Concorde: A Dream Takes Off

Abstract

While astronomers sought enthusiastically to unravel the secrets of the Sun, the stars, and the universe in general, other men and women dreamt of building machines that could tear themselves away from the Earth’s surface and take to the skies, going ever higher, ever faster, and ever further. These were the heros of the twentieth century, inspiring us even before the first men went into space (Yuri Gagarin in 1961), then to the Moon (Neil Armstrong and his colleagues in 1969), leaving the cradle of humanity to explore new, still more chimerical horizons. The supersonic plane Concorde was part of this saga of the last century, in which the ambition of intercontinental travel for a hundred passengers, putting New York at only three and half hours from Paris, would finally be realised. And it was precisely in this year of 1969 that the Concorde prototype 001 made its first test flight from Toulouse airport in Blagnac, 2 months after its Soviet rival, the Tupolev Tu-144, took to the air for 38 min near Moscow.