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Concorde: Sonic Boom and Bust | Dr. Keith McLoughlin On The History and Future of Supersonic Passenger Flight | 5
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- [00:00]
Lindsey Graham
Want to get more from business movers? Subscribe to Wondery plus for early access to new episodes, ad free listening and exclusive content you can't find anywhere else. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. It's November 2016 inside a hangar in Denver, Colorado. Blake Scholl gazes up at a 70 foot model of an aircraft. Blake is the 35 year old CEO of Boom Supersonic, a company he founded two years ago. As a pilot and aviation enthusiast, he's long dreamed of bringing back high speed air travel, and that goal seems finally within reach. Today, he's unveiling the Boom XB1, a demonstration prototype for the company's first supersonic jet. Beside him is a potential investor who's looking at the plane with an unreadable expression. Yeah, this is our single seat prototype, baby Boom. We call it the Boom Overture. Will be three times the size and I can't tell you how excited I am. You are one of the first people in the world to see it. The potential investor walks slowly around the prototype, taking it in from all angles. Well, it's a dead ringer for Concorde. Drooped nose, swept back wings. Well, we took everything that worked about that design and left behind everything that didn't. You know, growing up, I thought Concorde was just the coolest thing in the world. I was only 21 when they killed it. I was so sad realizing I'd never get to fly on it. That why you started Boom Supersonic? Well, I mean, at first I thought someone else had to be working on it. Supersonic air travel wasn't just going to disappear. Right. But I waited and waited and nothing happened. I realized it was up to me. Well, you and Richard Branson. Blake Smiles, the British entrepreneur behind Virgin Atlantic has been a key backer of this project. Oh, yeah. Richard's been an aviation pioneer for as long as I've been alive, and we're thrilled to have his support. What's the timeline? We plan to have the full size prototype ready to test by the end of next year. And from there, commercial flights could begin before the end of the decade. We really believe that this is the dawn of a new era and we sure like you to be a part of it. I don't know, Blake. Flying at Mach 2, that sounds great, you know, but Concorde was a flop. They teach it as a cautionary tale in business school. Well, it only failed because it was too expensive to fly. But thanks to lighter materials and other developments and technology, we're now able to make a much more nimble product. And we can bring the ticket prices down too. Cut a lot of the bells and whistles that Concorde had. You know, people don't need Michelin Star dining. The speed is the usb. Blake brings out an iPad showing mockups of the aircraft's interior and then continues talking. You see how there's just two rows of single seats on either side of the aisle. Every passenger gets a view of the curvature of the earth from 60,000ft that way. And there are only 55 seats on every flight. So we can actually film them. Blake can see that the investor is intrigued. I mean, think about it. You wake up in New York, jump on a flight to London, and you're there in time for a late lunch. You do an afternoon of meetings, a dinner, some drinks, hop on a flight at 9, and you're back in New York in time to tuck your kids into bed. I mean, I want to live in that world. Don't you? Blake Scholl's enthusiasm was infectious. By the end of the year, he had secured another round of funding, and though he knew there was a lot of development work still to be done, he believed his team could pull it off. He confidently announced that commercial flights would begin in 2023. But just like Concorde, the Boom supersonic project soon hit unexpected turbulence. Richard Branson quietly let his partnership agreement lapse and Rolls Royce withdrew from a deal to build the aircraft's engines. Boom was forced to delay its rollout, and it seemed that for a while longer, supersonic air travel would remain just a dream. Apple Card is the perfect card for your holiday shopping. When you use Apple Card on your iPhone, you'll earn up to 3% daily cash back on every purchase, including products at Apple like a new iPhone 16 or or Apple Watch Ultra. Apply now in the Wallet app on your iPhone subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch terms and more at applecard.com Business Movers is sponsored by Grammarly. If you're anything like me, and I bet you are, then you like to find the best option. Could be Italian restaurants, car insurance, vacation spots, a lot of things. But sometimes the best option is not at all obvious. Like, have you used any AI tools for work recently? Well, Grammarly has over 15 years of experience in secure, private, responsible enterprise grade AI and is trusted by teams at one third of the Fortune 500. Their enterprise grade security measures protect your organization's data and keep your private information private. And it's designed to fit your unique professional needs working seamlessly with the apps you use every day. So for the best AI option, join 70,000 teams and 30 million people who trust Grammarly to work faster and hit their goals while keeping their data Secure. Go to Grammarly.comenterprise to learn more. Grammarly Enterprise Ready AI from Wondere I'm Lindsey Graham and this is Business movers the past 20 years have seen remarkable advances in aviation technology. There have been aerodynamic breakthroughs, more fuel efficient engines have been developed, and the use of lightweight composite materials means airframes can be lighter and stronger than ever before. Despite a short term dip during the COVID 19 pandemic, global air traffic continues to grow and is expected to double by 2040. But despite these technological leaps and the increasingly interconnected nature of the world, supersonic commercial jets are yet to return to the skies. Concorde last flew in 2003, but is still without a successor. It is not for lack of trying. Several companies are working on supersonic passenger planes, with Colorado based Boom Supersonic leading the pack. But even that program's future is uncertain. Its rollout has been delayed as partners dropped out and questions have been raised about its commercial liability. Still, in March 2024, the company completed a successful test flight of its XB1 baby boom prototype. This led CEO Blake Scholl to insist that its supersonic passenger plane was back on course and would be in service by the year 2030. A lot has changed since the days of Concorde, but also not so much. A modern supersonic passenger plane will face many of the same problems as Concorde did. There may be plenty of people who would jump at the chance to cut their transatlantic flight time in half, but whether enough of them are willing to pay for it is another question entirely. Here with me to talk about the long shadow of Concorde and why it still doesn't have a successor is Dr. Keith McLaughlin, a lecturer at the University of Bristol specializing in the history of politics, industry and technology. Dr. Keith McLaughlin, thank you for speaking with me today on Business Movers.
