A Great Memory: What it Was Like to Fly the Concorde

Believe it or not, I do read things that don't relate to politics or LGBT rights and activism.  And I came across a piece in CNN yesterday that was fun for me because it looked at something that I actually did back in my days as in-house counsel for an oil company: I flew the Concorde.  It was in August, 1981, after a 10 day negotiating trip to Morocco.   I was already in Morocco with three other company representatives when the air traffic controller strike hit and air travel became a chaotic nightmare to and from and within the USA.  We generally flew first class on overseas trips at company, but the Concorde was off limits under normal circumstances.  Under the circumstances, the Concorde offered the assured way to be sure we got back to America.  The Moroccan government made the reservations for our party and few flew from Casablanca to Paris, spent the night at the always fabulous Plaza Athenee - perhaps my favorite hotel in the world - and then took Concord to New York City, leaving Paris at 12:00 noon and arriving in New York around 8:30 am.  We maintained Mach 2 all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.  As the CNN piece notes, it truly was something special (I still my boarding pass holder and the menu - each flight had a unique menu).  Here are some article highlights (check out the 28 photos in the article): 

In 1976 -- over 40 years ago -- elite passengers were crossing the Atlantic in under three and a half hours, flying at twice the speed of sound in the Anglo-French Concorde.

Only 20 of the sleek, delta-winged SSTs were built, and just 14 were delivered to two airlines -- seven each to Air France and British Airways.

With superlative service and cuisine, exclusive airport lounges and stratospherically high airfares, Concorde passengers flew far above other flights, and cruised faster than fighter jets to their destinations.

But what was it really like to rub shoulders with the rich and famous on a Concorde flight? CNN Travel asked some former passengers.

"The flight attendants loved being on it; the passengers loved being on it," says CNN's Richard Quest, who flew Concorde five times. "You were aware of being part of a very small group of people that were privileged enough to be on Concorde.

With an interior fuselage width of about eight and a half feet (2.63 meters), Concorde's cabin was just wider than that of today's Bombardier Regional Jet. The SST had a single aisle, with a two-two seating configuration.

"The quality and style of food service was exceptional, . . . . "I felt more strongly that I had entered a private club. It was a brief glimpse into a life I had not known, polite, considerate, and beautifully detailed. It was impossible to not feel spoiled, and valued," says Ford.

Concorde was the first -- and still only -- passenger aircraft that had turbojet engines with afterburners. Called "reheat" by the British, raw fuel was introduced into the exhaust of the plane's four engines, immediately increasing the engines' thrust by almost 20%.

"Each takeoff was a phenomenal experience, the performance such that we had to warn the passengers in advance what to expect. The roar of the Rolls-Royce Olympus engines, combined with being pushed back into your seat, was like no other civilian aeroplane."

Reheat was also used to push the plane from subsonic to supersonic speeds.

Cruising at Mach 2 -- or 1,350 mph -- at 60,000 feet, Concorde flew five miles above and 800 mph faster than the subsonic 747s plodding across the Atlantic.

While Concorde no longer takes to the skies, it can be visited at a number of aviation museums around the world.

It truly was an experience that I will never forget.  I can still close my eyes and recall the takeoff and the steep pitch of the plane as it gained altitude with the afterburners fully engaged.  

My boarding pass holder

The menu cover

The Plaza Athenee - Paris

Russian Backed Separatists Shoot Down Civilian Airliner

Driven by a huge ego and a fantasy of returning to the glory days of the Russian Empire, Vladimir Putin has continued to fan the flames of civil war in Ukraine - a war largely drawn along religious lines with the Catholic west of Ukraine seeking closer ties to Europe while the Orthodox east seek Russian ties.  Now, based on reports so far, it appears that pro-Russia separatists shot down a Malaysian Airlines jetliner with 298 civilians aboard.  Sadly, Putin could end this conflict by cutting off supplies to the separatists, but likely will not given his insatiable ego and maniacal desire to restore Russia to greatness even as his own corrupt policies hold it back  The New York Times reports on the latest victims of Putin's ego.  Here are highlights:

A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with 298 people aboard exploded, crashed and burned on a flowered wheat field Thursday in a part of eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russia separatists, blown out of the sky at 33,000 feet by what Ukrainian and American officials described as a Russian-made antiaircraft missile.

Ukraine accused the separatists of carrying out what it called a terrorist attack. American intelligence and military officials said the plane had been destroyed by a Russian SA-series missile, based on surveillance satellite data that showed the final trajectory and impact of the missile but not its point of origin.

There were strong indications that those responsible may have errantly downed what they had thought was a military aircraft only to discover, to their shock, that they had struck a civilian airliner. Everyone aboard was killed, their corpses littered among wreckage that smoldered late into the summer night.

Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, blamed Ukraine’s government for creating what he called conditions for insurgency in eastern Ukraine, where separatists have bragged about shooting down at least three Ukrainian military aircraft. But Mr. Putin did not specifically deny that a Russian-made weapon had felled the Malaysian jetliner.

