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When the Concorde lands for the final time at London's Heathrow Airport on Oct. 24, it'll be the last chance in a generation for commercial air passengers to pierce the sound barrier, aviation analysts say.
The Concordes are marvels of engineering and design, radically different from the cookie-cutter jets that crowd the skies. Legions of fans list their Concorde flights among the high points of their lives.
But the economics of operating an aging, fuel-chomping, deafeningly loud fleet of supersonic jets have become too cumbersome for British Airways and Air France. And the financial barriers to creating new, ultra-fast planes are too high for any other commercial carrier to start flying at Mach speed any time in the near future.
While research into new, supersonic technology continues across the globe, most of these efforts are geared toward the military. Many won't be ready for decades to come.
"The airlines have clearly spoken: Commercial supersonics are just not economically – and to some extent, technically – feasible," said Todd Lecher, a Boeing spokesman. The company recently abandoned its plans for a near-Mach Sonic Cruiser after resistance from the big carriers. "Maybe in two or three decades, that will change."
To hurtle across the ocean at nearly twice the speed of sound, the arrowhead-shaped, droop-nosed Concorde uses four Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 engines, each with 38,000 pounds of thrust. Generating such tremendous power takes a tremendous amount of fuel.
"For every seat, it has to carry a ton of fuel," said R.E.G. Davies, a noted airline industry analyst and author of Supersonic Nonsense, a book critical of the Concorde program.
At about 100 passengers, that's 200,000 pounds of propellant. A Boeing 747 uses a little more – about 270,000 pounds. But the subsonic plane has room for 400 passengers, quadruple the Concorde's capacity.
Carrying all that fuel over and over again, at such tremendous speed, has been brutal on the planes. When Air France and British Airways were operating their Concordes, they were logging more supersonic hours than all the world's air forces combined, Davies noted. It was an "amazing technical achievement," he said, that the planes were able to fly day in and day out for years with only one crash, in 2000 near Paris.
But as the Concordes aged, Davies said, the cost of maintenance piled higher and higher. For every hour in the air, the jet had to spend 12 on the ground being examined and fixed.
Despite all the attention, the planes – which first started making commercial transatlantic flights in 1976 – were beginning to show signs of age. A Concorde lost part of its rudder twice in the past year, said aviation consultant Ernest Arvai. Spare parts now have to be custom-made.
Covering these mounting maintenance and fuel costs was never easy. But it became particularly hard after the 2000 crash, when it was beyond tough to persuade passengers to pony up the $13,000 or so for a round-trip ticket. Yes, the excursions were fancy, with private massages and champagne in the private Concorde waiting room. And the seats oh-so-comfy leather.
But, as Concorde fan – and Northeastern University student – Craig Oppenheim noted, "You don't fly for the food or for the seat."
The rush is the reason; the thrill of being hurled up almost to the edge of space – 60,000 feet – at speeds only a fighter pilot or an astronaut would ordinarily get to feel.
In the end, however, even this once-in-a-lifetime thrill wasn't able to attract enough passengers to the Concorde. British Airways claimed to make money on its supersonic flights – but that's only because the British and French governments wrote off the planes' $3.5 billion development costs, Arvai said.
Now Concorde enthusiasts are trying a last-ditch effort to persuade British Airways and the U.K. government to stay the plane's retirement orders. They argue that, because taxpayer money was used to build them, taxpayers should decide what should be done with the jets. And Britons have long had a fascination with their supersonic bird. More than 250,000 people are expected to gather to watch the Concorde's last landing.
Jetinder Sira has been traveling to Heathrow for 27 years to watch the Concorde soar and descend. Since May, when the jet's retirement was announced, he's been making his airport pilgrimage at least three times a week. It's a journey of two hours – each way – from his home in Romford, Essex.
Sira's devotion to the supersonic inspired fellow members of a Concorde fan site to raise the money to buy him a ticket before the plane is encased in museum glass.
"She represents the hopes and dreams of a generation of people for whom nothing was impossible; the future was there for the taking," Sira said in an e-mail message. It was all about Mach 2 airliners, fast cars, man walking on the moon, manned space stations and moon bases. The technology used in Concorde was decades ahead of her time. She is still decades ahead of our time and needs to be saved and kept flying at Mach 2."
But Sira's passion isn't going to change the economics of ultra-fast travel. Even NASA has abandoned key efforts in the area. In the 1990s, the space agency teamed with industry researchers to sink a billion dollars into the supersonic High-Speed Civil Transport program. But ultimately, no airline was willing to commit to the project, and it died.
The space agency is currently working with the Pentagon research arm Darpa and the defense contractor Northrop Grumman on a $7 million project to reduce the earsplitting, thunderclap sonic booms that occur when planes break the sound barrier. Strict anti-noise regulations were one of several reasons a commercial supersonic flight was never scheduled from, say, New York to San Francisco. Perhaps the NASA-led group can make some headway in this area. But Arvai thinks it'll be a decade, at least, until there's major progress.
Darpa and the Office of Naval Research are also teaming up to develop cruise missiles than can reach up to six times the speed of sound. Researchers at the University of Queensland, Australia, have done preliminary testing on a jet that might even double that rate.
But Allan Paull, one of the chiefs of the Australian effort, told reporters in 2001 that it would take 50 years before his technologies could become commercial supersonic passenger planes.
"The technologies do work," Arvai said. "They are just not practical."
