supersonic airliner

Concorde: The Thrilling Account of History’s Most Extraordinary Airliner
by Mike Bannister
Published 29 Sep 2022

These dealt with multiple aspects of the challenge ahead, including materials, systems, engines and the economic and social ramifications, not the least of which was the impact sonic booms would have on populated areas – this at a time when it was envisaged that such an aircraft would fly supersonically over land. Meantime, supersonic transport aircraft studies were under way in France, the USA and the Soviet Union. The French initially were set on developing a supersonic airliner based on their highly successful Sud Aviation Caravelle; this for use on European and African routes – a medium-range design France remained wedded to for some time. In the USA, Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed were all involved in SST, or supersonic transport, studies. Intense competition from the UK, France and the USSR had resulted in the unprecedented decision by Washington to develop an SST utilising government subsidy channelled through the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics – NACA, forerunner of NASA – with Boeing eventually selected to design and build an SST at the end of 1966, the Boeing 2707.

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In the mid-1950s, various research and design studies into supersonic flight at the UK’s Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough had, by 1956, led to the formation of a Supersonic Transport Advisory Committee. In the days when Britain still had a sizeable and largely independent aviation industry, the STAC comprised nine British airframe manufacturers, four engine companies, leading research establishments, several government departments and BOAC and BEA. The STAC’s first meeting, on 5th November 1956, resulted in hundreds of written submissions covering the feasibility of a supersonic transport aircraft. These dealt with multiple aspects of the challenge ahead, including materials, systems, engines and the economic and social ramifications, not the least of which was the impact sonic booms would have on populated areas – this at a time when it was envisaged that such an aircraft would fly supersonically over land.

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But to paraphrase Bill, if we ignored or abused the system, the consequences had the capacity to prove fatal. 21 Prior to the fuel crisis of 1973–4, BAC and Sud Aviation had 200-plus orders for Concorde and the future of the aeroplane looked moderately rosy, with many airlines thinking this was the way to go. But when the fuel crisis hit, they all reconsidered. The choice they faced was binary: do we buy this supersonic airliner that can carry 100 passengers but only as far as the width of the Atlantic? Or do we buy this big 747, which has just come out, which can carry up to 450 passengers pretty much anywhere in the world? Ironically, you’d make more money flying a full Concorde across the Atlantic than you would a full 747, but there was another element to consider: your customer base of the future.

Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am
by Robert Gandt
Published 1 Mar 1995

It was the spring of 1963, and both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times had come out against the allocation of any more development funds for the SST—America’s supersonic transport. In Washington a speech had been delivered by Senator William Proxmire, congressional budget bloodhound, demanding that SST development funds be shriveled from $280 million to $80 million. To Proxmire and his disciples, the SST was a boondoggle—another fleecing of the taxpayers for the further enrichment of American big business. Such thinking incensed Trippe. The backward-thinking, nay-saying Primitives! It was just like the 707 project. Hadn’t he been proved correct in his determination to commence all-jet service? Now it was the supersonic transport. To Juan Trippe the SST amounted to more than just another pointy-nosed airplane that flew faster than sound.

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The technology, it was assumed, would evolve from the experimental B-70 supersonic bomber being built by the military aircraft manufacturer North American. At Lockheed’s famous “Skunk works,” where futuristic airplanes like the P-38 and the U-2 and the F-104 had been created, preliminary sketches were already rendered for a supersonic airliner. But Quesada’s proposal drowned in the muddy waters of the Defense Department and the Eisenhower cabinet. Then came young blood. The Kennedy administration replaced Quesada with a former test pilot named Najeeb Halaby. In addition to heading the Federal Aviation Agency, Halaby would be aviation adviser to Kennedy.

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But mostly they talked about Pan Am: “Did you know they’re buying a whole fleet of 727s?” “They’re opening a base on Guam. . . ” “. . . flying freighters to Saigon. . . ” “We’ll make captain in five years. . . ” “Pan Am will be the first to get the SST. . . ” Someone said he had seen a mockup of the American SST. The tail of the proposed supersonic transport bore the Pan Am blue ball. On this, the morning of the first day of their new careers, a euphoria pervaded their chatter. It was the sweet, contented certainty that they had arrived. By some stroke of fortune they had been plucked from the vast ocean of faceless and futureless aviators and deposited here in aeronautical heaven.

