Concord or Concorde (pronounced kon-kawrd)
(1) Agreement between persons,
groups, nations, etc.; concurrence in attitudes, feelings, etc; unanimity;
accord; agreement between things; mutual fitness; harmony.
(2) In formal grammar, a technical
rule about the agreement of words with one another (case, gender, number or person).
(3) A treaty; compact; covenant.
(4) In music, a stable, harmonious
combination of tones; a chord requiring no resolution.
(5) As concordat, under
Roman-Catholic canon law, a convention between the Holy See and a sovereign
state that defines the relationship between the Church and the state in matters
that concern both.
(6) In law, an agreement between the
parties regarding land title in reference to the manner in which it should
pass, being an acknowledgment that the land in question belonged to the
complainant (obsolete).
(7) A popular name for locality, commercial operations and products such as ships, cars etc.
(8) In horticulture, a variety of sweet American grape, named circa 1853 after Concord, Massachusetts, where the variety was developed.
1250-1300: From the Middle English and twelfth century Old French concorde (harmony, agreement, treaty) & concorder, from the Latin concordare & concordia, (harmonious), from concors (of the same mine; being in agreement with) (genitive concordis (of the same mind, literally “hearts together”)). The construct was an assimilated form of com (con-) (with; together) + cor (genitive cordis (heart) from the primitive Indo-European root kerd (heart)). The "a compact or agreement" in the sense of something formal (usually in writing) dates from the late fifteenth century, an extension of use from the late fourteenth century transitive verb which carried the sense "reconcile, bring into harmony". From circa 1400 it had been understood to mean "agree, cooperate, thus a transfer of sense from the Old French & Latin forms. Concorde was the French spelling which eventually was adopted also by the British for the supersonic airliner after some years of linguistic squabble. Concord is a noun & verb, concordance & concordat are nouns, concorded & concording are verbs and concordial & concordant are adjectives; the noun plural is concords.
Concorde was an Anglo-French
supersonic airliner that first flew in 1969 and operated commercially between
1976-2003. It had a maximum speed
over twice the speed of sound (Mach 2.04; 1,354 mph (2,180 km/h)) and seated
92-128 passengers. Man breaking the
sound barrier actually wasn’t modern; the cracking of a whip, known for thousands
of years, is the tip passing through the sound barrier and engineers were well
aware of the problems caused by propellers travelling that fast but it wasn’t
until 1947 that a manned aircraft exceeded Mach 1 in controlled flight (although it had been achieved in deep dives though not without structural damage). The military were of course immediately interested
but so were those who built commercial airliners, intrigued at the notion of transporting
passengers at supersonic speed, effectively shrinking the planet. By the late 1950s, still recovering from the
damage and costs of two world wars, France and the UK were never going to be in
a position to be major players in the space-race which would play-out between
the US and USSR but civil aviation did offer possibilities for both nations to
return to the forefront of the industry. France, in the early days of flight
had been the preeminent power (a legacy of that being words like fuselage and aileron) and UK almost gained an early lead in passenger jets
but the debacle of the de Havilland Comet (1949) had seen the Boeing 707 (1957) assume dominance. The supersonic race was thought to be the
next horizon and the UK’s Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee (STAC) was in
1956 commissioned with the development of a Supersonic Transport (SST) for commercial
use.
There is some dispute about whether the cabinet ever formally agreed to use the French spelling but, like much in English-French relations over the centuries, the entente proved not always cordial and the name was officially changed to Concord by UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (later First Earl Stockton, 1894–1986; UK prime-minister 1957-1963) in response to him feeling slighted by Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970; President of France 1958-1969) when Le President vetoed the UK’s application to join the European Economic Community (the EEC which evolved into the present Day EU of which the UK was a member between 1973-2020). However, the Labour party won office in the 1964 general election and by the time of the roll-out in Toulouse in 1967, the UK’s Minister for Technology, Tony Benn (Anthony Wedgwood Benn, 1925–2014, formerly the second Viscount Stansgate) announced he was changing the spelling back to Concorde. There were not many eurosceptics in the (old) Labour Party back then.
