Becoming the Sexiest Flight on Earth

Transcript

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

I never flew on Concorde in its glitzy and glamorous heyday of the eighties and nineties, but based on what I’ve learned for this series, I have a pretty good idea of what it was like. Oh, this is well nice. So everyone’s sipping champagne, and it’s served with these really delicious canapes. Oh, good lord, they’re serving the food on Royal Doulton China. I have a choice between prime grilled filet of Angus beef or this amazing looking lobster dish. And the wine, it’s all Grand Cru, super high end stuff. Now looking around, there’s a fashion model over there, and there’s a couple of British lords and some footballers. Oh God, there’s Joan Collins, and there’s Sting. I’m going to go sit next to him. Here’s the crazy thing. We left Heathrow at 10:30 this morning, and we’re going to arrive in New York at 9:30 AM. So not only are we flying at twice the speed of sound, we’re going back in time. Right, Sting? 

Sting:

It’s always exciting flying supersonic, and it’s always exciting to get to New York before you’ve left.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

On this episode of “Making an Impossible Airplane: the Untold Story of Concorde,” the plane itself becomes a mainstream celebrity, the sexiest airplane in the sky. But behind the scenes, engineers work frantically to iterate and improve the plane to keep it running safely under intense flying conditions. I’m Nastaran Tavakoli-Far, and this is season four of Teamistry, an original podcast from Atlassian, makers of collaborative software, including Jira, Trello and Confluence. 

Now, before Concorde became a celebrity, as we heard on our last episode, its economic future relied on flying in and out of a certain location.

Ricky Bastin:

It all hinged on New York because unless the airplane could get to New York, she was always going to lose money.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

In 1976, citing noise concerns, the New York Port Authority had banned Concorde. Without the lucrative New York route, Air France and British Airways executives knew that Concorde wouldn’t have a future. Both the French president and the British Prime Minister pleaded with US President Jimmy Carter to intervene, but he said he couldn’t make decisions for New York. So the airlines challenged the ban in court. In May of 1977, a federal judge ruled that the ban was unconstitutional, but the Port Authority, sticking to their guns, appealed the decision to the US Supreme Court. On October 17, 1977, the Supreme Court passed down its ruling, upholding the federal court’s overturning of the ban.

AP News:

Despite the opposition, Europe was suddenly four hours closer to New York as Air France made the first historic landing of a supersonic commercial flight at Kennedy Airport. One minute, 30 seconds later, Britain’s Concorde was brought in by Captain Walpole for another perfect touchdown. Supersonic transport for fair paying passages had at last arrived at New York. British Airways had, in the words of their deputy chairman, “taken the real bite of the big apple.”

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

After a decade and a half of struggle to get the plane built, in the face of massive technical challenges and forces all around them threatening to pull the plug, the teams behind Concorde could celebrate. Over the next few years, the appearance of Concorde in airports around the world captured people’s imaginations. Yes, there was protest and concern, and behind the scenes, low passenger numbers meant the plane was hemorrhaging money. But Concorde was becoming a household name. And a movie star.

Movie Trailer:

At twice the speed of sound, can the Concorde evade attack? Universal Pictures presents The Concorde Airport ’79.

Jonathan Glancey:

It’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It’s absolute trash.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

That’s Concorde historian, Jonathan Glancey, and he’s talking about a disaster movie that is, well, a disaster of a movie.

Jonathan Glancey:

On the Rotten Tomatoes website, it gets 14% approval rating by the public, and that seems very generous rating. It’s absolute trash story. Concorde gets chased by a missile, by enemy jet fighters, and it somehow escapes all these. Strange enough, there’s some quite serious American actors in it, like Robert Wagner and people, but it’s pure junk.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

Yeah, as cool as it is to see Concorde basically starring in a movie, it’s pretty bad. Now, I’m not going to bore you with the plot because it doesn’t make much sense anyway. There is one thing the film is infamous for, however. Now at the very end, and here’s a spoiler alert, the plane crashes into a snow-capped mountain, then it explodes. Here’s the disturbing thing. The actual Concorde aircraft used for the movie’s flying sequences is Air France BTSC, the same Concorde that would crash in real life two decades later. 

The late seventies and early eighties was a time of massive change for Concorde. This is when the British and French governments finally had to admit that the dream of building hundreds more was not going to happen, so the construction jigs and equipment were dismantled and turned to scrap. It went from a production project of thousands of team members to a fleet of just over a dozen planes in service. This left just a core group of engineers in Britain and France to shift from building to maintaining.

