Concorde and 747, Differing Destinies

1969 was an epoch making year in the world of aviation. As well as the successful flight of Apollo 11 in July (and Apollo 12 in November), it saw the first flights of two remarkable passenger aircraft, the Boeing 747 and Concorde.

Their first flights took place less than a month apart, February 9 for the 747 and March 2 for Concorde.  They represented bold new but strongly divergent directions for commercial aircraft.

The 747 was both the first wide bodied airliner and the first to use the new generation of turbofan engines.  These were much quieter and fuel efficient than earlier powerplants. But the really big thing about the 747 was that it was, well, really big. At a time when a standard international airliner had about 150 seats, the “Jumbo” could seat 450, a massive leap in capacity.  In one of those odd facts, the Wright Brothers original flight in 1903 could have comfortably occurred within the cabin of a 747.

Size didn’t matter for the Anglo French Concorde, it was all about speed.  It carried only about 120 passengers but flew at over twice the speed of sound. It offered the potential to cut flight times to an extraordinary degree.  A 747 takes about eight hours to fly from New York to Paris, but a Concorde could do it in less than four.

Both aircraft represented technical and financial challenges for their builders and airlines of almost Apollo Program proportions.  Boeing effectively bet the company on the success of the aircraft and not only had to build an entire new plant (in the largest building on the planet) but overcome a host of engineering issues.  Among these were designing an undercarriage to hold the 170 tonne behemoth and find a way to hang the four massive engines.

Concorde’s technical challenges were even greater given that it cruised at well over 2,000 kmh at 17 km above the earth. The aircraft was subjected to serious heating and the forces on it as it turned were staggering.  The engineers had to consider some particularly interesting safety questions such as what do you do when you lose an engine, or two, at those vast speeds.

These challenges were reflected in the time it took to prove the aircraft for airline service.  While their difference in first flights was measured in days, their entry into service were years apart. Pan Am were taking paying passengers on the Jumbo in 1970, just a year after the first flight while Concorde didn't become a commercial vehicle for another six years.

In that time the world had changed. This included an oil shock and the rise of the environmental movement. This meant that a quiet, fuel efficient aircraft with low seat per mile costs like the 747 was in a much better commercial position than a thirsty and noisy aircraft (including sonic booms), like Concorde, no matter how fast it flew.

In the end this meant that only 20 Concordes were ever built while over 1,400 747s have come out of that vast Seattle building and still more are on the way.  The 747 spawned a range of other wide bodies including the even more massive Airbus A380. Since the Concorde was withdrawn from service in 2003 there have been no other supersonic transports.

Two remarkable aircraft sharing a birth year with very different histories.