The World According to Clarkson (28 page)

That’s because life beyond the 750-mph sound barrier is seriously hostile. There’s the friction, which generates so much heat that planes swell by up to a foot.

There’s a spot on Concorde’s dash that, in flight, is so hot you could fry an egg on it. Then there’s the shock wave, a phenomenon of such ferocity that it jams the hydraulics and freezes the controls.

Toward the end of the Second World War, pilots who put their Spitfires into a dive often lost control and could not pull up. They didn’t know it at the time but a supersonic shock wave, the source of the sonic boom, was to blame. It sat on the trailing edge of the wings, preventing the ailerons from moving. To get a plane to fly through the sound barrier, this shock wave has to be tamed.

Of course, you can’t let the supersonic savagery anywhere near those delicate Olympus engines. The air has to be slowed down before it’s allowed into the intakes and past the spidery blades.

To make things even more complicated, there’s the bothersome business of fuel consumption and reliability.

A typical fighter jet of the 1960s, the Lightning, for instance, was out of juice after about 45 minutes. And it needed up to two weeks of maintenance after a sortie.

Concorde had to fly in that cruel place, where the air is as destructive as a nuclear blast, for 4,000 miles. Then it had to turn around and come home.

The Americans failed with their Supersonic Transport because they aimed for Mach 3 and the exotic materials needed to withstand the heat at this speed weren’t commercially available back then. The Russians were more realistic with their Tupolov but it failed because it only had a range of 1,500 miles.

It’s worth remembering that Concorde was built by trial and error after error. Men wearing Brylcreem and store coats, endlessly lobbing paper darts down the wind tunnel in Filton.

Make no mistake, Concorde was an extraordinary technological achievement. Almost certainly, one of the greatest.

And not just technically but politically. France and Britain couldn’t even agree on how it should be spelt. They finally decided that it should end in an ‘e’, in the French style, but then Macmillan fell out with de Gaulle and dropped the letter.

It was Tony Benn, the then secretary of state for industry, who solved the matter by declaring it would be ‘e’ for England, ‘e’ for Europe and ‘e’ for
entente cordiale.

Benn saved Concorde over and over again. He even had to fight the Americans who, in a fit of sour grapes,
tried to ban the plane on the grounds that its sonic boom would knock over their cows.

They kicked up such a stink that, bit by bit, the world began to lose confidence in the plane. One by one, the sixteen airlines that had ordered Concorde began to cancel until just two were left: Air France and BOAC.

Knowing that the plane was destined to be a commercial disaster, Benn had to cajole the Treasury and the French until, on 21 January 1976, the scheduled services began. For the first time, paying passengers could fly so fast they could watch the sun rise in the west and arrive in America before they left home.

The cost to the British taxpayer was astronomical: £1.34 billion. Even in today’s money, that would nearly get you two Domes.

But, astonishingly, the white elephant became a cash cow. Even though this exotic plane arrived as Freddie Laker began to take the working classes to New York for £59, it regularly flew three-quarters full and made £20 million a year for BA.

From my point of view, in a Fulham flat, Concorde was simply a device that prevented me hearing the second item on the six and ten o’clock news. Twice a night the hum of central London would be drowned by the crackle from those massive engines. And twice a night the entire city would look up. Familiarity never bred indifference.

And then. As I stepped off a Royal Navy Sea King helicopter in York my phone rang to say Concorde had crashed into a Paris hotel.

My reaction was the same as yours. Initial shock that was only slightly lessened when we found out it was an Air France bird and the people on board were not British. Usually, in an accident of this kind, we mourn the people who have died.

But this time it was different. For the first time since Titanic we mourned the loss of the machine itself.

The great white dart. The machine that reminded Londoners twice a day how great we once had been. The plane that was 40 years old but still at the cutting edge of everything. It was not invincible after all.

