I know you got soul: machines with that certain something (2 page)

So the idea of building a plane that could fly all the way to America faster and higher than any fighter, and then turn round and come straight home again, seemed ludicrous, especially as the people inside would be wearing lounge suits, rather than g-suits.

The main problem was the atmosphere. When a plane is travelling subsonically it parts the air easily, but when it goes up past Mach 1 the air no longer knows it’s coming and does not part. It smashes into the leading edges of the plane with such force that people on the ground, miles below, can actually hear it being rent asunder. This is the sonic boom.

This collision creates massive heat, so massive that Concorde really does grow by seven inches in
flight. On one early trip across the Atlantic a pilot put his hat in a space between two bulkheads and was alarmed to find on landing that the bulkheads were joined together more tightly than two coats of paint. Not until the return leg, when the plane had swelled up again, could he get his hat back, although by then it was more a mortar board really.

Some of the heat that generated this expansion transferred itself into the cabin. There was one part of the dashboard that was hot enough at Mach 2 to double up as a frying pan. The tiny windows were hot to the touch. And 10 per cent of the power produced by the engines had to be used to juice the air conditioners.

It was the heat that screwed the Americans. Like the British and French, they never foresaw millions of holidaymakers paying £99 for trips to Florida with Freddie Laker. Flying, for 50 years, had been the preserve of the rich, and as a result they thought the future lay beyond Mach 1.

Unfortunately, they felt Mach 2 wasn’t fast enough, and with their SST project aimed for Mach 3. That’s what finished them. They tried and tried, but at the time neither the technology nor the materials were available to get them past
the drawing board. As a result they gave up and designed the Boeing 747 instead. Subsonic, cheap transport for the masses. Well, you never know. It might work…

The Russians, too, developed a supersonic passenger plane that did actually fly. Into the ground. At an air show.

But even before this mishap Concordski was doomed because it had a range of just 1,500 miles, which would get it from Moscow to a point exactly 300 yards from the middle of nowhere. Technically it was clever because it could do Mach 2.2, like its European rival. Commercially it wasn’t going anywhere, so Ivan jacked it in.

The British and French, however, did not give up. I have seen film of the engineers throwing an endless succession of paper darts down the wind tunnel at Bristol as they struggled to work out which shape worked best.

The second problem, after the heat, is that the supersonic shockwave has a nasty habit of sitting on the trailing edges of the wings, causing the ailerons to jam. It was this that caused a number of Spitfires to crash in the Second World War. In a dive, without realising it, the pilots were getting awfully close to Mach 1 and as a result
they were dealing with forces they couldn’t comprehend. What they could comprehend, in their last moments before they hit the ground, was that for no obvious reason the controls had jammed.

It was boffins at the Miles Aircraft Corporation who figured this one out, and knew the key to supersonic flight was to lose the ailerons. The whole wing had to move. Or you needed a delta wing as was used on the Vulcan bomber, and eventually Concorde. But the shape of that wing had to be precise because, and this is not an exaggeration, life on the far side of the sound barrier is the most hostile place on earth. Mach 1 makes the Arctic Ocean or the Sahara Desert look like Battersea Park.

And if the forces were troublesome enough for the plane, they were a complete nightmare for the engines. Because if you let the spindly blades of a jet crash into the air at Mach 2, they will shatter and that will be that.

So the plane would be travelling at 1,500 mph, but the air going into the engines could only be moving at 500 mph. How do you do that? Well, you need to have paid attention in your physics lessons, that’s for sure.

As the engineers toiled away the marketing
men were having even bigger problems because of Concorde’s range. It was better than a fighter, and better than the Russian attempt. But it was never going to be able to cross the Pacific and even the Atlantic was a struggle. It could get to New York from London or Paris, but not from Frankfurt. This meant the number of routes it could fly was limited, and that meant the number of airlines that might buy it was equally small.

And then, after the Yom Kippur War and the subsequent oil crisis, the number dwindled from sixteen to just two. The national carriers of the countries involved. So although the engineers surmounted all the technical problems, no outsider wanted to buy their creation.

