How Concorde idea took off – as a model made from folded paper

 

Buyers gearing up to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on Concorde memorabilia this weekend might be surprised to learn that the apotheosis of supersonic travel began life as a paper aeroplane.

Engineers and designers who worked on the Concorde project from its inception in 1959 were not averse to taking their models outside at the British Aircraft Corpopration in Bristol at lunchtime to see how they performed.

Alan Perry, 77, who worked at BAC until the aircraft’s retirement in 2003, said: “There’s no better way to test an idea than to take it outside and see if it flies. Sometimes we’d even use our punch cards. We’d fold them up, take them outside at lunchtime if the weather was nice and see who could fly them farthest from the hanger.

“It may seem strange by today’s standards, but those simple trials were a great help at the time. Bigger and more complex models were used throughout the design process.” Among them were a variety of prototypes for the famous drooping snout, tested at length in a wind tunnel.

These long-forgotten models have been rescued from obscurity in a storeroom belonging to the Science Museum in London as part of a bid for £50 million of lottery funding. The museum wants to bring out of the closet more than 200,000 items for which it has no room to display.

Mr Perry now takes tours round the last Concorde built, which is on show at the Concorde Museum at Filton, Bristol.

Half an hour’s flight – by Concorde, of course – to the south, hundreds of parts from the aircraft, ranging from flight deck gauges to lavatory seats, will go on sale this weekend to enthusiasts keen to own a piece of aviation history.

Hundreds of potential bidders are expected at the old Corn Hall in Toulouse, from where the Franco-British jet made its maiden flight in 1969, for the sale. There are 834 lots with estimates ranging from a few dozen euros for temperature sensors to €3,000 (£2,000) for a 1.25-tonne nose-wheel assembly. But previous auctions have drawn bids far in excess of estimates.

A pair of seats (unused), engineered to high specification for Concorde’s cramped lavatories, are set at €400-€600.

Among the more coveted items are flight deck Mach-meters – estimated at up to €2,500 – which registered the aircraft’s passage through the speed of sound and up to Mach 2 as it crossed the Atlantic in three hours.

Most of the parts, stored by Airbus, the successor to the Aérospéciale company that built Concorde with BAC, never flew. Unused and packed in its wooden box, the wheel strut, without tyres, would have cost British Airways or Air France €1 million to fit.

Proceeds from the sale will go to Aeroscopia, an aviation museum park planned for Toulouse, the home of the French aircraft industry.

Also on sale – probably for under €100 – is a stall-warning sensor of the type that must have blared throughout the brief, fatal flight of the Concorde that crashed after take-off from Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris, in July 2000. Legal actions and prosecutions to attribute blame for the deaths of 113 people are still grinding through the French courts.

Viewing the items for sale offers a glimpse of pure 1960s design, with fine examples of what pilots call the “steam gauge” era. This was the precomputer age when needles pointed at numbers and the all-video readouts of modern jets were still science fiction. One of Concorde’s bulky mechanical artificial horizons is displayed at the residence of the British Ambassador in Paris. Another is on sale in Toulouse for an estimated €1,500.

The sale includes pieces of wing and flight deck windows, but it lacks a trademark drooping nose. One of these sold for nearly £400,000 at an auction in 2003 after being valued at under £10,000.

It is all a long way from those early days and models in Bristol. Frank Nutbeen, 75, an engineer who worked on Concorde from 1959 to 1994, said: “There was a whole think-tank that spent all day folding paper planes and scribbling plans to achieve what most people at the time thought would be impossible.”

With lottery funding in mind – the Science Museum is bidding against five other projects for the £50 million – he added: “These are an important part of human history, and should be available for everyone to see.”

Peter Turvey, 53, head curator, said: “We hope to win the funding we need so the next generation of inventors can be inspired by all these great achievements mankind has made.”

How Concorde idea took off – as a model made from folded paper

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