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Dr. Keith McLaughlin
Thank you very much for having me.
- [07:44]
Lindsey Graham
So first I'm interested. Where does your interest in aviation and Concorde specifically come from?
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Dr. Keith McLaughlin
I have always been interested in planes and aircraft, I think in part because I didn't really fly very much as a child. So they've always had a real kind of novelty value for me. Went to England when I was eight for the first time and the next time I was in an aircraft was going to JFK. And that was when I was 20. So a lot of time had passed before I was Ever in an aircraft. So they always had a real novelty value to me as a younger person. I remember Concorde quite vividly in the 90s. It was really a thing. It was very distinctive. And I remember very, very clearly the day that it had that terrible crash in July 2000. I know where I was at the time. And even then, it just felt very distinctive. It was Concord, and I was only 12. And even then I realized, this is different. This feels different. So I guess I planted a sort of a seed really subconsciously in my mind. Then I went on. I did a history major. I'm a historian by profession, and I've become to focus more and more on the history of technology. I did my PhD on military industry in Britain, and I've come to focus again on Concord. I've kind of come back to it, I guess, the last few years, because I realized that there's a lot left to learn about Concorde, and there's a lot of public interest in it, especially in the city that I'm currently speaking to you from, Bristol in the west of England. That was where Concord was built, partly here. And in Toulouse in France, there's a Concord museum here, as there is Concord museums in America as well. And it means a lot to people. It means a lot in terms of their identity, their culture, their sense of heritage. So I'm coming back to it. I'm doing kind of a social history of the aircraft and people's relationship with the aircraft, which I think is very, very distinctive.
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Lindsey Graham
It sounds like from the timeline, though, that you actually were not able personally to ever experience a Concorde flight yourself.
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Dr. Keith McLaughlin
No, that would have been interesting. That would have been tremendous. Last flight in 2003, 21 years ago. And the people who speak about it, the people who flew on it, I mean, they speak about what an incredible experience it must have been, really.
- [10:13]
Lindsey Graham
So looking back at the beginning of Concorde's story In the late 1950s, what was the general vision of the future of aviation then? How did people think that a supersonic passenger jet would fit into mass travel?
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Dr. Keith McLaughlin
It's a remarkable trajectory of technology. If you look at the 1950s, 10 years after the Second World War, 10 years after the Spitfire, which was a much, much smaller aircraft, you have these incredible aircraft that can fly very, very far distances at essentially supersonic speed, or just shy of supersonic speed. In the space of 10, 15 years, you go from not having a jet engine at all to having aircraft that are powered with multiple jet engines, really kind of punching through the sky. And it Makes sense, looking back, that planners and governments and engineers and business owners would have prioritized speed. It made sense. So getting somewhere faster than you did before is all part of the linear progress of technology. We went from horse drawn carriages, trains, aircraft, and then just made sense to have faster aircraft. And supersonic passenger jet would fit very much into that. The technology was partly developed through military technology. There is in the 1950s, a very close relationship in the west and indeed in the Soviet Union, between military technology and civil aviation. And essentially the military technology often comes first. And once they realize they have a very, very powerful engine, it made sense to go, okay, well, how do we commercialize this? How do we turn this into an actual business entity? Well, let's just repurpose this technology and make it into civil aviation. So when you look back at the history, I think one of the things you need to be mindful of is when we're judging the decisions that are made around technology and the decisions that people kind of do, the prioritized speed were very, very well intentioned because it made sense to just make faster and faster machines. So supersonic aviation fitted into that.