And to make matters worse, the Americans, spiteful because their supersonic plane had come to nought, invented all sorts of reasons why it should not be allowed in their air space. Farmers even argued that it would knock over their cows.

In the end just fourteen Concordes were made, the last going to Air France for just £1, and the only place you could fly to from London was Bahrain. Absurd. The greatest technological achievement of all time and no one could find a use for it.

Eventually the Americans caved in, and later still British Airways even worked out how their white elephant could be turned into a cash cow. Passengers were asked how much they thought their ticket had cost – each had PAs and assistants to deal with travel agents so they didn’t know – and amazingly most guessed way above the actual price. So BA simply matched the cost to the expectation.

It seemed that Concorde’s future was assured. Compared to normal planes, which bounce around the world’s airports like they’re on speed, BA’s flagship had a very small workload. There were very few landings and take-offs. And very little time spent in the air so there was quite literally no end in sight. Concorde would keep going until another visionary kick-started a project to build a replacement.

But then one of them crashed.

There had been near misses before. Tyres had burst, sending chunks of rubber into the wings. And on one notable occasion a BA plane had damn nearly run out of fuel coming in to land at Heathrow. It actually conked out while taxiing to the terminal building.

None of these incidents had really made the
news. After the fuel scare BA’s publicity department said that the plane was at a different angle on the ground than it is in the air and that actually there was enough left in the tanks to keep the engines running for 20 minutes.

As a result it made a small story in just one newspaper. But, in fact, while it had enough fuel for 20 minutes’ taxiing, there was only enough left for 90 seconds of flight.

The pilot, it turned out, had refused to slow down or refuel at Shannon when both his co-pilot and engineer realised something had gone wrong. He was sacked even before he could bash his hat back into shape.

The crash in Paris, though, made headlines everywhere and not just because of the casualties, who were mostly German. No, for the first time since the
Titanic
we were actually mourning the loss of the machine itself.

As the weeks wore on scientists realised a burst tyre had punctured one of the fuel tanks and that, somehow, the fuel on board had caught fire. They took steps to make sure it couldn’t happen again but the writing was already on the wall. And what little confidence was left went west after the World Trade Center thing.

Richard Branson made a few noises about taking the planes off BA’s hands and making them work with Virgin logos on the tail fin, but this was ridiculous. The French had already announced there would be no airworthiness certificates any more, and Beardy knew that even if there were, BA would never relinquish their flagships. He was turning the slow death of Concorde into a PR stunt. And I’ll never forgive him for that.

Concorde, you see, represented the greatness not just of the British and French boffins who’d made it against all the odds but also the sheer wondrous genius of the human race. This plane served as a twice-daily reminder that nothing was beyond us. Given time, and money, we could do absolutely anything.

Which is why, as I walked off the plane for the last time, I remember thinking, ‘This is one small step for a man. But a giant leap backwards for mankind.’

You see, unlike any other machine that is mothballed or donated to a museum, Concorde has not been replaced with something better or faster or more convenient.

This, and I’m trying not to exaggerate, is a bit like discovering fire and then snuffing it out
because someone got burned. Or finding America and not bothering to go back in case one of the ships sinks. Not since the Romans left Britain in
AD
410 has mankind shied away from technological or social advance, until now. And that is the main reason, I think, why there was so much shock at Concorde’s passing. Because it represented a sea change in the way we are.

We went to the moon and now we’re on our way to Mars. We invented the steam engine and immediately replaced it with internal combustion. We went to Mach 1 and then we went to Mach 2. We went across the Atlantic in three hours… and now we can’t any more.

And then there’s the fate of the machine itself. For more than twenty years it was woken in the morning and flown to New York. And then one day no one came to replenish its tanks or vacuum its carpets. There was a big party and the next day… nothing. Imagine doing that to your dog. Putting it in a kennel one night and never going back.

It’s a machine, so it can’t possibly know about the crash or the problems of getting an airworthiness certificate. It was built to do a job and it did that job, faultlessly, for year after year. So why, it
must be thinking, do they not want me any more?

