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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.
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