Backroom Boys
Page 6
But times had changed a great deal politically since the Wilson government made their grand attempt to put this vision into practice, with an integrated, co-ordinated blueprint for the entire British economy. The result, the National Plan of 1965, lasted for one year. Back in power now after four years of Edward Heath, the Labour cabinet was frantically reacting to events, not coolly planning for the long term. The stock market was crashing, inflation was at 20 per cent, the oil price had quadrupled, there were strikes everywhere. Like his colleagues, Benn spent his days rushing from emergency to emergency, arranging a cash injection here, calming an outbreak of militancy there. But unlike his colleagues, Benn had started to see a silver lining to the crisis, a promise glimmering amidst the confusion. This is what changed him: he thought he was witnessing a social revolution.
And probably, this was why he was sitting in the cabin of Concorde on 3 August 1974 with his wife, two aides, a reporter from BBC Radio Bristol and fifty shop stewards from the AUEW and TASS. It was the stewards’ first ride in the plane they had helped build. Despite spending most of the last fifteen years welding Concorde’s airframe, and applying its aluminium skin, and turning the parts for its control linkages, none of them had ever left the ground aboard it; indeed, some of them had never flown at all before, or not since their war service. One had carefully gone to confession, just in case. By arranging this jaunt, Benn was performing a sort of act of restitution. He was dispensing social justice on the fairy-godmother plan: yes, Mr Shop Steward, you shall go to the stratosphere. And probably, he was doing so because he believed that the stewards represented the future. In its 1974 manifesto, Labour had promised ‘an irreversible shift of power in favour of working people and their families’. Well, that meant power being transferred to grassroots union officials like these. Didn’t it? When Benn looked around the chaotic industrial landscape of Britain in 1974, he saw something rising, something being born that justified all the disparate crises in shipbuilding and planebuilding and train-building and carbuilding: a new, direct form of democracy based on union muscle. It was simple. Wasn’t it? Yet for some reason, other Labour ministers refused to see it. Instead they let their civil servants lecture them on the need for industries to make profits – ‘the Tory philosophy in a nutshell!’ Benn expostulated in his diary a couple of months later. His new conviction was self-reinforcing. The more alienated he felt from his cabinet colleagues, the more he depended on the warmth he got from activists, and wild-cat strikers, and company like today’s. Today’s atmosphere – he would write in his diary that evening, with a happy sense of inclusion – was ‘like a coach outing to Margate or Weston Super Mare’.
As Concorde 002 crossed the Cornish coast, Brian Trubshaw relit the afterburners, and started to climb again, up from the ordinary airline cruising height of 30,000 feet to Concorde’s altitude for supersonic cruise at 60,000 feet. As he accelerated past Mach 1, the bow wave of air the plane threw to each side of it became too energetic to slide into the atmosphere ahead, and slammed against it instead, colliding with the air molecules in its path at a pressure of about 2 lb per square foot. The assaulted air shook and gave up the dose of extra energy as sound. Concorde climbed on, dragging its sack of reverberating noise behind. There is, of course, no such thing as the sound barrier. What there is, is the aerodynamic challenge of the turbulent passage through Mach 1; and then the different challenge as the speed continues to rise and the airflow over the aeroplane’s wings changes its character again, smoothing out, yet condensing into new standing waves, new vortices, new invisible knots and whorls of intense pressure. Both these challenges are easier to surmount in the thin air at 60,000 feet. Even so, up there where the sky darkens to a deep purple and a few stars show at the zenith, the rarefied molecules of the stratosphere still hit the fuselage hard enough to make it blisteringly hot. The skin of an ordinary airliner chills to –35°C, causing the deep cold you feel when you touch the inner pane of the double windows. As Trubshaw levelled out at last, one sixth of the way into space as NASA defines it, with the Mach-meter reading 2.2, Concorde oo2’s skin temperature had risen to 90°C, from pure friction, with hotter spots still on the wing edges and the nose tip. Air-conditioning fans sucked heat from the cabin into the fuel tanks. Tiny pumps moved thousands of gallons of fuel from tank to tank to trim the plane. In the engine intakes under the wings, a sequence of curved baffles on which tens of thousands of hours of calculation had been expended slowed the onrushing air so it wouldn’t stall Rolls-Royce’s turbines. The plane outran the boom of its passing 2.2 times over: from Trubshaw’s and his passengers’ point of view, Concorde 002 soared in exquisite silence. Far below, the Atlantic was a sheet of wrinkled silver.
