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From the Times on Sunday:
She burned bright but takes her final bow this week. Jeremy Clarkson explains why he will be on Concorde for a last push through the sound barrier

Like most middle-aged people, I don’t know where I was when John F Kennedy was shot. But I do know where I was when the Air France Concorde crashed into a Paris hotel. And I know where I’ll be next Friday: on board the world’s only supersonic airliner as it makes its final scheduled flight from New York to London.
As I step off, the temptation will be strong to say: “That was one small step for a man. But one giant leap backwards for mankind.”

It’s hard to think of past examples where human beings had the technology to progress but held back. Maybe AD410, when the Romans pulled out of Britain, but not since. It’s not in our nature to snuff out the fire.

We went to the moon and now Beagle 2 is on its way to Mars. We invented the steam engine and replaced it almost immediately with internal combustion. We went to America in three hours . . . and now we can’t any more. It doesn’t make sense.

When the British and French governments decided to commission a supersonic jet liner in 1962, the engineers had no clue how such a thing might be achieved. Sure, they had jet fighters up there in the stratosphere, doing more than twice the speed of sound, but these were being flown by young men with triangular torsos in G-suits. The politicians were talking about putting overweight businessmen up there, in lounge suits.

Friends at Nasa have told me that the technological challenge of making a Mach 2.2 passenger jet was greater than putting a man on the moon. Those rocket boys get all teary-eyed about their beloved Apollos. But when you mention the Concorde, their eyes dry and they nod, slowly and reverentially.

That’s because life beyond the 750mph sound barrier is seriously hostile. There’s the friction, which generates so much heat that planes swell by up to a foot. There’s a spot on Concorde’s dash that, in flight, is so hot you could fry an egg on it. Then there’s the shockwave, a phenomenon of such ferocity that it jams the hydraulics and freezes the controls.

Toward the end of the second world war, pilots who put their Spitfires into a dive often lost control and could not pull up. They didn’t know it at the time but a supersonic shockwave, the source of the sonic boom, was to blame. It sat on the trailing edge of the wings, preventing the ailerons from moving. To get a plane to fly through the sound barrier, this shockwave has to be tamed.

Of course, you can’t let the supersonic savagery anywhere near those delicate Olympus engines. The air has to be slowed down before it’s allowed into the intakes and past the spidery blades.

To make things even more complicated, there’s the bothersome business of fuel consumption and reliability. A typical fighter jet of the 1960s, the Lightning, for instance, was out of juice after about 45 minutes. And it needed up to two weeks of maintenance after a sortie.

Concorde had to fly in that cruel place, where the air is as destructive as a nuclear blast, for 4,000 miles. Then it had to turn around and come home.

The Americans failed with their Supersonic Transport because they aimed for Mach 3 and the exotic materials needed to withstand the heat at this speed weren’t commercially available back then. The Russians were more realistic with their Tupolov but it failed because it only had a range of 1,500 miles.

It’s worth remembering that Concorde was built by trial and error after error. Men wearing Brylcreem and store coats, endlessly lobbing paper darts down the wind tunnel in Filton.

Make no mistake, Concorde was an extraordinary technological achievement. Almost certainly, one of the greatest.

And not just technically but politically. France and Britain couldn’t even agree on how it should be spelt. They finally decided that it should end in an “e”, in the French style, but then Macmillan fell out with de Gaulle and dropped the letter.

It was Tony Benn, the then secretary of state for industry, who solved the matter by declaring it would be “e” for England, “e” for Europe and “e” for entente cordiale.

Benn saved Concorde over and over again. He even had to fight the Americans who, in a fit of sour grapes, tried to ban the plane on the grounds that its sonic boom would knock over their cows.

They kicked up such a stink that, bit by bit, the world began to lose confidence in the plane. One by one, the 16 airlines that had ordered Concorde began to cancel until just two were left: Air France and BOAC.

Knowing that the plane was destined to be a commercial disaster, Benn had to cajole the Treasury and the French until, on January 21, 1976, the scheduled services began. For the first time, paying passengers could fly so fast they could watch the sun rise in the west and arrive in America before they left home.

