Friday, March 17, 2006

Quite Right Too

Concorde has been voted the number one design icon of the 20th Century by viewers of BBC2's The Culture Show and visitors to London's Design Museum.

This subject was the only one on which I've ever disagreed with a post of the Blessed Oliver's.

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm with you there Laban.

I stood on my balcony and watched the last three come in to Heathrow one after the other.

It sounds strange but I was close to tears.

6:28 pm
esbonio said...

An amazing aircraft. I cannot remember when I first saw it for real but it must have been very late 60s or more likely early 70s after I got my first day edition and corgi version or was it a dinky version; a member of my family got to fly in it (but then unlie yours truly he never got to fly in THE classic british jet fighter). If you have read Skunk Works you might want wonder whether Concorde or theSR-71 Blackbird was the greater technological achievement. On balance I think Concorde has it.

9:18 pm
JohnM said...

I should have thought you also diagreed with this

10:33 pm
Anonymous said...

My family moved down to Gloucester in 1965 and I often used to see the Vulcan ‘testbed’ appear over the Longlevens suburbs. It was used to test the RR Olympus strapped underneath and, as the Vulcan shared the wing configuration of Concorde, was best suited to the trials. It was based at Filton I think.

We had an impressive jet airliner industry in those days, with the BAC1-11, Trident, Comet 4C and the superb Vickers VC10, this last being aimed at a market niche that scarcely existed. Within 12 years there was no British jet airliner in production (the shorthaul BAe 146 entered production in the early 80s but was powered by US-built Lycoming engines and had other foreign components). Concorde was thus a glorious swansong of UK civil aviation. The Frenchies played it far better - although Airbus is collaborative, there is still an unquantifiable but critical advantage to building on your own soil and being at the centre of the operation.

11:37 am

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