctured tire that flew into the fuel tank and started a fire. Overhauled Concordes returned to service just two months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, in the middle of one of aviation's worst slumps and a miserable global economy. With ticket sales weak, the planes quickly became a heavy financial burden. BA is planning a send-off tour of Britain for its jets, and will then gi= ve them to museums. Air France is doing the same -- the Smithsonian has already gotten one of its Concordes -- and is auctioning off some airplane parts to collectors next month. Orlebar, the former pilot, said that while he's confident there's a futu= re for supersonic travel, he's sorry to see the Concorde go. After its final flight, he mused, "the world will be a bigger place." On the Net: British Airway's Concorde site: www.britishairways.com/concorde Unofficial Concorde site: www.concordesst.com =20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2003 AP