The engineering challenges were overcome and in 1969, some months before the moon landing, Concorde made its maiden flight and, in 1973, a successful demonstration flight was performed at the same Paris air show at which its Soviet competitor Tupolev Tu-144 crashed. Impressed, more than a dozen airlines placed orders but within months of the Paris show, the first oil shock hit and the world entered a severe recession; the long post-war boom was over. A quadrupling in the oil price was quite a blow for a machine which burned 20% more fuel per mile than a Boeing 747 yet typically carried only a hundred passengers whereas the Jumbo could be configured for between four and five hundred. That might still have been viable had have oil prices remained low and a mass-market existed of people willing to pay a premium but with jet fuel suddenly expensive and the world in recession, doubts existed and most orders were immediately cancelled.
The Tu-144 was the USSR’s SST and it was the first to fly, its maiden
flight in 1968 some months before Concorde and sixteen were built. It was also usually ahead of the Anglo-French
development, attaining supersonic speed twelve weeks earlier and entering commercial
service in 1975 but safety and reliability concerns doomed the project and its
reputation never recovered from the 1973 crash.
The Soviet carrier Aeroflot introduced a regular Moscow-Almaty service
but only a few dozen flights were ever completed, the Tu-144 withdrawn after a
second crash in 1978 after which it was used only for cargo until 1983 when the
remaining fleet was grounded. It was
later used to train Soviet cosmonauts and had a curious post-cold war career
when chartered by NASA for high-altitude research. The final flight was in 1999.
While perfecting supersonic military aircraft
during the early 1950s, Americans had explored the idea of SSTs as passenger
aircraft and had concluded that while it was technically possible, in economic
terms such a thing could never be made to work and that four-engined jets
like the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC8 were the future of commercial aviation. However, the announcement of the development
of Concorde and the Soviet SST stirred the Kennedy White House into funding
what was essentially a vanity project proving the technical superiority of US
science and engineering. Boeing won the
competition to design an SST and, despite also working on the 747 and the space
programme, it gained a high priority and the 2707 was projected to be the biggest,
fastest and most advanced of all the SSTs, seating up to three-hundred, cruising
at Mach 3 and configured with a swing-wing.
Cost, complexity and weight doomed that last feature and the design was
revised to use a conventional delta shape. But, however advanced US engineering and science might have been, US accountancy
was better still and what was clearly an financially unviable programme was in
1971 cancelled even before the two prototypes had been completed.
Lockheed also entered the government-funded
competition to design a US SST. Similar to
the Boeing concept in size, speed and duration, it eschewed the swing-wing
because, despite the aerodynamic advantages, the engineers concluded what
Boeing would eventually admit: that the weight, cost and complexity acceptable
in military airframes, couldn’t be justified in a civilian aircraft. As the military-industrial complex well knew, the Pentagon was always more sanguine about spending other people's money (OPM) than those people were about parting with their own. Lockheed instead used a slightly different
compromise: the compound delta. After
the competition, Boeing and Lockheed were both selected to continue to the
prototype stage but in 1966 Boeing’s swing-wing design was preferred because
its performance was in most aspects superior and it was quieter; that it was going
to be more expensive to produce wasn’t enough to sway the government, things
being different in the 1960s. Reality finally bit in 1971.
In mid-2021 US carrier United Airlines (UA) announced plans to acquire a fleet of fifteen new supersonic airliners which
they expected to be in service by 2029. It
wasn’t clear from the press release what was the most ambitious aspect of the
programme: (1) that Colorado-based Boom (which at the time had not achieved supersonic flight), would be able by 2029 to produce
even one machine certified by regulatory authorities for use in commercial aviation, (2) that the aircraft would be delivered at close to the budgeted US$200
million unit cost, (3) that what United describe as “improvements in aircraft
design since Concorde” will eliminate, reduce or mitigate (all three have at various times been suggested) the effects of the sonic boom, (4) that it won’t
be “any louder than other modern passenger jets while taking off, flying over
land and landing”, (5) that sufficient passengers will be prepared to pay a
premium to fly at Mach 1.7 in a new and unproven airframe built by a company
with no record in the industry or that (6) Greta Thunberg (b 2003) will believe Boom
which says Overture will operate as a "net-zero carbon
aircraft".