- [12:22]
Lindsey Graham
So I think probably it is true that a concern for speed made a lot of sense in this time. But this was a brand new era for the world only 15 years after the World War. And in Britain, quite a few changes are happening. What was the state of the British aviation industry at the time? Was it up to a project of this size and magnitude?
- [12:41]
Dr. Keith McLaughlin
Well, in a way it was in the sense of it was very large. It was large in relative terms. The first thing to keep in mind is that after the war, Britain understood that it didn't have the industrial muscle as the United States, the Soviet Union. But what people did feel was that Britain had a technological lead and it needed to make good that lead. So the jet engine was partly developed or harnessed in Britain during the war. And they wanted to use that technology to gain an advantage really over the Americans and over the Russians as well. So what you had coming out of the other side of the war is you had a very large, but very kind of fragmented aircraft industry. A lot of smaller firms that individually couldn't really compete with the new kind of Cold War order. And so the decision was taken in the late 50s to create a new large state owned corporation, British Aircraft Corporation, that was kind of hoovered up all the smaller firms that had been built during the war for them to basically coalesce into a much larger entity that could rival the Boeings of the world. That was the idea. But ultimately you asked the question about whether it was up to the project. Britain realized that it was quite spread quite thin. I think it's an important point to make that the state of civil aviation at the time, Britain felt that it could actually dominate the world market in civil subsonic aviation, too. There's a number of really quite impressive aircraft that you could name out. The Bristol Brabazon, which 75 years old this month, the Bristol Britannia, Other aircraft like that, the Comet, that were really impressive, long to medium range subsonic passenger aircraft, but for lots of different reasons, they were not commercially viable. There was numerous technical difficulties, there were crashes. In the case of the Comet, you had structural difficulties as well. You had all kinds of different issues with regards to just the actual early embryonic technology. Again, it's important to make the point that it's only a decade after the war. It's really quite soon in relative terms. So by the late 1950s, British planners, the British state realizes we need to rationalize, we need to concentrate our efforts in particular areas that we can actually have a genuine global lead, make the Americans think hard about what they're doing. And the way it was going to do that was by exports. The idea with all of these aircraft was actually to develop a really kind of vibrant export market, that Britain would be the producer and that even the Americans and continental Europeans and further abroad would buy aircraft from Britain. And that certainly did happen, perhaps not at the scale that they had hoped for initially. So it's about kind of what we can recall, techno nationalism, that these aircraft. It's not just about the aircraft. That's the important thing to keep in mind. The aircraft represents broader political objectives. That is a technological lead in the new cold war. That was Britain's idea, and that's where it was in the late 1950s.
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Lindsey Graham
This notion is perhaps why Concorde has sometimes been referred to as Britain and France's Apollo program. Can you give us a sense of just how technologically advanced the plane was? What kind of innovations did Concorde's designers have to come up with to take a passenger jet supersonic?
- [16:17]
Dr. Keith McLaughlin
Yeah. So in terms of speed, Britain had a nuclear bomber force. The Avro Vulcan was part of it. And that was powered by an Olympus engine. An Olympus engine allowed it to go at very, very fast speeds. And it was that engine that was used in a modified form on the Concorde itself. And one of the big technological challenges was when Concorde went to supersonic flight, and indeed, twice supersonic. Mach 2.02 is one of its fastest speeds, the air was too fast for the engine to actually digest. So they had to find a way of slowing that air down. That was done essentially on the shop floor. They found a way of, kind of a very novel way of slowing the air down at that speed. This is kind of one of the many technological challenges that faced. You know, it's important to also bear in mind that the Soviet Union was also developing its own supersonic passenger aircraft, the Chupolev, also referred to as the Concordsky by some people. And there's an interesting story that at the Paris air show in the early 1970s, the Russians were there, and they were talking with the kind of high end British diplomats about their air intakes. And the Russians said, how are your air intakes? And the British said, they're fine, thank you. And the Russians said, so you have no problems with your intakes? And the British said, no, we're okay. And the Russians just walked out. At which point the British deduced the Russians were having problems with their air intakes. So it was that type of thing that the modifications that are required for a supersonic aircraft to actually fly is different to a subsonic aircraft. Supersonic flight, the actual metal expands quite significantly more than you'd expect on a subsonic aircraft. That had to be accommodated for as well the temperatures, Very, very high temperatures, Very, very specific paint was required. So all of those things were required to actually fly supersonically. But you asked the question about Apollo, which I think is important with regards to the role of the state. And when we look at Concorde in terms of its development, the state was very, very important, if not crucial. And this was not something that was essentially done by kind of whimsical, kind of venture capitalists. It was done very much, as I said before, with the state kind of in a very, very central role. It is in many respects, a political aircraft, a political emblem. And without that kind of state involvement, it is difficult to see how concorde as we know it as an aircraft would have taken shape and how it would have survived and developed.
