Written by: Aryan Thagunna - 2022003, Grade X
Posted on: 02 August, 2020
We live in a time when aviation is just a normal part of our lives. It is like it was always there. It was more than a century ago that a plane took off. It was December 17th, 1903 when Wright brothers flew their first plane. They were successful with the piston engine aircraft. Then, humans wanted to push the boundaries, and then came the jet engines. But 68 years later and we are still flying in jetliners. Well, at least the improved ones.
It is not entirely true when we say there hasn’t been a major breakthrough in the aviation industry. We have had better planes but they didn’t work out for us. You probably haven’t heard of the Concorde. It might be either because you were not born back then or it never made its way to Nepal. Concorde was a plane capable of breaking the sound barrier. That is, it was able to fly at a speed faster than that of sound. Sound travels at a speed of 1234.8 km/hr. The Concorde flew at a speed of 2179 km/hr. This meant that a piston engine plane took 13 hours to go from London to New York. That’s 5566.721 km in 13 hours. Do the math to find the speed. When jetliners came, they not only flew faster but higher too, so the journey got cut down to just 7 hours. But when there was a revolution in the aviation industry, along came the supersonic planes which cut the journey to just 3 and a half hours. On paper, it sounds that this should have been the future of air travel. But boy were they wrong! Concorde was about to be the greatest missteps of the aviation industry, except maybe the airships.
Building a plane to go faster than the speed of sound was an engineering challenge. The high speed, temperature, air resistance, and passenger safety. Concorde was built by a government collaboration between Britain and France. They wanted to be a step ahead of the Americans and lo behold! Prototypes were presented to the public for the first time on 7–8 June 1969 at the Paris Air Show. The Americans due to various issues could not come up with their own. Just like any new piece of invention, Concorde received a lot of skepticism from its critics. They complained about the loud takeoff and landing noise. They also complained about the Concorde's fuel efficiency as it burned a lot more fuel than a jetliner. But again, when a plane was as good as the Concorde, it didn’t matter what the critics thought. Airlines from all over the world started filling orders for more than 70 Concordes.
Concorde estimated the orders to grow to 200 by the next year. But when it went into service, people started protesting about its noise and sound pollution. The Concorde's sonic boom (a loud explosive noise caused by the shock wave from an aircraft or other object traveling faster than the speed of sound.) reached 100-110 decibels and sounded like an explosion going off. People living close to the airport started complaining about the huge sound it produced. Due to these factors, many countries started banning Concorde from flying in their airspace. Concorde was facing a serious backlash. Evidence started to mount that it was also harmful to the environment. Concorde was a very expensive plane to operate. Although it was twice as fast as a jetliner, it burned four times more fuel than the jetliners. In the world where oil prices had risen just as Concorde came to service, this was a major concern. Due to these reasons, the orders started canceling and the Concorde program was left with just a handful of orders. In order to get their money back with no profit, the program had to sell about 150 planes but it couldn’t even sell 15. But due to the treaty of the two countries, neither Britain nor France could pull out of the program. They had to go on with the program so on 21st January 1976, Concorde entered commercial aviation. British Airways and Air France were the only operators of the Concorde with 7 planes in service each. Since these companies were owned by the country’s government they had been forced to. They lost about 100,000 pounds on one flight from Britain to Bahrain in today's money. In order to get their money back, the airlines decided to aim this plane at the richer class of passengers who could pay more for the flight. This was a commercial success and for a decade the Concorde even acted as a symbol of pride for Britain and France. But in the early 2000 Concorde's impeccable safety record came to an end when Air France’s plane crashed killing everyone on board. Along with the rising maintenance cost of the aging planes and the attacks of 9/11 that caused a huge recession in global air travel, Concorde was looking like an unsensible economic investment. So in October 2003, the most notable airplane of the most ambitious aviation project retired from service.
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