It never had been, actually. On one BA flight from New York to London one of the engine intakes refused to budge, increasing the drag and therefore the fuel consumption. The captain ignored the advice of his engineer and number two that they should land at Shannon in Ireland to refuel and cruised over the middle of London, arriving at Heathrow with enough juice for 90 seconds more flight. It ran dry while taxiing to the stand. Joan Collins never knew how close she came to being a permanent fixture in the wreckage of what had once been Harrods.

After the Paris crash and 11 September, public confidence in Concorde dried up. I flew on it for the first time last year and couldn’t believe how empty it was.

There were lots of things I couldn’t believe, actually. Like how small the windows were, and where in such a tiny fuselage they found space for such an extraordinarily well-stocked wine cellar. And how noisy it was in the back. But most of all I couldn’t believe the surge of
acceleration as it cleared Cornwall and the afterburners took us up past 1,000 mph.

Unless my children become fighter pilots, they’ll never feel that surge.

No company or government in the world is currently undertaking serious work on a supersonic airliner. There’s talk of Gulfstream building a Mach 2 business jet and there are whisperings about a ‘scramjet’ plane that could get from London to Sydney in two hours.

In the early 1990s, British Aerospace and Aerospatiale held secret talks about developing a 225-seat aircraft that could get across the Pacific at Mach 2.5. But when the proposed cost of such a thing worked out at £9 billion, they decided to build a double-decker bus instead.

Do you think Columbus would have reached America if he’d concerned himself with the bottom line? Do you think Armstrong would have walked on the moon or Hillary on the top of Everest? Was it profit that took Amundsen to the South Pole or drove Turing to invent the computer?

Compounding the problem is a sense that the First World has pulled so far ahead of the Third, the money would be better spent helping others to catch up. For every pound spent on human advancement, there are a thousand bleeding hearts saying the money could have been spent on the starving in Africa. I see their point.

But what I cannot see is the human thirst for improvement being extinguished by the bean counters. No individual company or country could afford to develop a plane that’s significantly better than Concorde, so maybe
what’s needed is a ring-fenced global fund for the greater good. A fund that undertakes the work business won’t touch, hunting the skies for asteroids, searching the seas to find a cure for cancer and fuelling our quest to go faster and faster.

Or maybe the days of mechanical speed are over. Why go to America at the speed of sound when, with an internet connection and video conferencing, you can be there at the speed of light? Why go at all?

Maybe planes are about to follow in the footsteps of the horse. When the car came along, the horse didn’t go away. It simply stopped being a tool and became a toy.

A show jumper. A playmate for twelve-year-old girls.

If you can communicate instantly with anyone anywhere the only reason to travel is for fun, for your holidays. And given the choice of doing that at Mach 2 or for £2, I know which I’d choose.

Perhaps, then, this is not a step backwards. Maybe Concorde dies not because it’s too fast but because, in the electronic age, it’s actually too slow.

Sunday 19 October 2003

Not much will get me out of bed at 4.30 a.m. in the morning. Especially when I’ve only climbed into it at 3.30 a.m. But when you’ve got one of the hundred tickets for the last flight of Concorde… I even had a shave.

They seated me right in front of the lavatory, or Piers Morgan, editor of the
Daily Mirror
, as you know him, and between a future hedge investment broker and an American who’d paid $60,000 to be there in some kind of eBay charity auction.

One of the girls flying was completely horrified at the guest list. ‘There aren’t even any press,’ she said. ‘Well,’ I said, hurting just a little bit, ‘that tubby bloke’s from the
Independent
. And then there’s the
Mail
, the BBC, ABC, NBC, ITN, PA, CNN, Sky, the
Sun
, the
Guardian
and the
Telegraph
.’

‘But where’s Hello!?’ That’s what she wanted to know.

There’d been talk of Elton John turning up and maybe George Michael too. But in the end all we had was a woman in a wig whom I recognised from a film called The Stud, and someone who used to be married to Billy Joel.

The rest? Well there was the chairman of every company from the Footsie, all of them a little bit northern,
a little bit florid and, dare I say it, a little bit heavy around the middle.

