|
The Concorde fleet operated for over a quarter century, yet just 14
of the awe-inspiring supersonic passenger jets ever flew
commercially. When compared to the more than 6,500 Boeing 737s
operating around the world today, it is strikingly clear how
relatively few people shared the rare privilege of taking a trip on
a Concorde before her service ended in 2003. Nearly everyone who
did, however, remembers Concorde fondly, perhaps no one more so than
Captain Brian Calvert. Involved with Concorde since the 1960s,
Calvert piloted it for eight years in the 1970s and 1980s, and he
wrote the book on it: Flying Concorde (Motorbooks
International, 2002). Below, Calvert reminisces about the airplane
he loved more than any other.
A thing of beauty
NOVA: What was so special about Concorde that made people
proud of it?
Calvert: It was beautiful, and it was a wonderful piece of
engineering. It embodied all the minute intricacies of watchmaking
or clock making, but at a shipbuilding scale. It expanded and
contracted. It flexed like a fly-fishing rod. It was extraordinary.
It flew at Mach 2. But the principal thing was its beauty.
NOVA: What about your pride in the plane as a pilot?
Calvert: Flying Concorde involved a mixture of emotions. As
an airplane it just felt right. You got an exhilarating feeling,
which was very exciting. You almost wanted to be flying it and
looking at it from the outside at the same time because you felt so
grand in it. But it just had something special and ineffable about
it, whether it was the power, the design, whatever. It was just
terrific fun.
I remember the first time I ever saw that plane. It was a very cold
day and very clear. I was sitting in a grandstand opposite the
entrance to the closed hangar where the plane was housed. There was
a French military band out front and it began to toot away. Then the
hangar doors started to open and I saw this unbelievably beautiful
shape emerge, tugged slowly by a vehicle in front. A pilot came out
and pulled on a special pair of white gloves and climbed into the
cockpit. There was no doubting at that moment that any pilot in the
world would have wanted to fly Concorde and would have been
exceedingly proud to do so.
NOVA: What did you feel the very first time you flew
Concorde?
Calvert: I can remember it very clearly. It was off the east
coast of Malaysia in the late 1960s, and we had just begun doing
some trials to see why the airplane got very agitated when you
operated it on a particular kind of runway. If you tried to take off
on the runway at the Singapore airport as it was at the time, the
tarmac had a kind of wavy shape to it, and as the airplane
accelerated it actually flapped about in the air. By the time it got
to take-off speed this flapping motion was getting to be rather bad
news. So they filled the airplane up with fuel and had the test
pilots check it out. I sat and watched them. During one of these
flights when we were out over the sea someone said, "Well, I suppose
you'd better go in and have a go." Just like that. Just off the
cuff, casual. So I did. In the cockpit I immediately began
discovering some of the plane's odder qualities.
NOVA: For example?
Calvert: Well, the pilot before me didn't leave me with quite
enough power on, so I had to put power on to keep the speed up. This
was one of Concorde's quirks. You had to put rather more power on to
start with so as to buoy it up, because it was operating on what's
called the back side of the drag, which would be a phrase understood
only by private pilots but probably not by anyone else. What this
essentially boils down to is that you had to be very careful not to
let the speed get too slow, otherwise you had to do rather drastic
things to get it back again—a scenario that's not fun to think
about. This was the tenuous position I found myself in within my
first few minutes flying the aircraft. It was always an adventure
with Concorde.
“You’re traveling at 1,300 miles an hour and doing it
all with two fingers.”
I also remember just getting into the cockpit and the feeling of
being in there. Sitting down in the seat and looking out to the
front, the nose and the visor were up at the time. There was a
rather odd sort of greenhouse effect in the cockpit. It seemed as if
you were looking out from inside a terrarium, and it was somewhat
disorienting at first. It's hard to describe.
Smooth as silk
NOVA: Describe the feeling of liftoff from the perspective of
the cockpit.
Calvert: You began to get the flavor on taxi out because as a
pilot you were sitting 100 feet ahead or so of the main wheels. It
had this odd tendency to bounce like a bobbing head as you were
going out. Once you were lined up on the runway you put all the
re-heats on, which gave extra power, you opened up the throttles,
and away you went. There was a huge push from the back, and there
was this incredible, rather rhythmic vibration. As you went, the
non-flying pilot called out the accelerating speeds. At the
appropriate moment you raised the nose. You raised it rather a long
way, up to 21 degrees or thereabout. And then you were off.
Incredible.
NOVA: And once you were airborne what was it like to operate?
Calvert: It was a lovely thing to fly. It was very easy to
fly both at low speed and high speed. At high speeds it was the most
impressive because at Mach 2, the airplane was seemingly stationary,
as if it was flying in a block of ice, and the curvature of the
Earth was clearly visible. If you looked down at the clouds below
you could see them turning as you went over them. If you disengaged
the autopilot you could actually fly the airplane with two
fingers—it was as easy as that. When you realized you were
traveling at 1,300 miles an hour and doing it all with two fingers,
it was pretty extraordinary.
NOVA: What did a passenger feel on takeoff?
Calvert: Even on the smoothest runway Concorde vibrated a lot
on takeoff. If you sat in the way back of the cabin while the plane
was taking off you could see that the entire 150-foot cabin was
whipping up and down in the fishing-rod motion I described. The
passengers didn't really notice this, but it did somewhat feel like
you were riding a horse as it was taking off. After that, it was
smooth as silk. But it was that first moment when it really flexed
that was such a unique experience because no other aircraft did
that. The cause of it was the long, thin fuselage. To fly supersonic
you have to minimize the diameter of the object you're trying to
push through the atmosphere. This thinness contributed to the
fly-rod phenomenon.
