Speedbird

Yesterday marked the passing of an era. The Concorde made its final scheduled flight in airline service.

For a couple of decades now, the Concorde has been the way for the jet set to travel from New York to London. Flying over two times the speed of sound, it brought Europe closer to New York than San Francisco or Los Angeles. Now the fastest airplane between JFK and Heathrow is the 747, which takes over twice as long to make the crossing.

I'm sure that somewhere, a bunch of environmentalists are popping champagne corks. Concorde was too noisy, too polluting, too fast, and flew too high for their tastes.

I once had the opportunity to climb around on one of the planes while it was in maintenance at Heathrow. The cabin was small, the seats weren't overly comfortable, and the cockpit was antiquated. But even so, you realized that you were standing in an engineering marvel. It was similar to the Boeing 247 - except that there was no equivalant DC-3 coming along after it to make the concept profitable. Concorde pushed the edges of the technological envelope, but no one ever bothered to follow through. After it came out, the world lost its will or interest to pursue projects like this (remember it came out just as we put a man on the moon). Never again have we been willing to take the risks necessary to achieve these kind of advances.

The era of the supersonic passenger flight is, for now, over. The Concorde is already on its way to becoming just a memory. Sure one or two will end up in museums somewhere, but nothing quite matches the majesty of watching it as it rolls across the ramp at Heathrow; nothing quite matches the graceful appearance of the airplane in flight; the powerful roar of the four Rolls-Royce Olympus engines at take-off; or the funny look the drooping nose gives the plane during landing. Concorde truly was unique.