The Dream of Supersonic Flight

Transcript

Mike Banister:
Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome aboard Concorde. My name’s Mike Banister. And it’s my great pleasure to invite you on the world’s only supersonic airliner as we prepare for departure from London’s Heathrow.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
so the actual cabin is really small. Um, I’m quite short, so I can stand up, but if you are over five foot, 10 or something, you’re gonna have to stoop

Mike Banister:
Do make yourselves comfortable as we offer you the finest wines, the finest cuisine, the finest service in the air. Although the flight is very. We hope it’ll be a memorable experience for you Cabin crew doors to automatic and cross change.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Ok, you’re probably thinking to yourself: wait a second, didn’t Concorde stop flying, like, twenty years ago? Well, that’s true but I can assure you I was actually on a Concorde aircraft. Or, you might even be thinking, what is Concorde?

Jonathan Glancey:
I think Concorde was by any standards, the most beautiful aircraft that ever flew. It’s just the most magnificent engineering achievement.
Katie John:
I think she’s the most beautiful airliner in the world. Also, she’s a symbol of peace.

Ricky Bastin:
She was like an entity all on her own. She was far more than an airplane.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Concorde. For many people, that word conjures up images of a sleek, futuristic, jet plane. Or, they may think of celebrity’s sipping champagne. Or, of a horrible fiery crash. Concorde is all those things, but it’s also much more.

Pathe News:
The giant gleaming white dart, which points the way to the supersonic future of intercontinental transport-

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Today, we hear about billionaires flying off into space or other acts, which to me, sound selfish and not really that impressive either. Concorde was different. It represented a hope that technology would change everyone’s lives for the better. Here was a passenger jet that could fly at the speed of sound, which is called Mach 1. No, in fact, it could fly faster than that. It could fly at twice the speed of sound. That’s Mach 2. I mean, we can’t do that today, even though companies like Boom Supersonic and Lockheed Martin are trying..

The story we’re going to share with you includes espionage, Hollywood blockbusters, protest movements, and countless teams of people working together to try and achieve the impossible.

Now, there’s the story of Concorde you think you know. But we’re going to do some mythbusting, especially later in the series involving one key moment.
We just got out the cab because we’re about to leave Bristol, and the cab driver was very excited when we mentioned Concorde and he was saying how Concorde ended because of a piece of metal… Referring to the crash, of course. However, the real story is actually quite a bit more complicated than that.

My name is Nastaran Tavakoli-Far and I’m a journalist and podcast host. I absolutely love delving into the personal and societal forces that shape our lives. This is Teamistry, an original podcast from Atlassian. Makers of collaborative software including Jira, Trello, and Confluence. Naturally, we’re going to focus on the teams of people who designed, built, and maintained Concorde. A story that no one’s ever told. We’re going to be spending all six episodes trying to answer the question: how do you make an impossible airplane?

But why are we dedicating an entire season to Concorde? Here’s Pedro Mendes. He’s been the lead writer and producer of Teamistry since the show began. You’re going to hear his voice throughout the series as we travel together through Britain and France. Hey, Pedro.

Pedro Mendes:
Hi, Nas.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Tell me, why Concorde?

Pedro Mendes:
Well, I just think it’s such a Teamistry story. You have two teams, in two different countries, trying to build something in a completely new way, something extremely high tech and it’s before the internet, before, really, computers. In fact, they’re doing it all with paper and pencils and slide rules.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Also, Pedro, I mean you absolutely love Concorde. You’ve shown me photos of models you’ve built and you just know so much about it.

Pedro Mendes:
Yeah, I’m a complete Concorde nerd, which is why I cannot tell you how excited I am to see one up close. I saw one when I was a little kid because Concorde used to fly over Toronto in the air show, but it was so far away. But even then, I was just amazed by it. And it’s funny because all the folks we speak to in this season, whether they’re writers, aviation experts, engineers, they also have a story of wonder of when they first saw Concorde.

Katie John:
I’m on a flight, probably with my brother, full of noisy school kids down the back end of a Gulf Air TriStar trundling around Heathrow, and then there’s this amazing shape just outside the cabin window and she just looked like something from the future. She was so beautiful.