- [18:55]
Lindsey Graham
I'm interested to know the necessity of the French state's cooperation and participation in this, because it seems to be, in this conversation, a port of large British military technology. Over to the concord, what were the challenges that required France's involvement?
- [19:13]
Dr. Keith McLaughlin
Well, the most obvious challenge that everybody would realize at the start was linguistic, of course, you have people speaking different languages. British engineers tended to use imperial measurement, Whereas the French tended to use metric measurement. So it really is kind of mind boggling. That they actually managed to do anything productive at all. But when you read through some of the memoirs of British engineers and the meetings they have with the French, there seems to be kind of a common language. And the common language is engineering and actually just wanting this aircraft to fly. And there's kind of remarkable, kind of bottom and cooperation. Concorde itself, of course, means agreement, so agreement between both Britain and France, so the wartime allies. So for all the kind of cultural and linguistic differences, they generally got on quite well. I mean, not all the time. Of course, there was creative tensions. But from the French perspective, you're looking at a country that's come out of empire like Britain and France had at stake in this Concorde project. It had its own quite large aircraft industry. Again, coming out of the war, it had a subsonic aircraft called the Caravelle, and it looked to create a thing called the Super Caravel, which was a supersonic version of it. But both Britain and France realized that they would simply just be duplicating the same technology. It would be incredibly costly, that it just made sense for France and Britain to kind of join forces on this aircraft. But remarkably, from a French perspective, it was a very political aircraft as well. So when Charles de Gaulle comes back in as president for the fifth Republic, he is very much in favor of Concorde because he likes the way it's going to rival the American market. Even French communists like Concord because of the way that they thought it was kind of something that was challenging American capitalism. So it's remarkable with this broad range of different kind of political views right and left, many people in France get on board with Concorde and see it as a national emblem. And the way in which it's discussed in both countries in kind of national terms is very interesting in that respect.
- [21:25]
Lindsey Graham
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- [23:50]
Dr. Keith McLaughlin
Well, Bristol had already a pre developed aircraft presence. So Bristol had been making aircraft since before the first World War. It was really kind of a contemporary of the Wright brothers. It was around that era it made aircraft through the first World War and significantly in the Second World War as well. So many families and communities had come to rely on aircraft production and that built very have specific technical skills. These were technicians that were often trained on the factory floor. So we created Bristol had a very specific identity that was closely linked to aircraft coming into the 1940s, into the 1950s. So at the peak of its development, Concorde would have employed around over 20,000 people specifically in Bristol, both in the factory and in the supporting kind of network. But I really supported many people more in terms of the community for all of those workers. So it had a kind of a dependence, a dependence grew on this particular project locally in Bristol. What's more, Bristol had its own Member of Parliament who was the Minister for Technology, who was a great enthusiastic cheerleader Of Concord, Tony bem, a left wing socialist minister who you wouldn't necessarily always associate with a very kind of nationalistic project, he really safeguarded concord through many, many difficult phases. So Bristol became very kind of closely aligned with concord. You had a lot of French workers who came to stay over. You had a whole kind of hospitality situation. You had a kind of cultural exchange going on as well. You had a broader infrastructure of flying parts over and back across the channel. So it was a very, very complicated endeavor. It was, in terms of its scale, kind of the Apollo program and perhaps then also kind of like nuclear submarine programs. It really was up there in terms of its vastness, in terms of its scale.
- [25:56]
Lindsey Graham
Yeah. I'm glad you brought up the employment numbers, Because I just looked up Bristol's population today, and the greater urban area is about 700,000, which means that 20,000 people employed directly, and this is decades and decades ago, would be close to 3% of the entire area. It makes a lot of sense that Tony Ben would be interested in this project for his constituents.
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Dr. Keith McLaughlin
Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you look at things like military industrial complexes or how businesses are awarded contracts, Politicians are never too far away. Tony Ben wasn't necessarily responsible for concord being created at Bristol. Bristol was already very, very ready for a project of that size that had the infrastructure coming from the 1950s and its civil aviation program. But on several occasions, Concord was very, very close to being canceled. Once in 1964 and very closely again in 1974 and in 1974. In the research I've been doing the last few months, Ben was instrumental in keeping concorde alive. And I think if it wasn't for his own intervention, and there's some kind of force of personality, I think there's a very good chance that the aircraft would have been canceled. The government, the British government wanted to cancel it on cost grounds. And they said, let's see, let's keep our cool, call the French bluff. But Ben said, we've invested so much money into this project, let's see it through. And that's how it turned out in the end.
