Concorde 2? We need another to enthuse the youth of today

Historian Eugene Byrne wants us to build another Concorde – or at least do something which would generate as much enthusiasm and dreams

SOMETIME in the 1960s, when I were a nipper, the family piled into the Ford Anglia to go on one of those outings that mean nothing nowadays, but which back then had the epic proportions of a Polar expedition.

We were going to visit relatives in Stroud! As we bumbled along the endless A38 at a breakneck 30 miles per hour, Dad pointed out Filton airfield.

“That’s where they’re building Concorde,” he said. “In that huge big building over there.”

I stared, kneeling on the back seat, straining my eyes out of the back window until the Brab Hangar had disappeared from view, but saw nothing. But it was enough. I had been close to Concorde!

The 1960s were in many ways a very privileged time to be a child. We were going to space when we grew up. More realistically, as we weren’t Americans, there were still the vestiges of a brilliant British aviation industry, we’d have happily settled for being test pilots.

And in all of British aviation, nothing came close to the excitement of Concorde, an airliner which would fly at Mach 2 to the very edge of space.

Some people were against it. Said it was a waste of money, a white elephant. The argument rumbled on for years. But those shrivelled, meanspirited, miserable puritans were wrong. Turbocharged, twice-thespeed-of-sound wrong.

Judged in purely monetary terms, Concorde was a failure. Only 20 were built and of these just 14 entered commercial service with the national airlines of Britain and France.

But bean-counters cannot put a price on inspiration. They can try to put a price on all the technical and intellectual by-products, but it’s in the nature of accountants (honest ones, anyway) that they’ll understate, just to be on the safe side.

The Apollo programme faced equal criticism, but it mobilised vast amounts of money and ingenuity for a project which fired the imaginations of the whole world. The Moon missions gave us giant technological leaps of the kind you usually only get from a world war.

Without Apollo, without the lessons that scientists and engineers learned about everything from materials technology to project management, we might still be waiting for the internet and mobile phones. Big, imaginative projects at the edge of the impossible inspire and ignite imaginations. They make people want to build stuff.

Concorde was our Apollo. It attracted some of the best talent in Britain and France to solve innumerable problems no one had ever faced before. Concorde inspired new generations of engineers. Wide-eyed boys and girls stared in wonder as this beautiful, graceful white aeroplane thundered skywards and soared.

Some of them solemnly swore in that moment that this was what they wanted to do, because nothing else in life came close to the excitement, the sheer glamour of powered flight.

“If it looks right, it’ll fly right,” say aircraft designers, and when the last one came home to Bristol, Concorde looked as right as ever. If you knew nothing about her, you’d assume that she had been designed and built in the last few years with the aid of ultramodern computers. No, she was designed in the 1960s by men in white Bri-nylon shirts using protractors and slide-rules.

Technologically she was closer to the Spitfire that flew by in salute after she landed than she was to the most workaday Ryanair or EasyJet plane leaving Bristol Airport that morning. Concorde, from her first flight to her very last, was a white-hot Space Age dream that punched a hole in the sky.

A few years ago, we went on a family trip to Bordeaux, Bristol’s French twin city. Beautiful place, thoroughly recommend it. We were walking along by the river and I noticed this big barge with a curious-looking cargo. I realised it was an A380 Airbus wing, being taken up the river to Toulouse.

“Look!” I said excitedly to my tenyear-old son while fumbling for the camera. “Look!”

I was thinking of the time when I was his age, the time I saw the shed where Concorde was being made. “Look! A piece of an aeroplane that’s partly made in Bristol! Isn’t that brilliant!”

“Meh!” he shrugged.

Airbuses are important. They provide a lot of skilled, well-paid jobs in Bristol, and we love them. They are works of hard-won technological competence, but they do not cause young minds to soar. They are merely, as the name suggests, buses. Flying charabancs.

Maybe artificial intelligence will solve all our problems. Maybe it’ll usher in a new age of leisure, though we have heard this many times before. Ask your parents and grandparents about “silicon chips” and, before that “automation” and “the white heat of technology” et cetera all the way back to Hargreaves’ Spinning Jenny.

But if we want to fire up a new generation to reach for the stars; if we want to create a spirit of optimism; if we want to give our kids hope for a future that’s not some degraded science fiction dystopia, we need big bold projects to enthuse them. We need another Concorde.