Ricky Bastin:

The thing with Concorde is you could read every book on Earth and it wouldn’t tell you everything you needed to know about the airplane you had.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

This is Ricky Bastin. You might see him on a cruise ship under the name of “Captain Concorde,” where he gives talks and presentations. This is after a career spent working on Concorde, starting in 1974, until it went out of service, culminating in his role as aircraft maintenance supervisor.

Ricky Bastin:

It was a headache. There’s no point in pretending otherwise, but you had to just roll your sleeves up, scratch your head and find out what’s wrong and go onto it. It was a constant learning exercise. There were so many twists, so many turns and very little in the way of troubleshooting aids. So you really needed to know your airplane and scratch your head. This is how I lost my hair, scratching my head.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

Ricky experienced the shift in work firsthand, as it morphed into a constant state of evolution and fine tuning. Even though Concorde didn’t substantially change during its over two decades in the air, so many little changes were made. Intake edges were redesigned. The leading edge of the tail fin was extended, elevons and rudders improved. Even the refueling process at airports was changed. Safety was also a huge concern. Remember, no other commercial passenger jet flew under these conditions, with such intense speed and heat. One of the main worries were the tires, which had to bear the weight of the plane at extremely fast takeoff and landing speeds.

There was almost a nightmare on 14th June 1979 when an Air France Concorde taking off from Washington blew two of its tires. Debris flew up, puncturing the wing, which caused a fuel leak. Miraculously, the captain was able to turn the plane around and land safely, but that wasn’t the only time tires blew out. It happened 57 times over the next two decades to both airlines. Six of those times, the blowout caused damage to fuel tanks. Thankfully, none of those accidents seriously threatened passenger safety, caused any harm to passengers and Concorde passed safety inspections and certifications year after year. Eventually, the plane was fitted with stronger tires, and there were even new safety procedures should any tires deflate during takeoff. By 1993, tire incidents were rare, but since Concorde was so unique and many of its parts and design were custom made, Ricky’s team had to be creative and improvised when solving problems.

Ricky Bastin:

It was like doing brain surgery with kitchen utensils, I guess.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

All of this custom work and these specialized maintenance teams – not just for maintenance, but the onboard crew also required special training – that all cost a lot of money. I’m talking millions a year, and the folk footing these bills, so not British Airways or Air France, but the British and French governments, had already spent almost a billion pounds building the planes, so well over a billion US dollars over 25 billion US in today’s money. building the planes. Aviation journalist Michel Polacco.

Michel Polacco:

When they saw that no others would be built, they decided that they didn’t want to be the ones paying for all the costs related to keeping the planes up to date if there were that few of them in service because when a plane is not distributed a lot, a single company cannot afford to pay all the maintenance costs to keep it in the air.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

Michel explains why the situation with Air France Concorde was so dire.

Michel Polacco:

At the end of the seventies and at the beginning of the eighties, Air France didn’t really like the plane because it had forced Air France to have a specific kind of crew with significant additional salary advantages. In 1982, they had broken a plane when they landed. The tail had twisted, and they decided not to fix it and to keep it as a reservoir for its parts. It was the beginning of the end because there were now only six planes that were in the sky.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

The French government’s solution was not to abandon Concorde but to take a bigger role. They agreed to cover even more of the operating costs as long as they decided on the flight routes. All routes were abandoned except the most lucrative one: Paris to New York. Within a year, Air France Concorde was turning a profit, but putting all their eggs into one basket left them in a precarious position. 

Meanwhile, the British government, which was now led by conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, had a different approach. They didn’t want to have anything to do with Concorde anymore. I know we spent much of the last episode describing all the moments when Concorde’s future was at stake, but this was the closest it ever came, until it went out of service, from having a premature end. In 1984, British Airways, which was itself heading towards privatization, officially took over maintenance of the Concorde fleet and saved it from the scrap heap. A huge gamble, says Ricky Bastin.

Ricky Bastin:

That was a potential game changer, a negative game changer. But in actual fact, I think it was the best thing that ever happened because BA could then actually operate the aircraft to try and make real profits out of it.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

In the early eighties, tickets on Concorde cost only about 20% more than first class on other airlines. As Ricky explains, British Airways wondered if they could charge more, so they came up with a rather cheeky way to raise their prices.

