Transport and Its Place in History

Making the Connections

David Turner, David Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351186612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Transport and mobility history is one of the most exciting areas of historical research at the present. As its scope expands, it entices scholars working in fields as diverse as historical geography, management studies, sociology, industrial archaeology, cultural and literary studies, ethnography, and anthropology, as well as those working in various strands of historical research. Containing contributions exploring transport and mobility history after 1800, this volume of eclectic chapters shows how new subjects are explored, new sources are being encountered, considered and used, and how increasingly diverse and innovative methodological lenses are applied to both new and well-travelled subjects. From canals to Concorde, from freight to passengers, from screen to literature, the contents of this book will therefore not only demonstrate the cutting edge of research, and deliver valuable new insights into the role and position of transport and mobility in history, but it will also evidence the many and varied directions and possibilities that exist for the field's future development.

Part 1

Policy and practice

1 Supersonic/gin and tonic

The rise and fall of Concorde, 1950–2000

Peter Lyth

Concorde was born from dreams, built with vision and operated with pride. Concorde has become a legend today.

Captain Mike Bannister, on the occasion of the last scheduled Concorde flight from New York to London, 2003¹

What little I did know about Concorde had persuaded me it was a prize technological monstrosity, the latest example of how scientific brilliance could be fatuously mis-applied.

Michael Foot, British Member of Parliament and sometime leader of the Labour Party, 1971²

On 25 July 2000 an Air France Concorde crashed in flames at Gonesse near Paris, killing all 100 passengers and 9 crew members. It was the first and only crash of the Anglo-French supersonic aircraft, which at the time had been in airline service for nearly 25 years. The crash marked the end of an era, and although Concorde services were revived briefly in 2001, the aircraft was finally retired in 2003. Since then Concorde has become something of a legend. To some extent, this can be attributed to the fact that it has had no successor; no second-generation supersonic passenger aircraft has been built or even developed to the prototype stage, although the United States did undertake a considerable amount of preliminary research on a ‘son of Concorde’ in the 1990s.³ Why? Why did the envelope of aviation speed, which had expanded steadily from around 160 km/h in 1920 to 2,100 km/h in the 1970s, expand no further? Why was Concorde not replaced by a bigger aircraft carrying more passengers at an even higher speed? Why did the ‘paradigm of speed’ appear to end with Concorde? Or, to put it another way, did the doctrine of ever-increasing speed in commercial transport, which we can trace back to the early railways of the 1830s, finally hit the social, economic and political buffers with the Gonesse crash?

The Concorde, jointly built and brought into commercial service in 1976 by Britain and France, was a thing of technical brilliance and outstanding beauty, but it was also a supreme waste of public money. In the appraisal and historiography of the aircraft, there appear to be three schools of thought. In the first, writers are lavish in their praise of Concorde’s technological achievement, in particular of the engineers who built it and pilots who flew it. Theirs is a story of far-sighted individuals, striving against the odds at the cutting edge of scientific endeavour.⁴ The second school of thought is the opposite of the first and represents an all-encompassing critique of the aircraft’s genesis in a muddle of government policy-making, the aircraft’s development without proper evaluation of its potential market, its dire impact on the natural environment, in particular its infamous ‘sonic boom’ and its spiralling cost, resistant to every attempt to control it. The literature from this school has few illustrations of the aircraft, but a great many facts and figures.⁵ The third school of thought on Concorde, positioned somewhere between the first and second, sees the aircraft as a noble European attempt to push forward the boundaries of high technology, subverted and destroyed by a conspiracy of forces, mostly in the United States, opposed to its creation.⁶

This chapter, while not siding with any of these approaches, has a different purpose. Concentrating on the British side of the story, it seeks to contextualise Concorde within an historical ‘paradigm of speed’, for which, it is argued, it represents both a culmination and an epitaph, or to use the terminology of the paradigm’s creator, a ‘paradigm shift’.⁷ It focuses on the first decade of the Concorde’s history, i.e. from 1954 to 1964, during which early ideas about supersonic transport aircraft in Britain were developed in government departments, research institutions, aircraft manufacturers and commercial airlines. For over a century, progress in transport technology had been seen in terms of ever-greater speed, but in the 1970s – at precisely the moment when Concorde was launched – enthusiasm for speed was waning in the face of greater concern for two other factors in commercial aviation: the economics of airline operation and air transport’s impact on the natural environment. This ‘shift’ was not so much a diminution in the modern urge to go faster as a sign of greater willingness to balance the advantages of speed against other factors, such as economic and environmental sustainability, which were becoming of paramount importance in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Above all, as this chapter aims to show, the doctrine of national prestige and its long association with ever-greater increments of speed was giving way to more pressing political ideas arising out of the rise of neo-liberal market economies and the rapidly spreading ‘Green’ movement. Reflecting this political focus, the chapter explores the evidence provided in the records of the 1950s Ministry of Aviation, focusing in particular on the final report of the ‘Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee’, which was delivered to the British government in 1959.

Aeronautical Britain in the 1950s

The Concorde’s genesis lies in the 1950s at a time when the British, Americans, French and Russians were all thinking about a supersonic transport aircraft, a so-called SST, which would fly faster than the speed of sound. In Britain the Bristol Aeroplane Company was working on preliminary designs for the Type 233, in France Sud Aviation was engaged in a similar direction on the Super Caravelle, and in the United States, with the delta-winged Convair B-58 ‘Hustler’ bomber having made its first flight in 1956, thoughts were turning to the question of how supersonic military aircraft could be turned into civilian airliners. British and French planning focused on a transatlantic aircraft for about 100 passengers, the project to be funded largely by government. This was accepted practice; indeed, it is fair to say that unlike any other transport mode, the rapid development of aviation in the twentieth century would have been impossible without the steady and generous hand of government. Aircraft inspired awe, wonder and respect for their creators and had become associated in the minds of both politicians and the public with progress, and the seemingly limitless opportunities offered by new technology. Governments, in particular European governments, grasped and frequently overestimated the prestige value of possessing and deploying technologically advanced aircraft. And for this reason, they willingly applied enormous resources in a sustained effort to support the technology of flight. Concorde must be seen as within this tradition – it was a creation of government, not of airlines and aircraft manufacturers working together according to the laws of supply and demand. Concorde is an extreme example of this tradition and, in the words of American scholar Elliot Feldman, ‘unlike other commercial aircraft in development’, in that ‘it had no airline sponsor, and indeed the airlines were not consulted when the first crucial planning was done’.⁸

The British context of Concorde’s genesis was overtly political, with the government seeing it in more or less strategic terms, in much the same way as it saw the acquisition of nuclear weapons in the late 1940s. The approach of the government and the government-funded Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) also had what can now be seen as obsessive characteristics. During the Second World War, Britain, in agreement with the United States, had abandoned civil aircraft construction in order to concentrate on military types. This gave a significant head start to American manufacturers like Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed in the post-war years and forced British firms into a game of ‘catch-up’ as they sought to design and develop new airliners for the 1950s. Great hopes were placed on the de Havilland Comet jet airliner when it entered airline service with British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) in 1952; at last the British had not only ‘caught up’ with, but seemed to have overtaken the Americans in the field of jet transport aircraft. But the early promise of the Comet was frustrated in 1954 when the aircraft suffered a series of crashes, later attributed to the little-known phenomenon of metal fatigue. The Comet crashes were especially unfortunate for the de Havilland company whic...