The cost to the British taxpayer was astronomical: £1.34 billion. Even in today’s money, that would nearly get you two domes.

But, astonishingly, the white elephant became a cash cow. Even though this exotic plane arrived as Freddie Laker began to take the working classes to New York for

£59, it regularly flew three-quarters full and made £20m a year for BA.

From my point of view, in a Fulham flat, Concorde was simply a device that prevented me hearing the second item on the six and 10 o’clock news. Twice a night the hum of central London would be drowned by the crackle from those massive engines. And twice a night the entire city would look up. Familiarity never bred indifference.

And then. As I stepped off a Royal Navy Sea King helicopter in York, my phone rang to say Concorde had crashed into a Paris hotel.

My reaction was the same as yours. Initial shock that was only slightly lessened when we found out it was an Air France bird and the people on board were not British. Usually, in an accident of this kind, we mourn the people who have died. But this time, it was different. For the first time since Titanic, we mourned the loss of the machine itself.

The great white dart. The machine that reminded Londoners twice a day how great we once had been. The plane that was 40 years old but still at the cutting edge of everything. It was not invincible after all.

It never had been, actually. On one BA flight from New York to London one of the engine intakes refused to budge, increasing the drag and therefore the fuel consumption. The captain ignored the advice of his engineer and number two that they should land at Shannon in Ireland to refuel and cruised over the middle of London, arriving at Heathrow with enough juice for 90 seconds more flight. It ran dry while taxiing to the stand. Joan Collins never knew how close she came to being a permanent fixture in the wreckage of what had once been Harrods.

After the Paris crash and September 11, public confidence in Concorde dried up. I flew on it for the first time last year and couldn’t believe how empty it was.

There were lots of things I couldn’t believe, actually. Like how small the windows were, and where in such a tiny fuselage they found space for such an extraordinarily well stocked wine cellar. And how noisy it was in the back. But most of all, I couldn’t believe the surge of acceleration as it cleared Cornwall and the afterburners took us up past 1,000mph.

Unless my children become fighter pilots, they’ll never feel that surge.

No company or government in the world is currently undertaking serious work on a supersonic airliner. There’s talk of Gulfstream building a Mach 2 business jet and there are whisperings about a “scramjet” plane that could get from London to Sydney in two hours.

In the early 1990s, British Aerospace and Aerospatiale held secret talks about developing a 225-seat aircraft that could get across the Pacific at Mach 2.5. But when the proposed cost of such a thing worked out at £9 billion, they decided to build a double-decker bus instead.

Do you think Columbus would have reached America if he’d concerned himself with the bottom line? Do you think Armstrong would have walked on the moon or Hillary on the top of Everest? Was it profit that took Amundsen to the South Pole or drove Turing to invent the computer?

Compounding the problem is a sense that the first world has pulled so far ahead of the third, the money would be better spent helping others to catch up. For every pound spent on human advancement, there are a thousand bleeding hearts saying the money could have been spent on the starving in Africa. I see their point.

But what I cannot see is the human thirst for improvement being extinguished by the bean counters. No individual company or country could afford to develop a plane that’s significantly better than Concorde, so maybe what’s needed is a ring-fenced global fund for the greater good. A fund that undertakes the work business won’t touch, hunting the skies for asteroids, searching the seas to find a cure for cancer and fuelling our quest to go faster and faster.

Or maybe the days of mechanical speed are over. Why go to America at the speed of sound when, with an internet connection and video conferencing, you can be there at the speed of light? Why go at all? Maybe planes are about to follow in the footsteps of the horse. When the car came along, the horse didn’t go away. It simply stopped being a tool and became a toy. A show jumper. A playmate for 12-year-old girls.

If you can communicate instantly with anyone anywhere the only reason to travel is for fun, for your holidays. And given the choice of doing that at Mach 2 or for £2, I know which I’d choose.

Perhaps, then, this is not a step backwards. Maybe Concorde dies not because it’s too fast but because, in the electronic age, it’s actually too slow.

Chip.