Air travel goes subsonic once again. With the Concorde fleet grounded today, an experiment in conquering time and distance draws to a close. The abandoned supersonic aircraft are also a telling saga of how plans for technological innovations can go drastically astray. When the first commercial flights began out of London and Paris in 1976, visions of man’s mastery over terrain and of his capacity to hasten through the day’s itinerary were conjured. You could, for instance, leap over the Atlantic in just three and a half hours, in contrast to a subsonic flying time of seven hours. Commercial carriers foresaw huge profits. In addition to catering to time-strapped passengers, they discerned great opportunity in transporting urgent letters and documents. In their last years, instead, Concorde flights ran with few paying passengers. And instead of the target business traveller, they ended up carting mostly the beautiful set and those eager for the one-time experience of flying at twice the speed of sound.What went wrong? Like the Iridium fiasco, Concorde is a case study in reading the future wrong technologically. Slashing a couple of hours off one’s journeying time is a tempting proposition. But the mismatch between monetary cost and time saved, between the speed acquired and the huge amount of fuel required, remained — just as the cost of casually acquiring a satellite phone seems rather steep compared to the prospect of being connected at all times. In any case, at journey’s beginning and end, the couple of hours rescued were frittered away in ever lengthening security hold-ups at airports and the motor traffic outside. As for sending documents realtime, fax machines and then the Internet connectivity in subsequent years provided far cheaper and more efficient options.But the Concorde story was about more than a jet. Stories about the earsplitting boom when the airplane crashed through the sound barrier overhead echoed with intimations of a better future. The ’70s were the high noon of man’s romance with technology. Supersonic travel was then seen as just a prelude to space travel. Science and technology, it was felt, would cater to every need, affordably and ably. It has been somewhat more complex than that. Today Concordes fly for the last time long after their age is past.
