Fri, 24 Oct 2003
Concorde, adieu
Excuse the silence, please: I'm trying to finish a book. It
was supposed to be nailed down today -- but instead I found
myself shivering in a car park for several hours in order to
see this:
That was the last ever Concorde flight departing from
Scottish airspace. I was there, standing about five hundred
feet away from the main runway at Turnhouse as it rotated. Contrary to rumour,
Concorde is not the loudest airliner in the world --
even on afterburner it's no worse than an old Boeing 727
(without stage III hush-kit, those puppies were very
noisy). Still, it's probably the most beautiful, elegant
aircraft in the air; there's nothing else quite like it.
(That it goes like a bat out of hell is just extra icing
on the cake.) As
Buckminster Fuller said, when you solve an engineering
problem, if the solution looks beautiful, you probably got it
right.
Anyway, I guess this means I probably won't get to fly supersonic
until I'm in my fifties. (Optimistically.) And it's just one
more item in a long, dismal litany of abandoned promises.
Big, advanced nuclear reactors pumping out power too cheap to
meter. Truck and car carrying hovercraft the size of 747's.
Saturn V's. They all went the way of the dinosaurs, and now
we have to put up with this. It's too much: I want my bright
shiny future back!
(PS: as a final insult to add to the injury, my favourite pub
in Edinburgh -- in fact, my local for most of the past
decade, notwithstanding that it's a good half-hour's walk
away from where I live -- closed its doors for the last time last Saturday
night at, oh, about 2:30am. Which means I can't even go to the pub
to raise a toast to the engineers who built Concorde.
Sometimes life sucks ...)
posted at: 20:52 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry
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