Air France Retires Concorde

By ANN Associate Editor Pete Combs

I remember the first time I saw it. Actually, I heard it before I saw it - the loudest jet roar I'd ever heard in my 13 years of life. It was an Air France Concorde flying into Washington's Dulles Airport. I stood and watched its needle-like figure cross the sky like a stately spaceship, an out-of-this world design that promised Washington-London flights in four hours. Racing the sun. I kept thinking about racing the rotation of the Earth... and winning.

In the days just after the Concordes began to fly, I remember the controversy that surrounded them. They were loud. There were sonic booms. I remember the terrifying sound of sonic booms from an earlier day in my childhood, near Tinker AFB (OK). But this, the Concorde, seemed so graceful, so full of promise, a dream of modern travel in ultimate style and comfort.

Friday, the dream ended for Air France. Soon, British Airways, the only other airline to fly the Concorde, will also retire the supersonic jetliners.

Air France's Last Concorde Run

Friday, hundreds of people stood around the fence at New York's JFK Airport to watch Air France bring to a close 34 years of supersonic passenger flight. The Concorde flew to Charles DeGaulle Airport in Paris in just three hours. The 79 passengers, some with tears in their eyes, deplaned the Concorde, one saying (with perhaps typical French fatalism), "In France we don't know how to hold on to what is beautiful."

"Concorde will never really stop flying because it will live on in people's imagination," Air France Chairman Jean-Cyril Spinetta told Reuters.

"It's the end of an era in aviation," Dominique Bussereau, France's transport secretary, told the Associated Press. The last Air France Concorde flight originated at JFK, as fire trucks sprayed a rainbow of colored water to send the supersonic aircraft off in style.

Those who were on board were fully appreciative of the standard-setting Mach 2 service. Christophe Mazel, the chief financial officer of Michelin Tires in Thailand, said of the jet: "You're eating the most beautiful food, drinking the most beautiful wine. You can't compare it even to first class."

"I kept my eyes wide open during the whole flight" to look out the window, said passenger Vincent Olivetto, adding, "It's an unforgettable memory." Olivetto unashamedly admits having shed a few tears upon landing in Paris.

Air France said in a statement Wednesday, "For Air France, Concorde belongs to humanity's aviation heritage and it must therefore be possible to see and admire it." Both Air France and British Airways are intent on dedicating the Concorde fleet to museums around the world.

"This will be true of the entire Air France Concorde fleet. all planes that belong to it will be presented to the public." Sir Richard Branson, the flambouyant CEO of Virgin-Atlantic Airlines, is reportedly crushed by news that the Concorde won't fly again. Branson was recently snubbed by both BA and Air France in his bid to purchase the entire Concorde fleet for his own airline, Virgin-Atlantic.

"We think it's a tragedy," a spokesman for Virgin told the AFP news agency. "The minimum would be to keep them in flight and preserve them for historic reasons."

But French expert aviation expert Pierre Condom was skeptical about Mr Branson's aspirations. "It's a bluff, it's a total fraud," he told French television. "First of all, there are no spare parts - the series was stopped a long time ago. The know-how only exists in two companies: Air France and British Airways.... It's impossible."

The Beginning Of A Dream

The joint French-British project to create a supersonic passenger service began as a dream in the late 1950s. By 1962, they came up with a design and in 1969, The first pilot, Andre Turcat, said on his return to the airport: "Finally the big bird flies, and I can say now that it flies pretty well." The flight took only 27 minutes and was dubbed completely successful.

Final Resting Place

The British city of Bristol wants to display a Concorde when BA retires its fleet of the supersonic passenger jets later this year. Other cities and museums are fighting tooth-and-nail for a display model.

Bitter times recently have led to the economic inviability of the Concorde - even before the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington. Passenger loads started dropping in 2000, when an Air France Concorde crashed shortly after take-off, killing 113 people. Since that fatal crash, there have been several relatively minor technical problems on Concordes that led engineers to worry whether the nearly three-decades-old icon of flight was near the end of its useful life:

November 27, 2002: Part of the tail assembly breaks away from a Concorde en route from London to New York.

November 6, 2002: The cockpit crew aboard an Air France Concorde had to shut down one of the engines after noticing a fault light on the control panel.

November, 2002: A BA Concorde flying from London to New York was forced to turn back because of a warning indicator in the cockpit.

October 30, 2002: A New York-London BA Concorde had to cut its speed to below Mach 1 after the crew got reports of window cracks that threatened to decompress the passenger cabin.

July, 2002: Turnaround after engine power surge

April, 2002: Engine failure causes mid-air 'bang' which sounded to passengers like a car backfiring.

March, 2002: Take-off abandoned after computer glitch

Nov, 2001: Flight aborted when instruments show engine overheats

But for guys like me who were ten years old or so when they first saw the pristine white needle streak across the sky, first heard the tremendously powerful engines roar, it will be the end of an era in aviation, the end of a dream and the realization that, with every passing day, many such dreams fade into dim, if not cherished, memories.

FMI: www.airfrance.com, www.britishairways.com