Yves Gourinat:
I was seven when I heard the first time of Concorde. It was in “Science Et Vie” which was a journal about science and there was a big picture of Concorde. All the classical aircraft were straight and sharp. This one there was a curvature on the wing. That’s the reason why maybe I found it very pretty. I don’t know.

Jonathan Glancey:
When Concorde flew over at about four o’clock in the afternoon in London, they’d point up at the sky and say, “Look, there’s Concorde.” Not a Concorde, that’s the important thing… Concorde. It was always as if there was only one of these machines.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
I also remember Concorde from when I was a kid, I grew up in London and you’d hear Concorde. It was extremely loud and it was incredibly fast, so it would be in and out of your eye line within seconds. And the other thing is that whenever I think of Concord, I also think of these incredibly nineties celebrities like George Michael, The Spice Girls, Princess Diana. I mean, it was the height of nineties glamor. So I associate Concorde with being extremely expensive, but it was also very important for Britain. And then it just seemed to disappear.

Pedro Mendes:
Okay, but Nas, you never flew on it, right?

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
No, of course not. I didn’t have the money to fly on it, but that’s why we start our journey by heading to Weybridge, which is southwest of London. I’m finally going to see a Concorde up close and I’m going to find out what it’s even like to take a flight.

Pedro Mendes:
All right. You want to describe what’s going on?

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
We are in Brooklands Museum. We’re going to go around to see a Concorde that’s here and I think… I see. That’s a Concorde. Wow. It’s very thin and… just walking up to it. It’s really delicate, actually. Wow. Well, that’s really nice. The wings are just really, really thin and maybe a bit like the tail of a fish or something. The wings curve out very delicately from the body. Wow, it’s really weird because there’s some planes next to it and they all seem very big and bulky, in comparison. For some reason, I’m just imagining it in water. I know it goes in air, but it looks like this… A machine that would glide in water really beautifully.
It’s so tiny. Wow. We are just going into the cabin. Wow. There’s two rows of seats on each side. It’s very compact. We can hear some music.

Tour Guide:
Mind your heads. Sit down.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Okay. I’m going to grab a seat here. Just looking around… So the actual cabin is really small. I’m quite short so I can stand up, but if you are over five foot 10 or something, you’re going to have to stoop. Now that we’ve sat down, it’s actually surprisingly roomy. I’ve got a lot of space to stretch out my legs really. It’s like being in premium economy or something like that.

Mike Banister:
Hello ladies and gentlemen. Welcome aboard Concorde. My name’s Mike Banister and it’s my great pleasure to invite you on the world’s only supersonic airliner. Do make yourselves comfortable as we offer you the finest wines, the finest cuisine, the finest service in the air. Although the flight is very short, we hope it’ll be a memorable experience for you.

Automated voice:
Cabin crew doors to automatic and cross check.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
The windows are really small, so I can pretty much cover it with my hand. That’s just how small they are.

Mike Banister:
Ladies and gentlemen, once we line up on the runway, we’ll be opening up our four Rolls-Royce engines to full power. You’ll feel the reheats kick in. We’ll accelerate very quickly through a hundred miles an hour, and within 40 seconds, we’ll be at 250 miles an hour. Speedbird to Concorde one, clear departure, runway, two, seven, left. Concorde, one, clear for take off. Everybody ready? 3, 2, 1, go.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
At this point, with Concorde at full power for takeoff, you are basically pushed so far back into your seat that you can’t even reach forward to touch the seat in front of you.

Mike Banister:
Well, ladies and gentlemen, here we are at 28,000 feet of Mach 0.95, 95% of the speed of sound. In a few moments time, we’re open up our engines to full power and switch on the reheats. And very shortly after that we’ll be through Mach 1, the speed of sound. We’re just coming up to that point now, engines up to full power. First pair of reheats on, second pair on… 0.95, 0.96, 0.98, 0.99… Mach 1, speed of sound. We’re now flying supersonically. You’ve joined the over 2 and a half million passengers who have flown faster than the speed of sound on British Airways Concorde.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
To tell you the truth, while I really was on Concorde, we didn’t actually take off. We didn’t even move. In fact, 2023 marks the 20th anniversary since Concorde’s last flight. What you heard was part of a really brilliant virtual flight experience at Brooklands Museum.
As I sat there, I kept thinking about how futuristic Concorde seems. Even today, but that’s the thing, Concorde was built in the 1970s. It was designed in the 60s and it was dreamed up all the way back in the 50s. At that time, the aviation industry was convinced that technology would evolve so rapidly that by the 1970s everyone would be flying at the speed of sound. Who was going to get there first?
Michel Polacco is a French aviation reporter and he’s also the author of a book on the history of Concorde. He’ll be one of our guides through the French side of this story.