Of course, we’ll still be able to go and see the old girl in a museum. That’ll be strange though. Going to a museum to see the future. Except, of course, Concorde isn’t the future. It’s the last, tumultuous, nail-biting chapter of the past.

When the car came along, we didn’t shoot our horses. They became playthings, toys for huntsmen and twelve-year-olds at gymkhanas. And it’s the same story with air travel.

Now we have the internet and video conferencing, big business can buy and sell its countries and its companies without ever leaving the swivel chair. There’s no need to fly to America.

So the only reason for using a plane is because you want to go on holiday. And given the choice of going to Florida at Mach 2 or for £2, most would opt for the cheaper option.

Concorde, then, had to die not because it was too fast but because, in the electronic age, it was too slow.

As I write a car is sitting outside my window, waiting to be tested. I do not know where it is made or what it is called. I think it might be a Kia but it could be a Daewoo.

Whatever it is, you would find more character in a glass of water and more heart in an office rubber plant. And there’s a very good reason for this.

In order for a car to have personality, an X factor, the company that makes it must be able to take guidance and inspiration from one man, the man who started the company in the first place.

This did not happen with the car outside my window, which was undoubtedly built in a jungle clearing by a company that makes cars to make money. No one began Proton or Hyundai or Daewoo because they’d harboured a dream of making something extraordinary or special. These are just enormous engineering and construction conglomerates that have been told by their
respective governments to make cars so that the locals can get off their oxen and get modern.

We see the same sort of thing in Japan. There never was a Mr Toyota who, since he was a small boy, yearned for the day when he could build a small family hatchback that never broke down. And you can scour the history books until the sky turns green but you’ll not find any mention of a young Timmy Datsun who stayed up until ten o’clock, even on school nights, devising his plan for a car with two milometers.

Subarus are made by a romantic-sounding outfit called Fuji Heavy Industries. At night I bet the chairman sometimes forgets he has a car division. It’ll be just another entry in his plofit and ross accounts.

The only Japanese cars with even a trace of humanity are Hondas, and there’s a very good reason for that. There was a Mr Honda and he did have a vision when he was a small boy. Even today that vision still steers the engineers, and as a result there’s a very definite correlation between the S2000 sports car and those early motorbikes. It’s solely because of this link with the past that I like Hondas more than any other Japanese cars.

Of course, in Europe most car firms were
started by a visionary. Lotus was kick-started by Colin Chapman, who liked things light and frothy. Jaguar was the brainchild of Sir William Lyons, who liked comfort and speed, with a low, low price. Enzo Ferrari wanted to make cars solely to support his beloved race team.

Most of these guys, and others like them, are remembered by sound-bite quotes. Ettore Bugatti, for instance, once said, ‘Nothing is too beautiful or too expensive.’ Enzo Ferrari came up with ‘the customer is not always right’. And Colin Chapman summed up his philosophy thus: ‘Simplify and add lightness.’

Mind you, he also said, ‘You would never catch me driving a race car that I have built.’ Which probably explains why Lotus came to be known as an acronym for Lots Of Trouble, Usually Serious.

These men are all now dead, or in South America, but their DNA is still evident in the cars that are being made today. The Lotus Elise is light and breaks down a lot. The new Bugatti Veyron will be astoundingly expensive and I think the paddle-shift gearbox in a Ferrari 575 is silly. But what do I know.

Unfortunately, however, time does have a nasty habit of blurring the idealism that gave rise to
these companies. I’m not sure, for instance, that Herr Porsche would get much of a hard-on for the Cayenne. And how would William Lyons react, I wonder, if he knew Jaguar’s current board was chasing euros by offering a front-wheel drive, diesel-powered estate car? Sure, it may help Jaguar out of a small hole now, but by losing sight of the goal, the vision, it will drive them into a bigger one later. I grew up, for instance, wanting an E-type. But my son is not growing up yearning for the day when he can buy an X-type diesel.