Inside View from Ireland: Our respect for the white dart

THE LAST FLIGHT OF THE CONCORDE attracted more people to my Weblog than anything I have ever written. On her final flight across the Atlantic, my Irish Typepad attracted a new visitor every three minutes. They came to learn about the plane that could fly faster than a bullet, faster than the earth rotated.

Concorde was always a star and star quality makes for pulling power. Google's search engine reflects that fact as it nudged "Concorde" into the "top ten search strings" for the third week in October.

And so the legend retires, no longer to be heard rumbling overhead, louder than any British train. That leaves the environmentally-conscious lobby much happier. They consider Concorde to be an evil, smoke-belching dragon who panders to the rich.

Even so, Concorde's numbers will be historical achievements.

Its fastest Atlantic crossing occurred on 7 Feb 96: 2 hours 52 minutes, 59 seconds.
Each of its Rolls-Royce Snecma Olympus 593 engines produced more than 38,0000 pounds of thrust.
It measures 204 feet long but stretched between six and ten inches in flight.
When at FL600, it cruised at 1350 mph.
It used 25,629 litre of fuel an hour on its Atlantic crossings. It takes me three years to burn that amount of fuel in my car. If a motorway connected Ireland to Boston, I could make ten return trips with the fuel Concorde burned in one hour.

I hope the National Air and Space Museum gets a Concorde. Its sleek shape and analogue cockpit will motivate future generations to earn engineering degrees, perhaps bringing an equally sophisticated mode of transportation to the 21st century.

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