Ricky Bastin:

They went around the cabin and asked these businessmen what they thought they were paying for the ticket. Now, these guys, most of them never bought the tickets themselves. The secretaries had, and they say, “Oh, I don’t know, a couple thousand bucks, whatever.” And they got all the numbers together and said, “Right. If that’s what they think we’re charging, we’ll charge it.” And that really is a fact. And from that point on, the spiral just went upwards, and the profits started rolling in.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

But to justify these new prices, British Airways and Air France had to seriously boost their service to the elite level. Michel Pollaco describes what it was like.

Michel Polacco:

The service on board was first-class service. They called it Concorde Class, and it was a mix of first class and business class. We would get on the plane, drink champagne, and then we would take off. Once you had finished drinking your champagne, they would serve you a delicious menu. There was always caviar. There was always foie gras and very beautiful wines. The Concorde Class on Air France and British Airways was magnificent.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

I’ve read stories that the flight was so smooth that you could put a drinking glass on your armrest and there wouldn’t be a ripple on the surface of the champagne. That’s because Concorde was the only passenger aircraft to spend most of its flying time at the edge of the stratosphere, 60,000 feet up, above turbulence. You could even see the curvature of the earth. Oh, and that wasn’t the only thing that was curved. You remember from earlier episodes about how the heat of supersonic flight expanded the aircraft? Here’s Aviation Professor Yves Gourinat.

Yves Gourinat:

We can see, when you are at the back of the cabin, we can see the bending in flight. And the reason why they put a curtain at the middle, it was not the reason because there were two classes because in Concorde, there was only the first class. But in order that we don’t see the feet of the people at the front disappear, they put this curtain.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

Wow.

Yves Gourinat:

It was very, very flexible and very… That’s the thermodynamics of structure.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

Wow. So basically, the plane is bending.

Yves Gourinat:

Yes.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

The bending of Concorde turned out to be a serious structural concern that required constant maintenance. We’re back at Aerospace Bristol Museum, and I’m walking around the British Airways Concorde on display with Mike Hall. He worked as a chief engineer for Concorde Support Operations starting in 1994. He says that the crown skins became an area of concern.

Mike Hall:

If you imagine this fuselage is a very long tube and the tube is bending during service because of takeoff and landings, changes in temperatures, you begin to develop fatigue cracks. And in this case, the crown skins are the portions of the top section of the fuselage along its entire length. Now, what happened is that you had to start inspecting those more and more frequently, and these inspections weren’t simple. They were acoustic inspections on individual rivets. 10,000 rivets up there that you have to inspect. You’re looking for little tiny cracks. So that began to be a very expensive, time expensive operation. 

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

Incredibly, Concorde passengers during the eighties and nineties were barely aware of the maintenance teams, and all this work that was being done behind the scenes. The vast majority of Concorde’s passengers were businesspeople, top bankers and CEOs, who demanded not only excellent service but consistent service. So in addition to Concorde Aircraft flying between Europe and New York, there was always a spare or two sitting at the airport in case of a glitch with the main Concorde. This was another huge operating cost, but it wasn’t just the rich flying Concorde. It was also the famous. Ricky Bastin, working as an electrical engineer preparing the plane for flight, saw a lot of them.

Ricky Bastin:

Saw Michael Jackson quite a few times coming on and off. I flew back with Diana Ross, and she was sitting in front of me out of New York one time. David Bowie. My first ever transatlantic was with David Bowie, one of my heroes.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

Personally, I remember seeing shots of famous passengers on Concorde. So we’re talking John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Elton John, Princess Diana, George Michael, and the Spice Girls. And someone who always seemed to be flying Concorde, Sting.

Sting:

It’s always exciting flying supersonic, and it’s always exciting to get to New York before you’ve left. You can do a full day’s work. Today, I’m going to see my wife, who’s in New York. And she doesn’t know I’m coming, so it’ll be a nice surprise for her. Promoting my new album.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

Okay, that thing about arriving before you left, you know how Concorde would leave London at 10:30 local time and arrive in New York at 9:30 local time, so time travel, it was exactly this time travel ability that was central to one of Concorde’s most famous moments with another musician. Jonathan Glancey tells the story.

Jonathan Glancey:

1985 Live Aid was played out in two stadia, one JFK stadium in Philadelphia and then Wembley Stadium in London. And Phil Collins, the Genesis drummer and singer, Phil Collins played in both the same day. So he was doing his bit drumming and singing in Wembley, and then a helicopter took him to Heathrow Airport. He flew Concorde, and a helicopter took him from JFK to JFK Stadium in Philadelphia where he played again, the second set and that extraordinary energy.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

By the 1990s, Concorde was well established as a symbol of luxurious and exclusive air travel. And while it might be an image that’s sexy and flashy, I can’t help but feel a bit sad about it all. We talked previously about how the dreams of the fifties came up against the hard realities of the seventies. But for me, this is when Concorde’s vision of a better future came to an end. A publicly-funded high speed transport that was supposed to be for everyone was now only being enjoyed by a small group of the ultra rich. Well, to be fair, there was one way in which the rest of us could get aboard Concorde: charter flights.