Michel Polacco:
[French language] With Roland Glavany and Andre Turcat passing Mach 2 in France in 1958, it was decided in 1959 that since they were able to pass that speed with an experimental combat plane, there was no reason for us not to know how to carry passengers with a plane that will also go at Mach 2 speed. It’s important to note that at the end of the 50s, most of the planes flying at time, were propeller and turbo prop planes.

Katie John:
Jet civil transport at the time was itself in its infancy. The first jet airliners had only recently appeared. The only supersonic airplanes in operation were fighter planes, and even they were at a fairly early stage of their technology.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Katie John is the editor of Mach 2, an online magazine about the history and technology of Concorde. She’s going to bring us the inside story since she spent so much time with former Concorde engineers and crew.

Katie John:
Designing civil aircraft to carry passenger safety was a much more complex task than designing an aircraft for one or two military personnel who were tooled up with oxygen masks and pressure suits and things. It was a massive quantum leap in technology.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
The idea for that quantum leap came together in Britain at a meeting, in the late 50s, of the Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee.

Jonathan Glancey:
They was sitting there in their big thick pin striped and chalky suits, smoking pipes, massive amount of cigarettes and cups of tea and biscuits.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Jonathan Glancey is the author of Concorde: The Rise and Fall of the Supersonic Airliner. You can think of him as our British guide through the story of Concorde.

Jonathan Glancey:
At the time, London was not just misty, London was smokey. We were talking about a coal powered city, a coal powered country, Britain. A country, of course, with very few refrigerators, very little in terms of central heating, a country that just come out of post war rationing. Quite a threadbare country.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
I love that contrast. This thought that whilst this 21st century dream is being cooked up, some parts of Britain is still just emerging from the 19th century. In fact, Britain as a whole, was struggling financially under the weight of the post-war rebuild.

Jonathan Glancey:
In 1956, the same time that the committee that established Concorde, met, the Treaty of Rome was signed. The Treaty of Rome created the European Economic Community, which later became the European Union. At the time, Britain, was very keen to join and Concorde would be a ticket to get in. Why? The British politicians knew, as did the engineers that were trying to create Concorde, they couldn’t possibly afford to do it on their own.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Now, here’s where Concorde really starts to intersect with world history. Even though French politicians were also keen to launch a supersonic transport, could these two rivals put aside their differences?

Michel Polacco:
In 1962, the leaders of France and Britain, de Gaulle and Macmillan, met up to discuss the Common European Market. De Gaulle proposed to the British that they build a supersonic plane together to revive the respective aerospace industries with an extremely modern product that would be more modern than everything that was being done around the world, especially in the Soviet Union and the United States.

Pathe News:
At Lancaster House, the Aviation Minister, Mr. Julian Amery and company with the French ambassador, almost crooned in admiration over the brainchild of their two countries. On behalf of their governments, they signed the agreement for the joint development and production, a foretaste perhaps, of common market cooperation.

Katie John:
In this country, at least, Concorde won support from both the right and the left of our political spectrum. The right wing, because they could see it as an icon of national pride and the left wing because they could see it as an icon of international collaboration.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
But while joining the European Community was part of the hopes for this new supersonic transport, politicians had a more deep seated reason as well.