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Lindsey Graham
I suppose that prompts a larger question. In your view, could concorde have been developed without government intervention?
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Dr. Keith McLaughlin
I think it's difficult to see how it would have been in that type of way, that type of scale. I think that the individual businesses involved had a lot of technological know how at the Bristol company in particular. But the government subsidized the research and development so heavily to the point where it kept on subsidizing it Even when it was told by a lot of people, you're never going to get that money back. So the British government never recouped its R and D costs, and in many respects didn't even really recoup much of its operating costs either. So that's not really something you would expect to see in a kind of a commercial free market environment. And in that sense, it's very much a product of its time. The British state, as was the French state, and indeed even the American state in the 1960s, was very large, very sprawling, very involved in technology. And that was very much the culture of we shall go to the moon with Kennedy or the white heat with Harold Wilson over in Britain. The state saw itself as being essentially the purveyor of technology. It was the authority, it was the financier in many respects as well. So it is difficult to see how Concord as we know it would have developed had it not been for very, very heavy state assistance intervention.
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Lindsey Graham
I'm struck by a difference, though, between, for instance, the Apollo program and the Concorde project. The going to the moon was never going to be available to the average American for space leisure travel. It was always a political project. It was always a project of pride. Concorde was, too, but nominally it was for commercial purposes. Why do they feel different, I guess, is the question. And were they really?
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Dr. Keith McLaughlin
One of the things I would suggest people look at is, I'm going to plug Wikipedia here. It's a great page on Concord. But what Wikipedia has done is actually collated all the orders that Concorde received and the airlines who kind of consented to those orders. Now, a lot of those agreements were. They weren't very binding. But I'm just looking at the airlines. Pan Am, we're going for six. Air France, six. American Airlines, four. Middle East, Qantas, we're going for six. Lufthansa went for three, and so on. And there's more than that as well. It felt like a commercial venture at the start. So this is the early 1960s. So just after the agreement between France and Britain in 1962, a lot of international airlines agree, perhaps tentatively, to this aircraft. Just basically off the plans. Okay, we'll buy this if it works out. Coincidentally, they all cancel. They all cancel. And actually they all cancel at pretty much the exact same time, which is the 1973 oil crisis, the economic crisis. But I think why this feels different. Concorde began life, as you say, as a commercial venture. And it was anticipated among at least the more optimistic cheerleaders of Concorde, that It would be a sellable, exportable aircraft. And it goes back to the broader mindset that Britain was going to use his technological know how to get ahead of the Americans. Because, of course, at the same time, Boeing is trying to develop an SST as well, which Kennedy was a big advocate of, but his very influential defense secretary, Robert McNamara, was vehemently opposed to. And that was having problems of its own. And as long as it was having problems of its own, Britain and France felt we can dominate this market. We can be the key figure in the supersonic aviation market. And that feeling persists up until the mid to late 1960s, when doubts start to be entertained as to the future of supersonic transport. But its initial ambition was in many respects, very, very commercial. Now, in saying that, we do need to keep an eye on the politicians, they are very much involved in this. And a bit like the Apollo program, which is obviously an ostensibly political ambition of beating the Soviet Union to the moon first. The Concorde project was signed between Britain and France at a very, very sensitive time for both countries. Britain was looking to join what was then called the common market, what we now call the European Union. And in doing so, it needed to keep France onside. France was a key player in Europe. It was kind of the largest continental, post war power up until the 1960s. So there's politics everywhere the whole way through this story. There is a commercial dimension, but it feels as though the commercial dimension played a somewhat secondary role behind the politics at certain points. There was an initial enthusiasm for the commercial viability of the project. As I said, it made sense that speed would win out, but in many respects, it was ultimately a very political project.
- [32:32]
Lindsey Graham
So if Concorde began with aspirations for commercial success, then the project in midlife clearly became political. But then the Concorde program became a very private initiative. Can you describe to us the privatization of British Airways and its impact on Concorde?