Katie John:

There were ordinary people who’d saved up for years to get a flight on Concorde for big birthdays or an anniversary. In fact, two of my friends were unemployed, and they took out loans to go on Concorde. One person even sold his house so that he could get a trip on Concorde.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

That’s Concorde Magazine Editor Katie John, who sadly, never flew on Concorde herself. But yes, starting in the early eighties, as a way to make a bit of extra money when the plane wasn’t being used, British Airways and, to a lesser extent, Air France allowed travel agents and tour operators to charter Concorde. Family anniversaries, surprise outings or work parties, you’d fly at Mach two, champagne all the way and even visit the flight deck. In a small way, the people who’d actually paid for Concorde, the taxpayers of Britain and France, could now actually experience it. Jonathan Glancey explains.

Jonathan Glancey:

So they would go around the Bay of Biscay in Concorde, which would taking off from the coast of Southern England, flying supersonic around the big Bay of Biscay around the coast of Spain and back to give people on very little money a huge bit of excitement and experience of Concorde. Concordes would be chartered to fly to Finland to Father Christmas’ grotto, slightly funny, charming things.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

So yeah, seriously, you could fly Concorde to the North Pole and visit Santa Claus. The charters proved so popular that by the late eighties, they made up over a quarter of Concorde’s passenger numbers, and they padded out the profits significantly. But Concorde also became known for its famous humanitarian acts. Ricky Bastin.

Ricky Bastin:

Concorde used to save so many lives because one of the constant traffics between New York and London both ways was organs, live organs. And the person carrying the organ would always be allowed the first person to get off the airplane because that’s going to be rushed to the hospital.

Jonathan Glancey:

People really did by this time feel for the machine because it, to use the terrible cliche word, but had become this national icon, had become a symbol of the nation. The British had adopted it, so it had become the British aircraft, even though it’s Anglo-French. It was much loved. So yeah, I think it started to become this idea of this national treasure.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

Interestingly, in France, the feeling wasn’t quite the same. Concorde was seen with pride as a massive accomplishment when it came to cooperation and innovation, but it wasn’t part of the national identity in the way that it was for the British. 

Now, here’s an example of that intense love some Brits have for Concorde. We’ve heard from Katie John throughout the series as the editor of the “Mach 2” Concorde magazine, which is a Concorde passion project for her. But Katie’s also an artist. When we spoke to her in her flat, she had a painting on an easel that I asked her to describe.

Katie John:

Okay. Well, the painting shows Concorde in the maintenance area, and she’s been stripped of paint. She’ll be up on jacks. She’s had the undercarriage removed. She’s had everything in the cabin removed. She’s had the nose cone taken away from the rest of the airframe for checking over, and there’s a group of engineers working on her and discussing what the next plan is while the airplane is sitting there basically in the dock.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

This painting is based on a photo of Concorde undergoing what’s called a major check.

Katie John:

Which was basically where every several years they would strip down the airplane completely right down to the skeleton. This happens to every kind of airliner, but in Concorde, it took several months. They would dismantle the entire aircraft, take out all the wiring, go through all the checks on everything to make sure it was all up to standard and then rebuild the airplane and repaint it and send it back out to airline service.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

And what was it about this particular scene which made you want to paint it?

Katie John:

It’s to commemorate the work of these guys who did such a lot of detailed work. It was so many thousands and thousands of man hours that went into maintaining and overhauling these airplanes, and it’s to commemorate what they did. What I do, aviation painting, is a kind of genre painting, like marine painting, where the aim is not so much bleeding edge creativity. Its commemoration of particular instances in history or particular achievements. And that’s what my paintings of Concorde are about.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

Katie’s paintings are spectacular. You can find a link in our show notes. But while she’s captured here, the intense maintenance of Concorde, it really gives you a glimpse into what was going on behind the scenes of celebrities sipping champagne at 60,000 feet. As mentioned earlier, instead of the huge teams of thousands that had built Concorde, now there were only small maintenance crews in France and in the UK. Okay. I know I say small, but that’s compared to all the people who worked on it before. Compared to other airplanes. Concorde, with a fleet of just over a dozen airplanes flying only a couple of routes, had a serious contingent of engineers and mechanics. It even had a rapid response unit in airports in case of last minute technical snags or problems. The pressure on the teams at British Airways in Air France shifted from design and building to making sure the plane passed all the safety checks and got to the gate on time for scheduled takeoff. This became increasingly difficult as the years passed and other aircraft modernized and fleets expanded. With so few planes in the air, Concorde was becoming an aviation island of technology. As they were the only teams in the world working on this unique plane, the maintenance crews in France and Britain kept in touch, explains Ricky Bastin.