Despite the weight, Concorde heaved itself into a crystal New York morning at 7.38 a.m. and banking hard – but not so hard that our Pol Roger Winston Churchill champagne fell over – pointed its nose at the rising sun and went home. For the last time.

I was, it must be said, in the mood for a party but this is hard in what’s essentially a Mach-2 veal crate. It is possible to leave your seat but you will not be able to stand up properly and then you will have to sit right back down again when the drinks trolley needs to get past.

As we hammered through Mach 1, I asked the hedge-fund man what it was like to go through the sound barrier for his first, and everyone’s last time. But he’d nodded off.

The American was deep in monologue with himself. There are no television screens – to save weight – and I’d left my book in my bag.

Concorde was not really designed as a party venue. Unlike the 747 with its larders and its video games, it is a child of the 1950s, a time when you were expected to make your own entertainment. So I did. I lobbed my drink over Morgan.

British Airways were keen that this, the final flight, should not be seen as a wake but rather a celebration of 27 remarkable years.

And to be honest, there was a celebratory mood both in the departure lounge and on the tarmac, where all the
pilots of the other early-morning flights sent goodwill messages.

However, at 3.24 p.m. local time, as we dropped back down to Mach 0.98, the mood changed. As everyone realised that we had been the last people to fly faster than the speed of sound without a parachute, it was as though a veil of sadness had been draped over the cabin.

Over London we couldn’t help noticing the landmarks of modern Britain. The Dome.

The Millennium Bridge. The traffic jams. The Mirror offices. And here we were in the last reminder of how great and innovative we had once been. And we thought: what’s going to remind us now?

There was applause as the wheels touched down but in the next 40 minutes, as they unhooked the power and the crowds took photographs, we may as well have been at a funeral. The drink had flowed but the veil, by this time, had become a blanket.

Idon’t feel sorry for the chairmen who will now need seven hours to get across the Atlantic. It was, after all, their meanness that caused this final flight in the first place.

I don’t feel sorry for the nation. It’s our own fault that we don’t make machines like this any more. I don’t even feel sorry for the people who’d struggled to keep Concorde flying these past few years: they’ll all get other jobs.

I do, however, feel sorry for the machine itself. It’s sitting in its shed now, wondering what it’s done wrong. Why did it not fly yesterday and why is there no sense
that it will fly today? Why is nobody tinkering with its engines and vacuuming its carpets?

And what was that last flight all about? Why were so many people taking photographs and why, after 27 years, did every single one of Heathrow’s 30,000 employees turn out to watch it do what it was designed to do?

I like to believe that a machine does have a heart and a soul. I like to think of them as ordinary people think of dogs. They cannot read or write or understand our spoken words. But they understand what we’d like them to do in other ways. Go left. Go right. Go faster. Sit. Lie.

So go ahead. Think of Concorde as a dog that you’ve had in the family for 27 years. Think of the way it has never once let you down. And how thrilled it is when you feed it and pet it and take it out for a walk.

And now try to imagine how that dog would feel if you locked it up one night. And never went back.

Sunday 26 October 2003

You probably thought, as I did, that Iraq had been conquered by the Americans and that Tony Blair had been allowed to take and hold the equivalent of Bournemouth.

In other words, you thought it was a two-country coalition.

But no. Back in February, President George W. Bush announced that despite the best endeavours of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys, he had gathered together 30 like-minded countries and that this ‘force for good’ would bring peace, goodwill and Texaco to Iraq.

Unfortunately, the 30 countries he had assembled did not include Germany, Russia or China: nations with proud fighting histories and lots of submarines. No. He ended up with an extraordinary collection including Estonia, which did have an army in 1993. But lost it.

No, really; the Estonian army was ordered to capture a Russian military town but the soldiers decided this was an unpleasant way of earning a living and went off, on their own, to fight organised crime instead.

Today Estonia has conscription but most young men get around this simply by not turning up. I don’t blame them. What’s the point of spending a year playing
soldiers when the most frightening thing in your country’s military arsenal is the general’s dog?