Jonathan Glancey:
It was about the fear that the very complex and yet very, very advanced British Aviation Industry would be beaten completely by the Americans.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
In order to compete with the growing power of the U.S. Aviation Industry, Britain and France would have to join forces, but even though they’d been allies during World War II, before the war, and for centuries, they had actually been rivals. Katie John

Katie John:
I think each side was equally committed and each side had an equal amount of misgivings. What happened was that the British managed to include a clause in there to say that if either side backed out, they would have to pay massive compensation to the other side because they weren’t sure how committed the French were.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
The French had their own misgivings about the British. The British Overseas Airways Corporation, a forerunner of British Airways, they actually put in an order for an American version of a supersonic transport, all while Concorde was being developed. We’re going to hear more on that in the next episode. The rivalry even extended to the name of the project.

Nigel Ferris:
My wife’s uncle was a man called Frank Clark, or Nobby as he was known, and he was a chief publicity officer for British Aircraft Corporation at the time.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
That’s Nigel Ferris. He worked as a clerk in the hangers where Concorde was being built in the 60s. He’s a lifelong champion of Concorde. He gives tours, he writes articles, he meets up with people like me and Pedro and tells us everything he knows. We’re going to hear a lot more from him in the next episode. But for now, Nigel tells us how the iconic plane got its contentious name and that’s by looking up the words, ‘agreement’ and ‘cooperation’ in a thesaurus.

Nigel Ferris:
Frank, and his family, sat down one night to find a name. His son, Tim, who is obviously my wife’s cousin, came up with the word ‘concord’. “Oh, that sounds good idea,” Frank said, “I’ll put it to the big wigs tomorrow.” It was after months and months of wrangling and so on, this and that and the other. It was decided that that was going to be, and Concorde became Concorde.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Throughout the 60s, the name was actually a bone of contention. The French spelled Concorde with an E at the end, and the Brits refused to do this. In the end, the Brits gave up and this was one of many compromises that the project would require.
Pedro and I are heading west. We’re taking a train from Weybridge to Filton, which is the place where British Concorde were assembled. Our destination is Aerospace Bristol, a museum built around Concorde. I mean, literally, the main hall, which looks like a small hanger, is long and angular so that it perfectly houses British Airways Concorde, BOAF, which is the last to have ever flown. We’re here to figure out just what were the main challenges, which were facing the designers who were tasked with building a supersonic passenger jet.

Pedro Mendes:
I think that the best image that I’ve ever heard about this is that wanting to fly a supersonic passenger jet out of a commercial airport is like taking an F1 Racer to the mall… the shopping mall.

John Britton:
Yeah.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
The guy laughing there is John Britton. He started working on Concorde in 1966 in the design office. He went on 30 years later to become chief engineer of the British Concorde fleet. Now, despite this important sounding title, he’s actually really affable. John can be lighthearted about the most serious stuff. And he always has a look on his face like he’s about to tell a joke.
Now, the point Pedro made about Concorde being like a Formula one racer at the mall, is not an exaggeration. The challenges that Concorde’s designers faced were massive, exactly because of this mismatch. They needed to design a plane that could take off and land from regular airports, even though supersonic jets usually need much longer runways. And whilst other supersonic jets were flown by fighter pilots wearing astronaut’s gear, Concorde would have to accommodate luggage, food trolleys, bathrooms, and most importantly, passengers not wearing flak suits. They needed to do all of this whilst being profitable. John takes us first to the wing of Concorde, which looks like a thin swooping triangle.

John Britton:
Supersonic wings, traditionally, they’re not good for takeoff and landing. A supersonic wing is optimized usually for supersonic flight and different to a subsonic wing. Normally, on a subsonic aircraft, you have high-lift devices. That’s when you were sat on your aircraft and if you are sat over the middle of the wing, you’d probably hear the slat drive going, “Yang, yang, yang, yang, yang,” under your feet. You think, “What’s that?” The slats run out and the flaps run out.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
If you’ve been on a plane, you’ve seen that, right? When the wing comes apart and extends backwards. Now that helps to create extra lift. I should say, how lift actually works is incredibly complex and we could dedicate an entire episode to just that. Simply put, a subsonic airplane wing, bends the wind around it, forcing air to travel faster over the top, creating a zone of low pressure above the wing, which pulls it up. Those slats and flaps then direct the air downwards off the back of the wing, producing an upwards push.