Concorde was a marvel, a genuine exercise in the technological sublime. More than any rocket ever built in Europe, this was the European equivalent to the Apollo programme, a gasp-inducing, consciously grand undertaking that changed the sense, in those who contemplated it, of what human beings were capable of. When Britain and France agreed to build Concorde in 1962, no one knew how to design a supersonic passenger plane. Oh, there were proven military jets that flew at Mach 2, but those were one-seat aerial hotrods in which a fit young man could hurl himself around the sky for a couple of hours, followed by days if not weeks of maintenance work on his aircraft. A smooth ride, a commercial level of fuel economy, an aircraft reliable day after day: these were all mysteries to be solved in 1962, which helps to explain how the cost of the project kept multiplying over the years of Concorde’s development, aided by some poor management and by some foolish late changes in the spec, until the price tag too was sublime and worthy of a gasp. By some reckonings, Concorde ended up being designed not once, nor even twice, but two and a half times, because of a decision to make the production model 20 ft longer than the prototype, and the constant jostling of redesigned components against neighbouring components which then also had to be redesigned. At the witness seminar on Concorde held at the Institute for Contemporary British History in 2000, one of the civil servants participating remembered the example of Concorde’s ever-expanding wheels. ‘They discovered that the weight had gone up to the point where the wheel had to be larger to meet the runway requirements, but the wheel was a tight fit in the wing. So a bulge had to be produced in the wing. The result of that was that the air resistance was greater than it had been, more fuel was required, and to carry that fuel a heavier structure was required. Because a heavier structure was required, an even bigger wheel was needed.’ And at every revision, the designers were aiming at an extraordinarily narrow window of technical viability. As eventually completed, Concorde has a payload capacity of only 7 per cent of its takeoff mass, a ratio more reminiscent of a satellite launcher than a normal airliner. It can cross the Atlantic, but only just. London–New York and Paris–New York are possible; Frankfurt–New York is not.
Yet, perverse though it may seem to say so, Concorde works at all because in one limited sense the designers were modest. They successfully confined themselves to solving only the next problem, filling in only the immediately adjacent bits of the unknown. Take Concorde’s chosen cruising speed of Mach 2.2, for instance: it was just about at the safe limit of what a conventional aluminium structure could stand, in the way of atmospheric heating, so long as there were a few pieces of more resilient steel and titanium covering the sensitive nose and wing edges. If they had tried to build a plane that flew at Mach 3, they would have been looking at a skin temperature at cruise altitude of 250°C, enough to melt aluminium, and the whole plane would have had to be executed in unproven, exotic materials. Here was where the Americans went wrong with their abortive government-funded Supersonic Transport: Boeing spent the 1960s trying to construct a super-duper, all-new Mach 3 SST, and ended up with nothing at all. The Russians, meanwhile, made the contrasting mistake with their Tupolev-144, a.k.a. ‘Concordski’, and attempted a quick ’n dirty solution which didn’t refine military technology enough. The Tupolev’s engines were twice as hea
vy and burned fuel twice as fast as Concorde’s. It only had the range to get halfway across the Atlantic.
