There's beauty in machines

I saw her standing there, alone, in a dark corner of a giant hangar. She was sleek; she was slender and white skinned.
She was fast.

She was beautiful.

One Sunday morning, while the girls wanted to have some more Bath time, I had an impulse to drive one hour south to an isolated air museum in rural Yeovilton. Why?

Because they have on display the first Concorde ever built.

Concorde was a beautiful 1960's concept plane built to reduce the world's travel time and allow trips from Australia to become fast and frequent. Qantas and many major airlines considered buying a fleet of these sleek jets to complement their new 747 Jumbos. But it wasn't to be, and only 14 were ever constructed. France and Britain locked one another into a no-get-out contract that committed both nations to a sink-hole of funds to support a plane that few wanted. It was amazing they even agreed to have a joint-venture of this magnitude, since they argued over how to spell the name.

So, on a cold morning in February , guided by my trusty TomTom GPS, I ventured along narrow roads to this isolated little town whose name I could hardly pronounce.

This was the first Concorde prototype with its distinguishable V-shaped delta wing. The cabin was filled with twelve tonnes of electronics monitoring gear to check the pulse of this amazing new supersonic technology. Today, the computing power of this gear could be stored in a laptop. As Concorde forced air out of its path at 60,000 feet, it would heat up so much that it would lengthen by 18 cm.

Britons would see (and hear) Concorde fly out of Heathrow at 6.03 each day as it departed for New York. Eventually it became a victim of teleconferencing, reducing the need to travel across the Atlantic at Mach 2 for a meeting and return on the same day. And, following that horrific take-off accident from Charles De Gaulle airport, Concorde was doomed.
Nowadays, this futuristic machine is used as an object lesson on the advantages of private enterprise over government's failed attempts to compete in industry.

So, on this quiet Sunday morn, Concorde and I had our shared moment together.