John Britton:
But this has got no slats and flaps because they’re extra weight, extra complexity, so you have to incorporate it in the wing. You could only do that with a high angle of attack.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Which means that for takeoff and for landing, the plane would need its nose to be way up, but the back of the plane would need to be much lower. Like a duck landing on water. Now at that angle, little vortices, little whirlwinds, form on the wing and these suck it up. That really high angle of attack ends up causing another problem.

John Britton:
When you’re taking off, and more importantly, when you’re landing, the crew can’t see the runway and they don’t like that.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
The designers and engineers would have to figure out a way to have both a streamlined nose, for supersonic flight, and then some way for the pilots to see the runway on landing and take off. There was another more significant challenge. How’d you even get this thing off the ground?
Could you tell us about the power plants?

John Britton:
I mean, we can walk back to the engine if you like.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Concordes engines are inside something called the power plant, a large rectangular structure, which is under each wing. To reach a speed fast enough for the wings to achieve lift, to rise off the ground at that higher angle of attack, the plane would have to go much faster than conventional airplanes. Not to mention, the speed it would then need to reach Mach 1 and then Mach 2. The plan was to use reheats.

John Britton:
Now reheat, another name for it is afterburners.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Afterburners are when jet fuel is sprayed into the back of the engine, literally into the exhaust fumes, which burns like crazy and gives the plane lots of extra thrust. But, of course, it takes an obscene amount of fuel.

John Britton:
It’s a really crude way of getting extra thrust, but it’s effective, but it uses a lot of fuel. You don’t want it on any longer than you can.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Once an aircraft reaches the speed of sound, a whole bunch of other problems come up. There’s the intense heat, which is caused both by friction and by air compression. That makes it too hot for the regular metal alloy that was used to build planes at the time. Not to mention the heat would also cause the body of the plane to expand. Yeah, I mean that it would actually get longer. We’ll hear how they overcome these challenges in our next episode when the teams start designing and building.
But in the early 60s, when this was all still speculative, British politicians had started making huge promises about the future of Concorde. The market was going to be between 150 and 500 planes and that selling just 30 planes would make it all profitable.

Pathe News:
In a few years time, the site of Concorde’s on international air fields all over the world will be commonplace, if all goes well. Then there’ll be 130 passengers on board. Flying times will have been cut by half. London to New York from seven hours, 40 minutes to three hours, 25 minutes.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
And because of growing competition and airplane production around the world, Britain’s Aviation Industry had to take this chance or face a complete collapse. Now, that’s a lot of pressure on the backs of the initial teams of designers and engineers. Plus, they had to do it in a way that no airplane had ever been built before. Here’s Concorde author, Jonathan Glancey again.

Jonathan Glancey:
The project was divided in two halves in terms of the power plant, which was largely British and airframe, essentially French. You could say it was a ridiculous way to try and build a complex machine, having factories set several hundred miles apart and across the English Channel.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
That’s right, as an act of political compromise, two Concorde prototypes would be built, with the work divided roughly 50 / 50. Two sets of the front and back bits of Concorde were the responsibility of the British Aircraft Corporation. Two identical main bodies of the plane, including the wings, would be built by France’s SUD Aviation. Then, both would work with a number of independent companies to supply various other parts, like Rolls Royce for the engines. Once the main bits were built, the Brits would send some over the Channel to Toulouse to assemble the French prototypes, and the French would send one set of fuselage and wings over to Bristol to assemble into the other prototype.
Now really think about that for a second. It’s a bit like you and a friend in another country are both building the same pieces of Idea furniture. Except you’re building the doors and legs for yours and your friend’s, while your friend all the way over there is making the shelves for both of you. It’s actually even more complicated than that because the Brits used imperial measurements, so feet and inches, while the French were using metric, so centimeters and millimeters. To add to all of that, they also spoke two different languages and had two very different work cultures.

