Discord over Concorde

The date: June 1975. The place:

Nord Airport, Paris. Passengers are checking in for one of the first supersonic Concorde flights to New York. Each passenger is weighed with his baggage, while an adding machine tots up the mounting burden: 18,000 Ibs. . . .

19,000 Ibs 19,800 Ibs. At that point

a corpulent Frenchman steps on the scales, clocking 220 Ibs. "Pardon, M'sieur," says the clerk. "You cannot travel today. Even without your baggage you would put the Concorde over its weight limit."

That look into the future may not be farfetched. The Concorde's small payload, mounting costs and environmental effects are creating discord in Britain and France. This week British Aerospace Minister Michael Heseltine and French Transport Minister Jean Chamant meet in Toulouse for urgent discussions of ways to ease the problems surrounding the plane. TIME European Economic Correspondent Roger Beardwood (210 Ibs.) reports:

When the Anglo-French Concorde project was announced a decade ago, the estimated cost was $440 million. This month the two governments gave the latest, far from final estimate: $2.5 billion. Each Concorde will cost some $49.4 million with spare parts, or 83% more than the present price for a 747 jumbo jet. It is small wonder that the builders, British Aircraft Corp. and France's Aerospatiale, do not have a single firm order so far, although 16 airlines have options for 74 planes. The builders do not expect all those options to be taken up. Even state-owned BOAC and Air France have not signed contracts to buy, despite intense pressure from their governments. The two airlines are holding out for the governments to offer low-interest, long-term loans and guarantees against operating losses. The officers of most lines, still struggling with the high costs and excess capacity of the jumbo jets, wish that the Concorde would just go away.

Limited Load. Concorde's small payload over the North Atlantic is the main reason for the airlines' reluctance. Geoffrey Knight, Chairman of British Aircraft Corp.'s commercial division, says that the Concorde will be able to carry at least 100 passengers from Paris to New York in 3 hr. 40 min. But that number assumes a mixture of men, women and children, weighing on average only 200 Ibs. with baggage--a total of 20,000 Ibs. The Concorde, however, is likely to be a businessmen's jet, since they will be among the few people willing to pay up to $975 for a round trip. Because business travelers are adults, usually males, and often plump, the assumed average weight of 200 Ibs. with baggage seems optimistic.

The alternative may be to carry fewer passengers, but that would result in higher fares or larger operating losses --or both. Officers of Scandinavian Airlines, for example, have concluded that the Concorde would not be profitable on their North Atlantic routes, and thus have decided against buying it. Experts doubt that the British and French governments will ever sell enough planes to recover their total investment.

Restricted Routes. Cost is not the only difficulty. Because it creates a sonic boom when it exceeds the speed of sound, the Concorde will be barred from flying over most populated areas at its optimum speed of Mach 2.05. That limitation will reduce the number of routes on which it can be used; for example, it will not be able to fly super-sonically between New York and Los Angeles or between London and Rome. Even at subsonic speeds, Concorde is hardly an environmental advance: on takeoff it will be as loud as a Boeing 747 and perhaps louder.

In the face of these drawbacks, Britain and France are going all-out to promote Concorde. French President Georges Pompidou proudly flew to the Azores in one for his summit meeting with President Nixon last fall. Recently Britain's Princess Margaret flew at 1,300 m.p.h. and declared that the Concorde was "a tremendous technological achievement." What has yet to be proved is Concorde's success as a commercial airliner.

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