NOVA: What were your favorite features of Concorde?
Calvert: The wing shape was the best part for me. From any
angle you looked the wings you saw a different airplane, as if it
was a modern art sculpture. And if you looked at the back end of
Concorde there was another completely different picture. It appeared
that there was no connection between all those different
"airplanes," yet they all fit together to make this extremely
impressive symbol of speed. And nobody's done it any better than
that. Military aircraft couldn't match it, and they certainly
couldn't do it while serving caviar and canapés to 100
passengers, that's for sure.
NOVA: What about its bizarre nose? Explain to people who
might not understand why it had that oddly shaped nose.
Calvert: Well, first of all, it had a long nose because it
needed to be reduced to its sharpest possible point in order to fly
supersonically. It was from those points at the end of the nose that
sonic booms radiated. In terms of the droop action of the nose,
that's quite simple to explain. As a pilot, if you put your head in
there and looked forward when the nose was up you couldn't see
enough to land properly. In order to land, you had to get rid of
that nose, so down it went. [To learn more about the plane's unique
features, see
Anatomy of Concorde.]
A shared experience
NOVA: Looking back over the years you were a pilot, who were
the famous people and celebrities and so on that you flew?
Calvert: Princess Margaret, Henry Kissinger, and so many
others I can't even think of how to list them.
NOVA: Were there any regulars that you remember?
Calvert: Oh yes, the famous British talk show host Sir David
Frost. He used to appear, go straight to his seat, which was always
the same, the second one back on the right-hand side. He'd cover
himself up with a blanket and disappear into sleep. He would wake up
on approach into Kennedy Airport in New York. I think during one
period he was doing that once a week, which must have been fairly
shattering on his system. But it goes to show how Concorde was such
a help to people with certain careers and lifestyles, because if
you're trying to keep that kind of schedule there's no way you could
do it without Concorde. You need something that goes at high speed,
and three and a half hours each way hardly affects you really. He
obviously made great use of it.
NOVA: Did you speak to your passengers much?
Calvert: We all spoke to our passengers quite a lot because
it was clear they were very interested in the aircraft. One of our
pilots, in fact, was a bit of a specialist in educating the
passengers. By the time they got off the plane they knew precisely
how many rivets there were on the fuselage and all sorts of other
esoteric pieces of information like that.
On one occasion I was route checking, as it's called; in other words
I was observing the flight, walking through the cabin to make sure
the crew was doing the right sorts of things. Shortly after we got
up to Mach 2, I went back to use the men's room from the cockpit. As
I went in the captain started off on his little speech on all the
details of the airplane and so on. When I eventually came out of the
men's room I noticed that he had abruptly stopped talking. All the
people reading their Financial Times and
London Times and New York Times and so on had all
looked up at me with these strange expressions. They thought I was
the one who had been talking to them over the speaker, and that I
had been doing so from my perch in the toilet.
“It’s the end of a great era in aviation.”
The passengers' actions on Concorde in general were quite amusing in
a way because everybody wanted it to be thought that he or she was a
regular Concorde traveler. In other words it didn't do to wander
about the plane with your mouth open saying "Ooooh" and "Ahhhh."
That would prove that you weren't a regular passenger, and it would
show a certain amount of weakness to be impressed if your regular
lifestyle was equally polished. Sometimes people exaggerated this
detached approach. They opened their very expensive briefcase to get
the paper out and start reading as soon as they sat down and would
ostensibly be too absorbed to even notice this amazing aircraft they
were occupying. But I would always notice their heads popping up and
looking around, because you couldn't help yourself. And every
passenger wanted to take in what was going on up on the flight deck.
That was fascinating to them. We all blissfully left the flight deck
doors open because that's the way the passengers liked it.
End of an era
NOVA: Can you recall how you felt when you heard about the
crash in France?
Calvert: I remember I felt about all the emotions that you
can think of really. Sadness mostly. I had always realized that
Concorde's existence depended on immaculate results. And an
immaculate result, as far as I'm concerned, means no loss of life
during the aircraft's period of use. I was dreadfully sorry and sad
that that happened. Of course, it was more terrible for the people
who were the relatives and friends and loved ones of the passengers
and crew.
NOVA: What's your feeling about it having ended now?
Calvert: I'm very sad about it, and I think everybody that
was involved with the aircraft feels similarly sad. It's the end of
a great era in aviation. Everybody I talk to doesn't see why
Concorde flights shouldn't have gone on. Theoretically, the airplane
was designed for 24,000 cycles. That's 24,000 takeoffs and landings
and supersonic flights. It did about 8,000. So in theory the
airplane could have gone on for another 50 years. In reality,
though, the supply of spare parts and the maintenance of the
airplane cost a lot and are quite difficult because all the
components are special one-offs; nothing like them exists. And the
technology was aging. But the real deciding factor was not so much
the technology of the airplane but its commercial viability. When it
began losing money, especially after 9/11, it had to stop. Everyone
involved knew this from the beginning—that if it couldn't turn
a profit it had to stop.
NOVA: Do you think we'll ever see another commercial
supersonic aircraft?
Calvert: Possibly, but I wouldn't put any money on it. It is
arguable that there have been several times in the history of
aviation, which has only just come up to 100 years recently, that
the design of an aircraft pursues a certain goal and once enough
energy and money and effort has been put into that goal, then there
are still major hurdles to get over to change anything fundamental
in the total architecture of our commercial airplane options. But
we'll see. [To read more about the possibilities for supersonic
commercial aircraft in the future, see
Shock Treatment.]
NOVA: Do you think Concorde was a he or a she?
Calvert: She.
NOVA: And you loved her?
Calvert: Isn't that obvious? Yes, she was a fine thing.
|
