Twentieth Century Society — Concorde design and lifestyle — notes

An online talk and Q&A with Lawrence Azerrad, hosted by the Twentieth Century Society, exploring the design, culture and legacy of the legendary Concorde. A glimpse into a past that showed us a future we still romantically strive for.

The main talk

Azerrad opened by framing Concorde not as a story about an aeroplane but as a story about ideas — possibility, ingenuity, and what happens when human creativity is pointed at an ambitious, seemingly unreachable goal (quoting American president John F. Kennedy in the process). He drew a through-line from the space race and the Apollo programme to the development of supersonic civil aviation, arguing that both were expressions of the same spirit: setting an aspiration and then working backwards to make it real.

"Futures literacy" anchored this, the idea that if you begin from what is merely probable, you never reach the extraordinary. Using the future cone model Azerrad showed places "preference" at the widest, most ambitious end: only by starting there do you have a chance of getting close to it. Concorde, like the polio vaccine or the moon landing, was that kind of moonshot.

The jet age context mattered enormously. We saw early renderings of LAX and images of Braniff Airlines' Emilio Pucci uniforms to illustrate how architecture, fashion and aviation were all pulling in the same direction in the late 1950s and 60s: a shared, palpable optimism that technology was going to make ordinary life better for many people, not just a few. Airlines from Lufthansa to Qantas had Concorde on order. It was never meant to be an elite product, but the next logical step in mass travel.

On the aircraft itself Azerrad was clearly in awe of the engineering. The Rolls-Royce Olympus engines (designed and built in Bristol) were effectively rocket engines, allowing the aeroplane to cruise at 1,350mph — faster than the Earth's rotation. A flight's service ceiling was 60,000ft, high enough to see the curvature of the Earth. The fastest transatlantic crossing: 2 hours, 52 minutes, 59 seconds. People "arrived before they set off", as they adjusted their watched in the time zone of their arrival. In 1973 it stayed within the path of totality of a solar eclipse for 74 minutes — a record for the longest total eclipse viewing in history.

He was candid about Concorde's shortcomings. Around a tonne of CO2 per passenger per flight was not defensible, although he acknowledged the aircraft came from a pre-computer era with completely different objectives (which was accompanied by an eye-opening picture of a large room of men – and it was men – working with paper and pens). Azerrad felt had the programme scaled, improvements in materials, sustainable aviation fuel and computer-aided design would have addressed much of this — but Concorde never got that chance.

The story of why it didn't... The US was developing its own supersonic transports (Boeing and Lockheed both had designs), and rather than let European aviation set the standard, American commercial and political pressure made it very difficult for Concorde to become a market norm. Then the Boeing 747 changed the economic equation entirely: dollar per seat per mile pointed decisively towards volume over speed. With no large-scale orders surviving, British Airways and Air France were left with fewer than 20 aircraft and had to pivot — turning Concorde into something closer to a prestige sports car than a new standard for air travel.

That pivot produced some remarkable design work. He traced the interior evolution across roughly four major redesigns — from Raymond Loewy's Air France interior (with echoes of Kubrick's 2001) through the rather grey Landor Associates period to Terence Conran's final BA interior: blue, lean, uncompromising. Every object a passenger touched had been designed by someone — menus, toiletry bags, silverware (famously pilfered by Andy Warhol), uniforms by Hardy Amies (the Queen's dressmaker, who also designed the costumes for 2001 and the uniforms for the 1972 Olympics). André Putman designed the last Air France interior. Azerrad quoted her: "To not dare is to have already lost." The Concorde Room at JFK, designed by Conran, was, he said, among the most beautiful rooms he could imagine being in.

He closed with Terence Conran's foreword to the first edition his book Supersonic, in 2016: "Concorde provides an example of aspiration that we can learn from today. It's an invitation to dream and create. It provides a calling that is needed now more than ever."

Q&A snippets

• Boom Supersonic (a modern attempt at commercial supersonic aeroplanes) has airline orders and believes it can deliver this decade, but the context is very different — private enterprise rather than national endeavour, and the post-9/11 migration to private jets has already shrunk the addressable market.
• The US role in Concorde's downfall: American pressure to block European aviation setting the supersonic standard meant the programme never achieved the scale it needed. When the US cancelled its own supersonic efforts, it redirected funding to the space shuttle rather than supporting Concorde. Nobody got the dream.
• Does every technology eventually collapse to volume? He didn't dispute it, but noted what gets lost — the 747's brief golden age of piano bars and Chateaubriand is also gone. The A380 and 747 are being retired. We keep stripping travel back to a logistics problem.
• "Why people fly in pyjamas now?" He borrowed this from designer Debbie Milman — passengers have stopped respecting the experience because airlines stopped respecting passengers first.
• Boom is targeting business-class prices, not ultra-luxury. The value proposition is time, not glamour. Some companies will pay for it, but the private jet boom since 9/11 has already taken a big chunk of the natural customer base.
• On optimism: not a platitude, a practical orientation. The real question is always how you point it at something and make it productive. That's Concorde's actual legacy.

The book Supersonic: The Design and Lifestyle of Concorde is now in its third edition.