- [32:51]
Dr. Keith McLaughlin
There's a real sea change in the 1970s, and you can really pinpoint it probably to the oil crisis of 1973. I mean, it comes before that in a way, but what happens in the 1970s is it was described once as the engineer was replaced by the accountant, that the kind of blank check approach to funding these large technological projects was no longer really palatable. It wasn't palatable in Britain. It wasn't really palatable in the United States either. Increasingly, market forces began to play a role. So it was about privatization and privatization of British Airways to alleviate the burden on the taxpayer. At this point, you go Back to the mid-1970s, Britain's economy is in a very, very bad place. And privatization has to make sense in that context. So it was sort of, by the mid-1970s, it was a very different country, very different world, really, from the kind of heady optimism of the early 1960s when these projects were, were first kind of created. And so the point about becoming privatized was the Concorde was essentially sold to what was referred to as two captive airliners, Air France and British Airways, at a greatly reduced price. The state absorbed pretty much all of the loss, and British Airways was left with the Concorde. British Airways itself was very skeptical of it because it predicted that it would run at an operating loss. And indeed, it did run at an operating loss for a long time until the change really happened. When Concorde was chartered, as in groups, kind of private groups, could take it out and charter it themselves and go to different routes around the world. So that kind of privatization is really interesting because you have an aircraft that its origin is very much very statist, very government centric, essentially semisocialist. And by the 70s, 80s and onwards, it becomes very glitzy. It's about glamour, it's about really high end elite market. That kind of celebrity dimension is a very important part of Concorde as well. It traverses both eras. It begins in one and it kind of ends in the other. And that's what's so interesting about the.
- [35:07]
Lindsey Graham
Aircraft in this period. We have the newly privatized British Airways, who takes on Concorde and turns it around as an operational profit center. Air France was not able to do that. Why?
- [35:21]
Dr. Keith McLaughlin
It's a question that probably deserves more research in terms of why Air France wasn't able to turn it around. From the British perspective, the chartering the aircraft, just giving it essentially more air miles was a key point. And there was a lot of public enthusiasm. And it goes back to the point of this was an aircraft that was initially built for exports, but very, very few people ever got a chance to fly on it. And in fact, most of the people, in fact, the vast majority of the people who built it in Bristol never got a chance to fly on it. I mean, some of those people actually never flew on an airplane at all. And so when it was chartered from the 70s, 80s onwards, there was huge kind of public enthusiasm for taking it to places like Fion, went to Egypt, went to the Caribbean, essentially anywhere where it was allowed to go. Not over land routes, but over water routes. It went to the north pole, it went to Lapland over Christmas time. It became Essentially this very holiday centric thing. It was part of popular entertainment. And so the chartering of Concord, I think, was a real kind of game changer because of course it had to occupy a specific market. So it occupied both the recreational market but also the high end business market as well. And I guess in terms of finance, between the two financial centers of London and New York, Concorde played a very, very important role in that sense as well. Again, if we're trying to empathize with Concord, it existed in the pre Internet age. This was the time when commerce was done, you know, before companies were trying to reduce their overheads by, you know, having meetings and agreements online or remotely. It was a very, very different kind of corporate culture. It was a culture where being there really mattered and was essentially vital. And so Concord played an important role in that. The idea of, you know, flying businessmen from London to New York and being back pretty much in the same day was very attractive to companies that had a lot of money to spend. So the combination of Britain's growth as a financial district in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher's governance, combined with the kind of the recreational dimension, which allowed more people, people who were not of that class, not of the kind of the commercial class, people essentially who had saved up a lot of money, done a lot of savings, more middle class and lower middle class people to fly on the aircraft. A combination of both of those things is the reason why British Airways was able to essentially turn it around.
- [38:12]
Lindsey Graham
Klaviyo powers smarter digital relationships for more than 151,000 successful brands, including Headley and Bennett, Fishwife and Dagny Dover. Klaviyo's unified data and marketing automation platform turns your customer data into personalized connections to make every moment count across AI powered email, SMS analytics and more. Build smarter digital relationships with your customers. Visit K l a V I Y o dot com to make every moment count. One of the reasons Concorde is so expensive to run is its fuel costs. It's a bit of a gas hog. But that introduces a new question for its sustainability. Were it to continue into the future, and that's an environmental one, do you think, either economically or environmentally, that even regardless, without the drop in air travel after 9 11, that Concorde could have been a sustainable business model?
- [39:21]
Dr. Keith McLaughlin
It could have been in terms of the chartering, because there is still so much emotional attachment to the aircraft. I'm on several Facebook pages and the outpouring of emotion towards Concorde is quite immense, really. There still would have been very significant consumer demand at various Air shows. Whenever Concorde flew, people would run over and look at it. People would double park their cars beside Heathrow Airport to see Concorde take off. It just had that particular attraction and it still does for a lot of people. So the chartering dimension, yes, but that alone, I don't think would be enough to really sustain what, as you said, was a very expensive aircraft to maintain. It's also worth keeping in mind that by the early 2000s, Concorde was, yeah, in some cases almost 30 years old as a model, maybe a bit older. So it would needed to have been replaced at some point anyway, before it kind of became a bit of a hazard. After the crash, it was, it was tested rigorously, pretty much more than any other aircraft. It still had that real kind of structural integrity. But ultimately it was an older form of technology. And as before, market forces came to bear. And what I think perhaps would have surprised the initial planners behind Concorde in the 50s was that we now know that the future was mass transportation, often on a medium to short range basis. And that's obviously where Boeing and Airbus have come to dominate that market. It wasn't actually speed in the end, it was cheaper travel, mass travel at a cheaper rate. And it's difficult to see how Concorde would have operated in that environment. If Concorde was introduced today, for example, what market, what it would fulfill. So it's difficult to say really.