The suggestion was the Overture will run on "posh biodiesel", made from anything from waste cooking fat to specially grown high-energy crops although whether this industry can by 2029 be scaled-up to produce what will be required to service enough of the aviation industry to make either project viable isn’t known. Still, if not, Boom claimed "power-to-liquid" processes by which renewable energy such as solar or wind power is used to produce liquid fuel will make up any shortfall. Boom does seem a heroic operation: they expect the Overture to be profitable for airlines even if tickets are sold for the same price as a standard business-class ticket. One way or another, the flight-path (figuratively and literally) of the Boom Overture follows is going to become a standard case-study in university departments although whether that's in marketing, engineering or accountancy might depend matters beyond Boom's control.
Boom’s progress can’t however be denied because on 10 February, 2025, its XB-1 “proof of concept” test platform accomplished what orthodox physics once deemed impossible. On that day if flew over California’s Mojave Desert at speeds beyond the sound barrier without generating a sonic boom, the announcement surprising some sceptics but doing little to quell the doubts among analysts unable to build models which show a sustained profitable life for the project. What Boom did with the XB-1 was use an implementation of “Mach cut-off” technology which exploits atmospheric conditions by manipulation, redirecting shock waves upward rather than toward the ground. This is achieved by operating the airframe in a certain four-dimensional envelope (a window created by specific atmospheric conditions within a certain height range up to a certain speed). Flying within these parameters, the airframe minimizes the unwanted effects of pressure waves, dispersing them without forming the concentrated pressure front that creates the dreaded sonic booms. Whatever the sceptical economic modelers may conclude, it was an impressive display of Boom’s technology and engineering with the ground-level impact eliminated, at least in the ideal, controlled conditions of a test flight.
What the economists noted was the XB-1 was able to achieve the much vaunted “silent-supersonic” at around 1,200 km/h (750 mph) and the math indicates the means to implement Mach cut-off when travelling faster (certainly the 2,100 km/h (1300 mph; Mach 1.7) which apparently remains Boom’s target) doesn’t yet exist, even at the level of theory. On land, sea or air, for centuries what has determined commercial viability is the speed-cost trade-off and notional profitability was for at least some of Concorde’s years of operation achieved because it offered a quicker trans-Atlantic flight-time (typically the Concorde at Mach 2.04 (1,350 mph, 2,180 km/h) would take 3 hours 30 minutes while at Mach 0.85 (565 mph, 910 km/h), a Boeing 747 would need 7-8 hours). In truth that profitability was a fudge subsidized by taxpayers (a remarkably common phenomenon in modern capitalism) because the French & British governments “wrote off” the development costs (some Stg £1.3 billion by the late 1970s at a time when a billion pounds was still a lot of money and even that may have been a deliberate under-estimate to conceal the true cost which has been estimated (in 2023 Sterling value terms) as high as Stg£21 billion).
Rich customers or those with tickets paid for by OPM (other people’s money) were prepared to pay the significant premium charged for a seat on Concorde just to avoid sitting an additional 4-5 hours on a wide-bodied subsonic aircraft and that’s the market Boom is interested in for a trans-continental (New York City (NYC) to Los Angeles (LA)) US service. Subsonic flight times on the NYC-LA route are typically 5-6 hours while Boom will be able to achieve that in under two hours if their silent subsonic plans can be realized; that would mean the road transport components of a trip elements to and from the NYC & LA airports could be longer than the time in the air. If able to offer a 3-4 hour reduction in NYC-LA travel time, genuinely that’s a marketing advantage but one which can be leveraged only if there are enough customers willing (with the required frequency) to spend somebody’s money to fill the seats of UA’s 15 silentsonics. If, as Boom once indicated to venture capitalists (VC) and others (JAL (Japan Airlines has reportedly invested US$10 million), the tickets on the NYC-LA route would retail at around the subsonic business-class level, then few doubt their model will work but it remains to be seen whether what’s necessary can be achieved (1) by 2029 or (2) ever. Hopefully, Boom does succeed so delta-winged supersonics can make a (quieter) return to the skies though it’ll be a shame if the marketing department insisted on changing the corporate name to something like “Boomless”, “No Boom”, “Boom-Free” or whatever. “Boom” is a really good name for an aviation outfit has some history in the field, “Boom” the nickname of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Hugh Trenchard (First Viscount Trenchard, 1873–1956) who was instrumental in the formation of Britain’s RAF (Royal Air Force) although he gained the moniker because of the tone of his voice rather than anything to do with fluid dynamics.