Ricky Bastin:

There was always a liaison between Britain and France at various levels, not on a day-to-day basis, but there’d be joint groups between Air France and British Airways regarding Concorde. We helped each other along. There was a good interchange of information between the two airlines. It was a pretty good relationship, although we were technically rivals. It was a pretty good relationship. There never seemed to be much friction or anything.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

As you can hear in Ricky’s voice, this wasn’t the camaraderie that existed back in the sixties when a shared goal allowed teams in France and Britain to overcome their traditional rivalries. Now, as commercial competitors, each team was on its own to figure out how to keep each individual plane safely in the air. Knowledge was shared, but each team had gone its own way when it came to the day-to-day maintenance of the two fleets. Fleets that were not only flying under extreme circumstances, but were also aging. 

And so, Mike, can we look at some parts of the plane?

Mike Hall:

Certainly. Let’s take a walk. We’re starting at the front office, if you will…

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

We’re back at Aerospace Bristol Museum with support operations engineer Mike Hall.

So what were the points of concern about Concorde and its maintenance?

Mike Hall:

Well, there were many because it was a complex aircraft, as it required quite a bit of complicated equipment in machinery and multiple teams to keep the aircraft safe and in the air. And some of the major areas that we were always concerned with were the normal activities associated with tires, maintenance of the landing gear, obvious constant maintenance of the engines. So it’s like looking at a very fancy car that is aging that you have to constantly, continually try to maintain so that it looks nice and continues to operate safely. It’s in a similar fashion but a bit more expensive.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

So, Mike, we wanted to know about some of the areas that would’ve made maintenance difficult.

Mike Hall:

One of the things on this aircraft in particular that began to be a problem were the fact of her age. The aircraft as a system was designed in the late sixties and seventies. Manufacturing technologies changed over those ensuing years, and a lot of the equipment suppliers no longer fabricated components of the same nature that they did in the seventies. Analog systems, analog pumps and all the other control systems were now moving to be digital, and eventually, those particular items began to be more expensive. And, of course, because of the relatively small fleet size that were actually eventually operational, there was not a tremendous demand for things like fuel pumps and the specialized components for the Olympus 593 engines. The electronic systems were particularly like that, where they were outdated, right down to the component level. And because of the certification rules, you can’t take and just replace components individually with new bits. You cannot do that. You have certified a system. It’s a black box with many components in it. The system is certified by the authorities and tested by the manufacturer, and that all costs time and money. And, of course, you can’t just come up and say, “We’re going to put a whole new box that we promise will do the same thing.” You have to then retest it.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

How does that compare to other commercial planes, which are subsonic, just so that we have some sense of context?

Mike Hall:

The principles are the same. The integrity of the unit, the amount of activity you have to be involved in is even more intense.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

More intense, more unique, more costly. Yes, this maintenance and care was expensive and time consuming, but for the teams working to keep Concorde in the air, they could really take pride in its perfect safety record since passenger flight began  started in 1976. 

As the year 2000 began, tests showed the Concorde fleet with continued maintenance could be in service for another decade, if not longer. And then the unthinkable happened.

Katie John:

Somebody said Concorde crashed. And I looked on the news websites, and just the shock was awful.

Ricky Bastin:

We felt bad for the airplane, bad for Air France and obviously mortified to think of all these bereaved folks. These are families torn apart.

Mike Hall:

It was a terrible impact on the team who’d been working so closely on the aircraft. So it was emotionally a very difficult thing.

John Britton:

We were out on a crash site for six weeks. We weren’t doing our normal job of keeping the aircraft safe and airworthy. We were a part of an investigating team doing detective work.

Ricky Bastin:

They came up with a package of modifications, which weren’t easily done, but they were gradually implemented.

John Britton:

And we’d reinforced the tire, and that became the solution that got the aircraft back into service.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:

That’s next time on Teamistry’s Making an Impossible Airplane: the Untold Story of Concorde, an original podcast series from Atlassian.