The Other Ssts
Congress’s termination of the SST program did not ensure success for either the Anglo-French Concorde or the Soviet Tu-144. Both came into service in the mid-1970s and were plagued with their own misfortunes. The foreign supersonics required massive government subsidies in a race that ended up producing only 20 Concordes and 17 Tu-144s, and both types ultimately experienced horrific disasters.
In its prime the Concorde conjured up a mystique of VIP comfort and convenience at twice the speed of sound. Passengers were treated like celebrities and paid roundtrip fares of $12,000 or more for the privilege. Air France and British Airways each took seven production Concordes; six others never carried passengers. The airlines paid far below the $20 million sticker price for some of them after OPEC’s price increases frightened away potential buyers from an aircraft that drank three and a half times as much fuel per passenger-mile as the Boeing 747. Noisy Olympus engines restricted nighttime operations into New York City, while the sonic boom that had helped kill the American SST similarly restricted the Concorde on overland flights.
However, it was a fiery crash on July 25, 2000, that foreshadowed the end. While taking off from Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport, an Air France Concorde struck a piece of titanium that had been shed by another aircraft. Rubber from the Concorde’s exploding tire created a shock wave that ruptured a fuel tank and sent the flaming aircraft plunging to earth. The crash killed 109 passengers and 4 villagers below. The Concordes did not return to the air until November 2001, following extensive modifications that gained the plane only two more operational years. British Airways made its last commercial flight on October 24, 2003, between New York and London, and then the fleet was parceled out to museums around the world. By conservative estimates, Britain and France invested a combined $3.5 billion to develop an aircraft that was rejected as uneconomical by virtually all the world’s airlines.
The Soviet Union’s Tu-144 experienced an even more checkered history. In 1965 the French intelligence service arrested and deported the head of the Soviet airline Aero-flot’s Paris office after learning that he was feeding Concorde secrets to Moscow. However, another agent apparently managed to slip the KGB a complete set of Concorde blueprints. Such espionage helped the Soviets send the first “Concordski” prototype aloft on December 31, 1968, two months ahead of its European competitor. But the hurried development came at a price. A prototype ripped apart during a demonstration flight at the Paris Air Show on June 3, 1973, killing six crew members and eight victims below.
Cramped, noisy, and unreliable, the Tu-144 didn’t begin passenger service until November 1, 1977, almost two years after the Concorde. Less than a year later an inflight fire forced a modified Tu-144D to make an emergency landing, taking several lives. The U.S.S.R. grounded the plane (except for flight testing) soon afterward, though in 1997 a Tu-144D was taken out of mothballs for a joint Russian-American research project to study supersonic flight.
In the end one can say that all three supersonic transport ventures played out rationally on political grounds, if not technical ones. As they had done with their space program, the Soviets used the Tu-144 to maintain an image of technological prowess with another showy “first.” This reputation helped support their international status until it turned out to be a Potemkin village. The Concorde never came close to being a paying proposition, but the prestige it won may have been worth the cost—for Britain because it erased the memory of the failed De Havilland Comet, and for France as a follow-up to the success of Sud-Aviation’s twinjet Caravelle. More tangibly, it served as a test-bed for European cooperation and an incubator for Airbus, the European airline consortium that is now competing successfully with Boeing. The United States, on the other hand, already had a flourishing aerospace industry, and its international prestige needed no boost, since it had the Apollo program. With no extraneous factors to consider, America’s decision could be made on the basis of dollars and cents, and by 1971 that decision had become an easy one.