- [41:23]
Lindsey Graham
I expect that British Airways faced a difficult decision, even acknowledging that within the company there were detractors to the Concorde program. But after the crash in 2000, the downturn in travel after 2001, Concorde was retired in 2003. You've already mentioned that the plane itself was aging and probably required some sort of larger retrofit than the safety modifications made or a new plane produced to replace it. But the question here is though, what was the calculus for British Airways to make the decision to retire? What is a national icon?
- [42:02]
Dr. Keith McLaughlin
Well, I think it's very much based on market forces combined with other technological developments. So I think you're right in terms of post 9 11, that air travel goes down, at least for a time. Because later in the 2000s and onwards, certainly in a European context, we begin to see increased kind of subsonic short range, short medium range travel at incredibly low prices. Prices far lower, for example, than traveling on a train. You can get from one end of the UK to the other on an aircraft far more cheaply than you would via rail, which is in some respects a slightly obscene type of situation really. So people wanted cheaper Travel, they wanted value for money. And I think that British Airways made that calculus in the Internet age that changed the way people booked flights. People were looking around more, they were looking for deals. They were booking travel in a slightly more, I suppose, informal way, a more flexible way, a more self sufficient manner as well. It wasn't just a case of booking via the travel agents and accepting whatever cost the travel agent essentially gave you. You could, as soon as the Internet age really started to look around and that competition, and British Airways was dealing with competition from a lot of different kind of emerging airlines from the Middle east and others who were giving them a run for their money in terms of their market and they needed to concentrate on the subsonic market more. And I think the fact that Concorde was an aging aircraft, one that was limited to only really a handful of routes because of its sonic boom. It couldn't really fly over land for prolonged periods of time because it would create this very, very loud boom effect on the ground. All of this would have been part of British Airways thinking. And so to retire a national icon, it would have been a difficult decision. But in the 2000s, and especially post 9 11, a harder form of market thinking had emerged, one that was ultimately less sentimental. And Concord had to make way in.
- [44:18]
Lindsey Graham
That climate after its retirement. And despite all its commercial shortcomings, Concorde is still, as you mentioned, regarded as a design and engineering icon. There are Facebook groups dedicated to it. So what lasting impact has it had on aviation design and culture?
- [44:35]
Dr. Keith McLaughlin
As I said, there's a real interest in glamour and celebrity culture, and it has left behind that kind of gap that you don't see celebrities getting on aircraft anymore and being photographed by the press. It was a real thing to see celebrities getting on Concord and flying to gigs. Famous story about Phil Collins, who played at the 1985 Live Aid gig in Philadelphia and was able to go on Concord and fly over and still play at the gig in London. So it has left behind that kind of celeb dimension. Now, that could be an interesting reflection as to how people look at celebrity. Maybe they look at celebrity different. Maybe it's a little bit less deferential. It has left behind that dimension of it. It is a style icon. It was voted in a recent poll as Britain's greatest style icon, above the mini car and the mini dress. So it's still seen very much as an aesthetically beautiful machine. And it has left behind a particular form of kind of elite travel in terms of the design of air lounges, kind of elite kind of Business class culture. That culture is still there, even though Concorde isn't, and it has left that behind. Now, there are some ventures into new forms of supersonic transport, such as boom, supersonic kind of overture. So there is still interest in kind of reviving this kind of supersonic transport. But if you look at the aircraft, impressive as they are, it's still, obviously, for a very, very small market of people, much in the way that Concorde ultimately was as well. So I think it's going to be very interesting to see over the next few years, perhaps decades, whether supersonic transport is revived and what that revival represents, how it's going to compete, if at all, with far cheaper subsonic aircraft. Because ultimately, if you're in an airport and you see Boeing 747s or Airbus A380s, most people don't look twice because those aircraft made transport routine, transatlantic transport, incredibly routine. And only aviation geeks like myself get really, really excited by that. But if a new form of supersonic aircraft is introduced, which in a way, if you look at it actually kind of looks a bit like Concorde, it has that kind of distinctive delta shape, and it's very white, it could revive again a broader interest in very, very fast aircraft. Kennedy was talking about Mach 3. There's actually some designers think that an even faster speed could be possible, something that would fly, for example, essentially beyond the earth's atmosphere to go at remarkable speeds. So that's going to be very interesting to see how that develops over the next few years and decades.
