A supersonic airliner takes shape
On 11 December 1967, at the Sud Aviation plant in Toulouse, in southern France, the first Concorde prototype was shown to the public. Painted in white, with its long drooping nose and slender delta wing, the aircraft looked unlike any airliner in service. Its design aim was to carry passengers at more than twice the speed of sound across the Atlantic, cutting the journey time between Europe and North America to a few hours.
The ceremony marked a rollout, as with the Boeing 747 a little over two months earlier, and the aircraft would not fly for another fifteen months or so. But for the people involved it was the first physical proof of a project that had existed mainly on paper and in treaty negotiations.
An Anglo-French partnership
Concorde was a joint project of Britain and France. By the early 1960s, both countries had been studying supersonic transport, and both realised that the cost of developing such an aircraft was very high. In November 1962 the two governments signed an agreement to build it together. The British Aircraft Corporation and the French Sud Aviation (later part of Aerospatiale) shared the airframe work, and the Olympus 593 engine was developed by Rolls-Royce and the French firm Snecma.
The partnership was unusual for its time. Work was split between the two countries, with assembly lines in both Toulouse and Filton, near Bristol. Documents and meetings had to be handled in two languages, and some people have described it as an exercise in political as much as technical cooperation. The agreement was reportedly drawn up in a way that made withdrawal difficult, which helps explain why the project continued despite rising costs.
Costs were indeed a problem. The original estimates were far exceeded, and the final bill for the development was many times the early figure. The exact amounts vary by source, so it is safest to say simply that the overrun was very large.
Politics and the name
The programme was also tied up with wider relations between Britain and France. President de Gaulle had vetoed British entry to the European Economic Community in 1963, and he did so again at the end of November 1967, only days before the Toulouse ceremony. The Common Market veto was a reminder of how strained relations between the two governments could be. Britain’s government was also dealing with the pound devaluation of that month, which added to economic anxiety.
Against this background, the unveiling was an occasion for expressions of unity. A story often told about the day concerns the spelling of the aircraft’s name. In Britain, the name had often been written without the final letter. Tony Benn, then the British Minister of Technology, is reported to have said in his speech that the final letter stood for excellence, England, Europe and entente. Whether or not the details of this account are exact, the British spelling was brought into line with the French one soon afterward.
First flights
The first flight took place on 2 March 1969, when the French-built prototype, flown by the test pilot André Turcat, took off from Toulouse. The British-built prototype flew from Filton on 9 April 1969. Both flights were widely reported. Supersonic speed was reached later that year, and a test programme of hundreds of flights followed, intended to explore the plane’s behaviour across its operating range.
The Soviet Union’s Tupolev Tu-144, which looked broadly similar, made its first flight at the very end of 1968, a few months before Concorde. The two programmes belonged to a period when supersonic travel was seen as the next logical step in aviation.
Service and limits
Concorde entered passenger service in January 1976, with British Airways and Air France beginning flights on 21 January. It carried passengers on routes such as London to New York and Paris to New York, and it cut transatlantic flight times to about three and a half hours.
Its commercial success was limited. Orders from other airlines that had been expected did not materialise, in part because of high fuel consumption, noise concerns, restrictions on supersonic flight over land, and the economic shocks of the 1970s. In the end only twenty were built, including prototypes and preproduction aircraft, and they served a small, wealthy clientele.
Concorde was retired in 2003, a few years after an accident in Paris in July 2000 and amid a downturn in air travel. It remains a symbol of both technical ambition and the difficulty of making such ambition pay.
What the rollout showed
The December 1967 event was a celebration of engineering and cooperation. It was less certain, even then, whether the economics of supersonic flight would work. The same year saw the first Boeing 747 rolled out in the United States, and in hindsight, the quieter, larger aircraft went on to reshape air travel far more widely. Concorde’s legacy was prestige, speed and a design that people still recognise at a glance.