The real flaw in Concorde was not technological. It was social. The whole project was based on an error in social prediction. Those who commissioned it assumed that air travel in the future would remain, as it was in 1962, a service used almost exclusively by the rich; and not the mobile, hard-working managerial rich either, but the gilded upper-crust celebrity rich, the jet set as they were when the phrase ‘jet set’ was first coined. Concorde was built to move Princess Margaret, Noel Coward, Grace Kelly and Ian Fleming around the world. It was built to carry them to Barbados for the winter, and to New York to go shopping; to Buenos Aires to watch the polo, and to South Africa to go on safari. Since this pattern of use for air travel was assumed to be a given, the natural next step, technologically speaking, was to make the planes faster. But at the same time as Britain and France were betting on supersonic speed as the next step in aviation, one of the bosses of Boeing, unconvinced that the SST programme was really the way forward, pushed through the development of a subsonic plane that could carry four hundred passengers at a time. The Boeing 747 was just as bold a leap into the unknown as Concorde, just as extreme in its departure from the norm; nothing so large had ever left the ground before. And Boeing’s gamble paid off. The 747 was the right plane for the future that actually arrived. It allowed airlines to serve the mass market for air travel that burgeoned in the 1970s. Boeing sold the hundreds of planes that the Concorde consortium had hoped to. Concorde could not be adapted to suit the more varied needs of a world in which it had become normal for millions of people to fly and percentages of the population of entire countries to migrate during the holiday season. With its cramped tube of a cabin, and its tiny payload of passengers in relation to its operating cost, Concorde could never be turned into a workhorse of the skies. Even if the initial estimate of the price at which it would be offered to airlines had not been out by a factor of ten, it would still have been a strictly marginal proposition to operate. So by the time that Brian Trubshaw took Tony Benn and his coach party out for a spin, it was becoming painfully clear that Concorde had been a brilliant exercise in providing an unneeded product. Concorde was redundant to exactly the degree that it was superlative. It was a Batmobile when the market demanded a bus.
And as it happened, the trade unionists did not represent the future either. The era of their power was almost over. Two different lost causes were compounded that day in 1974 – British socialism’s hope for the New Jerusalem, and the British aircraft industry’s hope that one sublime technological roll of the dice would readmit it to the big league of civil aviation players, with the likes of Boeing and Lockheed. Over the Bay of Biscay, Concorde soared on, gorgeously excessive, gorgeously divorced from utility. It was now doing in literal fact what Superman did in the comic books; at 1,350 mph, it was moving faster than a speeding bullet. One of the shop stewards took an old thruppenny bit out of his pocket and balanced it on its edge on the table in front of him. It quivered, but it didn’t fall down.
*
9 December 1981. Early dusk over the Thames; rain in the wind. The lights were going on in the Palace of Westminster. Nine men in a committee room waited to help lay Concorde to rest. The MPs of the Commons Select Committee on Trade and Industry talked the language of grave open-minded deliberation between options, but all of them, the Conservative majority and the Labour minority alike, expected that their inquiry into Concorde’s finances would end with a consensus that the ill-begotten project should be halted at last. The sixteen planes authorised in 1974 had been in service for years by this time. They had been tried out on route after route, and they had never made a profit for British Airways or Air France on any of them. Indeed, the demand for Concorde tickets seemed actually to be going down as the recession of the early 1980s bit. So far as the MPs were concerned the aeroplane had had every chance to prove itself, and it had failed. The Committee could no longer be swayed by concern for Britain’s technological honour, as it might have been a decade earlier. They saw their primary duty as defending the public purse; for every year that Concorde went on operating, the government was having to pay over another £30 million of taxpayers’ money in subsidy. And then another. And another. And another, with no end in sight. Total expenditure on Concorde had reached £849 million by the end of 1980, and it was still rising.