- [47:32]
Lindsey Graham
How might these new ventures into supersonic passenger travel avoid the pitfalls of Concorde?
- [47:38]
Dr. Keith McLaughlin
I think they're going to need to reflect very carefully on what their market is. In a way, they're actually probably better positioned because we know that budget transport is and always will be very popular. People will want to pay less to get places, even if it means somewhat more inconvenience. I think that the initial planners behind Concorde didn't realize that because air Transport in the 50s was for an elite, even subsonically. So a lot of people just never flew an aircraft until the 70s or 80s, in a British context at least. So now we have the benefit of history and the benefit of hindsight, and we know that people will want to fly cheaply, safely, but cheaply. So a new supersonic venture will need to be very, very clear about what its market actually is. And if it's going to be elite business people, why would they want to fly places really, really quickly when the Internet provides a mechanism to Do a lot of commerce remotely and at negligible costs to the company. So perhaps there are ambitions to have a broader base to actually fly more and more people more quickly. They need to be very clear on that, and I'd be very interested as to what their thinking would be. It's an important point that we are in a place which is essentially the opposite of the 60s. The state is not showing an interest in this. The British state, the French state, okay, they might facilitate it to a certain degree, but they're not going to intervene and manage it in the way they did in the 60s. Nor close. So it's very much on the risk is going to be faced by the financiers of these projects, and it's going to be very interesting to see how that turns out.
- [49:24]
Lindsey Graham
This is a business show, of course. And if we were to broaden our view beyond aviation, what business lessons do you think our listeners could learn from the rise and fall of Concorde?
- [49:35]
Dr. Keith McLaughlin
Be very aware of your market. That would be one thing. I think it's difficult to predict the future. As a historian, and I asked my students this question as well. How do we really effectively judge the decisions by people in the past? What information was there for them? And I think that the initial development of Concorde was done probably with the best of intentions. It was a very political air crash. But there was some feasible market dimension to it as well. I think that for people who are developing kind of new forms of technology, you know, part of the challenge has to be, well, trying to predict the future. Are people going to fly on this aircraft? What is going to turn people on to speed in a way that is new and interesting and enticing. And they're talking about things like hydrogen fuel and it being greener and being more sustainable, which is really fascinating because, of course, as you mentioned Concorde, it was not that, you know, Concorde was not an environmental aircraft by any means. So we could come to a point where we have an aircraft that is sustainable, that is able to fly. Some people predict. Some of these aircraft could fly, for example, from London to Sydney, Australia, in a matter in a handful of hours as essentially kind of like suborbital kind of speed, kind of like you're very much on the edge of space type territory. That type of aircraft could potentially be very enticing, but very enticing, I think, for initially at least, a very small number of people. So predicting the future and being aware of the market, I think, are the broader lessons to be deduced from Concord out of thought.
- [51:14]
Lindsey Graham
Well, Keith McLaughlin, thank you so much for speaking with me today on Business Movers.
- [51:17]
Dr. Keith McLaughlin
Thank you very much for having me.
- [51:20]
Lindsey Graham
That was my conversation with Dr. Keith McLaughlin from the University of Bristol from Wonder E. This is the final episode of our series on Concord on the next season of Business Moves. A Czech refugee fleeing the Nazis moves to Britain to begin a new life under a new name. Media mogul Robert Maxwell wants to make it to the top and he's not afraid to cheat to get there. If you like Business Movers, you can unlock exclusive episodes found nowhere else on Wondery plus and access new episodes early and ad free. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a survey@wondery.com survey if you'd like to learn more about Concorde, we recommend the Concord Affair by John Davis Flying, the Full Story by Brian Calverton and Concord by Mike Bannister. A quick note about our dramatizations. In most cases we can't know everything that happened, but all our reenactments are based on historical research. Business Movers is hosted, edited and executive produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship Audio editing by Mohammed Shazib Sound design by Gabriel Gould Music by Lindsey Graham. This episode is written and researched by Emma Dibdin, coordinating producer Jake Sampson. Ex executive producers are William Simpson for airship and Erin O'Flaherty, Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marshall Louie for Wondering for more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History, tellers Wondery and William Morrow present the new book the Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world altering decisions and shocking scandals that have shaped our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792, and you'll watch as the British burn it down in 1814. Then you'll hear the intimate conversations between FDR and Winston Churchill as they make plans to defeat Nazi forces in 1941. And you'll be in the Situation Room when President Barack Obama approved proves the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Order the Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital edition. Wherever you get your books.