Let us pause and give tribute to the passing of a noble thing. British Airways retired its last Concorde Supersonic Transport (SST) on Friday, October 24, ending the last romantic era of flight.It is to the lumbering jumbo jets and the sky buses for almost all of us now, even the wealthy.That isn’t to say that many of us could have afforded the $10,000 or $12,000 it cost for a one-way trip on the SST in its final years. But part of the romance was in knowing that there were beings, apparently human, whose time was so valuable or wallets so fat that they could drop thousands of dollars just to shave a few hours off the duration of a transatlantic crossing.
What did they talk about, these shining people, as they traveled under a blue-black sky at 1,300 miles per hour, sipping champagne and noshing on fine foods?
Well, that was another part of the romance. Surely few among those who ever flew on the SST were jaded or unmoved by their experience. Here was a machine so sleek and powerful that it could fly at the edge of space and beat the sun across an ocean. No doubt most of its passengers, as privileged and sophisticated as they were, sat in simple awe looking out the windows at the curvature of the earth and contemplating how it was that a fangless, clawless, wingless primate like man could savvy the laws of nature enough to do this.
Some people thought the SST was a folly. In several ways it was – it guzzled aviation fuel like a novice jalapeño eater gulps ice water, it rattled and irritated people with its sonic booms, and it was too small and cramped to ever become either profitable or an ultimate standard of comfort.
It was also a flagship for expensive national pride, in this case Britain and France. Stung by American technological primacy, they resolved to build something so astounding that the world would turn its eyes to them in admiration. That desire cost both nations billions of dollars that their beautiful bird never earned back.
Despite the fact it quickly became apparent that the SST was a dead end, an intriguing great thing that wasn’t good enough – like Beta to VHS or Mac to the PC – it still thrilled almost everybody who ever saw it. In 1980, while I was waiting to board a United flight for San Francisco at JFK Airport in New York, something told me to turn and look out the waiting room window. I did, just in time to watch an SST dart down a runway and jump into the sky, its nose pitched at the steepest angle I had ever seen on an ascending plane. It seemed almost frantic to be airborne.
So, we are back to stolid planes that patiently demolish distance at 600 miles per hour. Boeing has a plane on the drawing boards that will go somewhat faster, close to the speed of sound, paring an hour off a flight across the U.S. and two hours off a transpacific flight. But it will never bound into the sky like the Concorde and take one’s breath away.
Yet we're left with a good story. All of us – the lucky ones who rode the SST and the rest of us who could only imagine that ride – will get to tell younger people the true account of travelers who could board a jet in Paris after eating a good breakfast, then race westward across the Atlantic in time to have another breakfast in New York.
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