Concorde was an anomaly now anyway. The sixteen planes had become technological orphans. They had only just managed to come into existence, by monopolising all the available investment and all the official attention, in the process killing off a whole range of other initiatives that might have been more fruitful and self-sustaining. And now they were like messengers from a lost world: the world in which British high-tech industry had existed since the Second World War, sustained by the decisions of grandee industrialists and Whitehall mandarins working by a top-down ideal of the public good. For all that time, there had been a beleaguered assumption that each new generation of technology would be integrated as it came along into a kind of great British stability, and would be infused, in turn, by a gradually changing but still always recognisable British identity. When the film director Michael Powell had shown a hawk rising from a Canterbury pilgrim’s hand and turning into a Spitfire in his wartime film A Canterbury Tale, it had seemed natural. When English Electric developed the Lightning – tested by Roly Beaumont – the RAF’s new jet interceptor had seemed to integrate easily into the ‘New Elizabethan’ spirit the newspapers were fond of perceiving in the 1950s. It had seemed natural that in the picture-postcard skies above the green fields young Mr De Havilland would be testing some smooth silver prototype, that the needle-nosed Fairey Delta would be setting an air-speed record. Saunders-Roe draughtsmen had worked in the stables of Osborne House. All that was gone by 1981, its slow death finally concluded. It had been hit by oil shocks and strikes and stagnation in the 1970s, and remodelled several times over with increasing desperation. Now a government had come to power that thought that the whole system was bankrupt, in practice, and much more significantly, in principle. Thatcherite Tories looked at the industrial policies of the past and saw high-minded objectives stifling the pursuit of individual interest without which market economies cannot live. They resolved to have no industrial policy – to let the cold wind of the market blow on the whole cobwebby structure. The pound was allowed to float free on the foreign exchanges; at the same time, Geoffrey Howe’s budgets squeezed inflation out of the economy by raising interest rates sky-high. The combination was lethal. Suddenly, as a wall of speculative money rushed into the country, the pound soared to $2.40. Firms faced phenomenally high costs at home to produce goods that were then hopelessly uncompetitive on the world market. Firm after firm folded. Area after area of technological prowess, which had just about staggered through the 1970s, was now extinguished. Industry after industry lost its British player. They would not be coming back. It was the end of metal-bashing; it was the end of Britain’s history as a traditional industrial power. Whatever happened next technologically, it would have to be something quite different; the old game was over. Yet sixteen Concordes remained. In their hangars at Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle, they’d survived the end of the world that brought them forth. No one would have commissioned them now; but there they still were, like the servant in the Book of Job who stumbles out of the wreck that has engulfed his master’s household, and says, I only am alone escaped to tell thee.
The reason why Concorde survived is that it was the subject of a very unusual international treaty. Britain couldn’t get out of the Concorde Treaty without French approval; France couldn’t void it without Britain’s say-so. It isn’t clear which of Britain’s negotiators back in 1962 was responsible – Macmillan’s Aviation Minister Julian Amery, who actually signed, or his predecessor Peter Thornycroft – but one of the two had deliberately designed the treaty without an exit clause, so that the hands of future governments on both sides of the C
hannel would be tied. The idea seems to have been to create a technological bond between Britain and France, even if General de Gaulle would not (yet) agree to let Britain into the Common Market. It was a ploy that their successors cursed. Over the next twenty years, whenever a British government thought about escaping from Concorde’s insatiable need for money, they always got the same advice from their law officers. It would cost more to pay the damages the French would win at the Hague for breaking the treaty than to go on with the aeroplane. It always seemed to be that way around: the British wanting out, the French wanting to keep going, in line with their wider policy of using Concorde to lead the development of their aerospace industry. Where RAF Fairford remained a shabby military base, minimally adapted for flight development work, its counterpart facility at Toulouse became the nucleus of a giant new industrial complex. (It’s now the nerve centre of Airbus.) In fact, there were French qualms too as the bill mounted, and it now appears that there were moments when there would have been relief in the Champs Elysées if Albion had taken on the burden of being perfidious. But this was invisible from the British perspective, and so the plane had been designed, despite the multiplying cost, and it had been manufactured, despite the lack of any airline orders for it, and in 1981 it was in service, despite the fact that it lost money every time it took off: all in accordance with the treaty.