Jonathan Glancey:
British engineers, and they’re still like this today, tend to be not so much matter of fact because they can be highly imaginative, but they’re quite laid back, they’re quite gentle, they’re quite diplomatic, self-deprecating, very much. The French, some of the engineers could be very noisy, very lively, very argumentative, different tradition in debate and culture and education.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Looking at this from the outside, you would not have put your money on this to be successful. It sounds like an almost impossible task to be built by two rival cultures. There were reasons to be hopeful. The biggest one came to light when the British and French first revealed their early supersonic plans to each other, only to discover how similar they were. After all, since the war, teams on either side of the Channel had already achieved remarkable things on their own. But even so, the engineers themselves knew that going it alone, they couldn’t solve all the problems a supersonic transport threw their way. They needed to combine their skills and know how.
How were these two groups going to work together? An early example of how engineers created new ways of collaborating comes from Aerodynamicist and Concorde Chief Design Engineer, Ted Talbot. In 2013, Ted published a memoir called Concorde, A Designer’s Life. That’s how we’re going to take you back to the early 60s and the first formal meeting of French and British engineers to tackle the problems of a supersonic power plant.
We’re in a large, incredibly ornate meeting room, that could be inside Versailles Palace. There’s about 20 engineers here who don’t speak each other’s language. Now the first thing they need is someone who will take charge. The person chosen is Pierre Young, an engineer from Bristol who’s also bilingual. Here’s what Ted writes about Pierre.

Ted Talbot:
If there’s any factor that can produce instant recognition and respect in a gathering of engineers, it is the facility to swear in more than one language.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Pierre’s first insight is that the only way this group will get anything done is to break into smaller groups. Ted, and two Frenchmen, are all sent to a rickety table in a somber, dark green room. None speak each other’s language. Ted asked Pierre for help.

Ted Talbot:
The response was, “I have my own meeting to attend.” With the additional comment of, “Your French was good enough to order three beers last night. Try it out on the instability of plug nozzles”.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
At this point, Ted doesn’t even know the names of the two French engineers he’s working with. He names them based on their reactions to him. One, is sallow-faced and the other is taciturn. Ted starts racking his brain about what to do when he remembers how his old French teacher got him to write everything down.

Ted Talbot:
That’s what was needed. Paper, sheets of it. The standard pad of British Aircraft Corporation paper worked its miracle. Sallow-face sensed that he’d been getting nowhere with his explanations and produced a pencil with which he sketched the details of a jet engine. Then he named each item in French, writing each name on the sheet and carefully repeating the word, waiting for a nod of understanding before proceeding to the next. When he’d completed the labeling, he handed the pencil across the table. Taking the pencil, I wrote the English equivalent under each word at the same time as saying it out loud. This being the correct way to address foreigners. Having finished, the pen was handed back to its owner who nodded his approval and smiled at his companion, a rather somber individual who nevertheless had followed each move with the greatest interest.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Excitedly. The three engineers get more sheets of paper and they draw more parts of the power plant covered with symbols and numbers.

Ted Talbot:
The atmosphere in the room had changed. It became apparent that there was a will on both sides to succeed in exchanging as much information as possible in order to assess the background and ability of each other’s organization. The language of mathematics was common to all. By the end of the day, all three of us were both elated and exhausted.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
As Ted writes in his memoir, this was just the first of countless meetings that were to happen over the coming decades as teams traveled back and forth between the engineering hubs in Britain and in France.
Right now, I’m taking a flight to Toulouse and we’re over the English Channel and I just realized that I’m basically recreating the milk run that engineers and various other people who worked on Concorde used to do every week in the 60s and early 70s. We’re on our way, straight from the airport, to a little town just outside Toulouse, right in the middle of the French Aircraft Industry. We drive past Airbus and a bunch of other aviation companies and it’s so close to the airport that planes are flying over every few minutes.
We’re heading to Dudley Collard’s house. He was a central part of the team who worked on aerodynamics at Sud Aviation. Basically, he helped design Concorde.
We’ve come to see Dudley Collard and very beautiful house with the light blue wooden shutters outside the windows.

Pedro Mendes:
Hello?

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Hi.

Pedro Mendes:
Dudley?

Dudley Collard:
Yeah. You are?

Pedro Mendes:
Pedro.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Nas.

Dudley Collard:
Yeah, come on in.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Nice to meet you.

Pedro Mendes:
Thank you. We brought all our luggage, I’m afraid.

Dudley Collard:
I can see that, you…

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Now, here’s what you need to know about Dudley. Because he’s a Concorde alumni, in France they call him, “Ancien du programme Concorde”. He’s almost 90 years old, but he seriously doesn’t look it. He’s really tall, really slim, and he’s as sharp as a tag. As you can hear, Dudley isn’t French. Well, at least he wasn’t born in France.