Flight 17, which had been bound for Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, from Amsterdam with 283 passengers, including three infants, and 15 crew members. Aviation officials said the plane had been traveling an approved and heavily trafficked route over eastern Ukraine, about 20 miles from the Russia border, when it vanished from radar screens with no distress signal.

Mr. Najib said he had spoken with the leaders of Ukraine and the Netherlands, who promised their cooperation. He also said that he had spoken with President Obama, and that “he and I both agreed that the investigation must not be hindered in any way.” The remark seemed to point to concerns about evidence tampering at the crash site, which is in an area controlled by pro-Russia insurgents.

By Thursday night, American intelligence analysts were increasingly focused on a theory that rebels had used a Russian-made SA-11 surface-to-air missile system to shoot down the aircraft and operated on their own fire-control radar, outside the checks and balances of the national Ukrainian air-defense network.

In Amsterdam, a Malaysia Airlines official, Huib Gorter, said the plane had carried 154 Dutch passengers; 45 Malaysians, including the crew; and 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, nine Britons, four Belgians, four Germans, three Filipinos and one Canadian. The rest of the passengers had not been identified.

Reduce Blogging Tomorrow and Friday

As part of my new job I will be traveling to corporate headwaters in New England.  My flight in the morning leaves before light and I have a full day ahead both tomorrow and Friday before I return to Hampton Roads on Friday evening.  I will uploads posts as time permits.

After having my own firm for eight years, it is going to be a big change to no longer being the boss.  On the other hand, a steady base salary and better benefits are hard to turn one's nose up at.

A Hard Landing for the Middle Class

The Republican Party is working hard to bring a return of the so-called Gilded Age  - a time when the robber barons made countless millions while most people struggled to survive.  The time period was reflected in that days main modes of travel: private railroad cars for the wealthy and fabulous accommodations on transatlantic liners while the rest of us - certainly my father's parents emigrating from Austria-Hungry prior to WWI and my mother's Irish grandmother - were relegated to steerage.  Nowadays, we are seeing the vast gulf in travel accommodations reflected in air travel where first class and business class amenities are expanding while coach class - today's equivalent of steerage - is getting ever more cramped and no frills.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the trend as we move into the GOP's new Gilded Age.  Here are excerpts:

It’s August, and Americans by the millions are cramming themselves into coach-class seats as they embark on their summer vacations. Those able to learn from adversity might ponder this: Airline seating may be the best concrete expression of what’s happened to the economy in recent decades.

Airlines are sparing no expense these days to enlarge, upgrade and increase the price of their first-class and business-class seating. As the space and dollars devoted to the front of the planes increase, something else has to be diminished, and, as multitudes of travelers can attest, it’s the experience of flying coach. The joys of air travel — once common to all who flew — have been redistributed upward and are now reserved for the well-heeled few.

The new business-class seats that Lufthansa is installing convert to quasi-beds that are 6 feet 6 inches long and two feet wide, the New York Times’ Jad Mouawad reports. The price for working, eating, drinking and sleeping on this commodious couch, round-trip from Kennedy airport to Frankfurt and back, is a cool $5,000.

Lufthansa is hardly alone. Delta, United and American have all announced plans to upgrade their business-class seats for cross-country and transcontinental flights. Then there’s Emirates, which now sells first-class suites — complete with a shower — that go for a tidy $19,000 on the New York-Dubai route.

At the other end of the economic spectrum, low-cost airlines that re-create the thrill of traveling in steerage are thriving, too. The new business model, apparently, is to shrink the seats, charge extra for everything and offer nothing for free that might be construed as an amenity. That’s certainly the credo of Spirit Airlines, which charges its benumbed passengers a fee for their carry-on bags, $3 for water and $10 for printing out boarding passes and whose seats don’t recline. Spirit boasts one of the highest profit margins in the industry . . . . It also ranks dead last in customer satisfaction — indeed, in last year’s Consumer Reports survey, it had one of the lowest overall customer satisfaction scores of any company in any industry that the magazine had ever surveyed.

But people fly Spirit Airlines because the fares are what they can afford.

The upgrading of business and the downgrading of coach present a fairly faithful mirror of what’s happening in the larger economy: the disappearance of the middle class. As University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez has documented, between 2009 and 2011, the incomes of the wealthiest 1 percent of American families grew by 11.2 percent while those of the remaining 99 percent shrunk by 0.4 percent. Median household income has declined every year since 2008. Profits, meanwhile, have risen to their highest share of the nation’s economy since World War II, while wages have sunk to their lowest share.

Airplanes, like stagnating economies, are finite, and if one class takes up more space or commands more resources, the other class gets less.The U.S. economy has not stagnated over the past four decades, but so much of its wealth has been claimed by the very top that most Americans have experienced it as a zero-sum game in which they’ve lost ground. As tax rules favored the wealthy, as employees lost the power to bargain for their wages, as globalization reduced the incomes of millions of workers, the rich grew richer at everyone else’s expense.