1969: The Concorde’s Hopeful First Flight
A technologically innovative product of an era when just about anything seemed possible, Concorde entered its flight test program just three weeks after the first flight of Boeing’s enormous 747, then the world’s largest airliner, and one day before the launch of Apollo 8 – one of four manned U.S. space missions to take place in that year alone. It was truly a remarkable period of advancement in air and space when new records for speed, altitude, distance and payload were being broken on virtually a weekly basis.
Although the Soviet Union’s Tupolev Tu-144 supersonic airliner had flown the previous December, the relative secrecy of the Russian effort meant world attention was heavily focused on the Concorde program as the leading airlines of the world confidently planned for a supersonic future. As history shows, however, this was not to be. While the British Aircraft Corporation/Sud-Aviation project was banking on speed, Boeing – and the rest of America’s civil airliner industry – was betting on the efficiency and economics of a new generation of subsonic widebody jets.