Dudley Collard:
Born in London, in 1933. What’s known here as an “ancien ancien” because sinceI worked, I’m a former worker on the Concorde. I’m an ancien du programme Concorde, but since I’m ancient, I’m also ancien. That’s why I’m “ancien ancien.”

Pedro Mendes:
What was your first job at Sud?

Dudley Collard:
Sud? You have to realize this is in beginning of September, 1962. The program had not been launched. I hoped it would. Merry me, I cam over from Boeing with my family and three children and took a salary cut of 50%.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Before his speculative moved to Toulouse, Dudley had worked at Boeing in the United States. He worked in their early supersonic division, which was purely researching at the time. Then he heard about England and France’s plans to actually build a supersonic transport. Now, Dudley didn’t care about the European Community or Britain’s Aviation Industry. He was following a dream to build something that had never been attempted. Would he follow that dream to France or to England? Well, he’d left England over a decade before and he had no desire to work there.

Dudley Collard:
Having lived in the U.S. and paid for my education by working in lumber mills and so on, in the Oregon Mountains, I wouldn’t take the way their stratification in the… I didn’t care for that at all. The way their bosses could walk over, they wouldn’t have walked over me.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Despite not speaking French, he showed up in Toulouse and because of his experience, he was immediately hired.

Dudley Collard:
People were quite happy to try their English on me when I got here. I said, “Well, that’s fine. We’ll work in English,” I said, “for one month. And at the end of the month, chop… All will be French”.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
In those early days when the Concorde agreement had just been signed, despite massive challenges, Dudley felt a sense of freedom.

Dudley Collard:
We started working alone in the aerodynamics office. Nobody really told me what to do, so I just started doing what I thought was interesting. We could get quite a lot done. In those days, you didn’t have these funny things they have now called meetings. There were none. If the boss wanted to know, he called you in, and asked you. It was all very simple. Of course, having nothing else to do, I suppose you worked and you could get a lot of work done.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
As 1963 dawned, Dudley’s team in Toulouse, and Ted Talbot’s team back in Bristol, and dozens of other teams all around France and Britain, they had an awful lot of work to do. How would they design the wings or build the power plants or deal with the heat of supersonic flight? This was all with the future of their country’s aviation industries hanging in the balance.

Dudley Collard:
You never say that things are impossible. Concorde, of course, was impossible. You don’t say that. But you can see all these problems and you think, “My gosh, I’ve not a clue how they’re going to get over this”.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
Still to come in this series, we’re going to hear about the teamwork that it took to solve these problems of designing, building, and maintaining Concorde. It’s a story that involves so many twists and turns. It includes espionage, colonialism, glamorous celebrities, a terrible crash, 9/11 and constant uncertainty.

John Britton:
Every time it did high speed taxi tests, we didn’t know when it was going to be the first flight or not. You were holding your breath.

Jonathan Glancey:
If you think of that period, this was the sort of, as it were the golden age, the spies, wasn’t it? There was even a priest, in France, coming out of the factory in Toulouse with drinks under his arms, which he’s going to take to the Russians.

Katie John:
When they were doing test flights down the seaboard of India and the sonic booms were landing, one of the things that they said to the British government was, “Why are you doing this to Indians when you won’t do it to British people? Are we less important than British people”?

Ricky Bastin:
The likes of Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger… I told Mick Jagger off once, because his kids were running around the airplane.

Yves Gourinat:
Concorde 45, 90. You have flames. You have flames behind you.

Jonathan Glancey:
Absolutely horrific moment in Concorde’s history and in those people’s lives.

Mike Hall:
It was a terrible impact on the team who’d been working so closely on aircraft. Yeah, it was emotionally, a very difficult thing.

Katie John:
The shock of 9/11 in which the aviation industry as a whole, took a massive hit.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far:
We’re going to hear about all that and so much more – including the possible return of supersonic passenger flight -over the next five episodes of “Making an impossible airplane, the untold story of concorde”. Season four of Teamistry, in original podcast from Atlassian.