Concorde

On 22 November 1977, today 45 years ago, the first Concorde flights between Paris, London and New York were scheduled. I was 12 years old at that time and was the proud owner of a Concorde plastic scale model.

Even today, a project like Concorde would seem extremely ambitious. On top of the technical challenge, it was also a challenge in international cooperation. It suffered many delays and costed more than ten times the initially estimated cost. It had a lot of safety issues and finally had to be stopped. Surely, Concorde was not a sustainable aircraft.

Why should I spend time on this lost cause? It has to do with human nature and the human condition. Humankind needs to be ambitious. We need to know what our limits are. If you want to know your limits, you can only do so by exceeding them. This is what we have done with Concorde.

Aviation and space are the technical areas where we can push the technical limits most. They are the playgrounds of many dreamers who do. We will do much more useless endeavours. In the long run, however, they are not useless because we are learning. We are not only learning in the technical sense, but we are also learning on the level of international collaboration. Concorde shows what is possible. The same can be said about the International Space Station.

I also refer to my blog: “Gute Technik ist immer schön“ and “ode to aviation”.

Picture: taken 2018 by ©Wim Lahaye in Udvar-Hazy Center Chantilly, VA, USA