Boeing Versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business
by John Newhouse
Published 16 Jan 2007

It’s very difficult to establish trust.”15 For now, the conventional wisdom supports the skeptics. Risk-averse Japanese suppliers do have a very good deal with Boeing, and they might be content to await a new cycle in technology, one that showed signs of moving industry toward a cost-effective supersonic airliner. “We have to decide whether to take a bigger part in engine development, or whether to leapfrog the current generation [of aircraft] and jump ahead to the supersonic technology, since the U.S. and the Europeans are ignoring this sector,” said one industry executive.16 Suppose that Boeing, for whatever reason, ended its privileged association with Japan.

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“We have to decide whether to take a bigger part in engine development, or whether to leapfrog the current generation [of aircraft] and jump ahead to the supersonic technology, since the U.S. and the Europeans are ignoring this sector,” said one industry executive.16 Suppose that Boeing, for whatever reason, ended its privileged association with Japan. Would Airbus abandon one or more of its “centers of excellence” so as to acquire similar arrangements with Japan’s aircraft industry? We are unlikely to know, since it’s unlikely to happen and hard to imagine, unless, that is, Japan should elect to develop a supersonic airliner and choose a partner, like Airbus, that can draw on direct financial help from partner governments. Meanwhile, Airbus will continue to do what it has always done—outsource a huge array of components and subsystems, many of them to American and Chinese suppliers. Until recently, the received wisdom was that Airbus, unlike Boeing, wouldn’t outsource core competences, partly because of the jobs that would leave and partly because of a reluctance to help any supplier become a competitor.

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He wanted a clean break with Boeing’s 737 and Douglas’s DC-9 in aerodynamics. He wanted some carbon fiber [hence, less weight] and a new flight management system. “Since 1976, we had been working on a new cockpit—flight management system—in the lab. It was fly by wire. It was being tested on the Concorde [the Anglo-French supersonic transport], where I was production manager. But only in 1982 did we decide that we were ready for fly by wire.”14 Fly by wire is a system for moving an airplane’s control surfaces with electrical impulses transmitted by wire. It replaced the heavier standard system that did the job with cables and pulleys.

Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her
by Rowland White and Richard Truly
Published 18 Apr 2016

Painted in an elegant sky-blue and white livery, the jet usually bestowed bragging rights upon the US president in any company. But that Sunday, December 12, Pompidou arrived in Lajes aboard Concorde 001, the first prototype of the needle-nosed Anglo-French supersonic airliner. The appearance that America was lagging behind the Europeans embarrassed the US president, who had been disappointed a year earlier when Congress had strangled the country’s own supersonic transport project. At dinner on Monday night Nixon observed that Pompidou’s journey to the Azores had been three times quicker than his own. “I do not speak in envy,” he claimed, “I only wish we had made the plane ourselves.”

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• • • NASA had tried, without ever being entirely convincing, to justify the Shuttle on the grounds of cost, national security and jobs, but in the end perhaps it was simply that Nixon wasn’t prepared to preside over either the end of US manned spaceflight or, following the abandonment of Boeing’s supersonic airliner, a further retreat from the country’s world-leading position in aerospace technology. America would have a Space Shuttle because America should have one. And on January 3, 1972, NASA were told to draft a statement for the president. The Space Shuttle had been approved. Two days later, at the Western White House in California, NASA’s new administrator, James Fletcher, met with Richard Nixon.

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Next, Moser traveled to England, where he visited the British Aircraft Corporation factory at Filton, near Bristol, to be briefed on the Concorde, an aircraft he thought was perhaps the most beautiful piece of engineering he’d ever seen in his life. In contrast to Lockheed, the British and French engineers had built their supersonic airliner from aluminum-copper alloy. Because of a lower top speed, the Concorde didn’t have to contend with the same absolute temperatures as the American spy planes Moser had studied. Instead, the challenge for designers was to accommodate extreme temperature differentials of the kind that cause a cold glass to shatter on first contact with boiling water.

The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite
by Ann Finkbeiner
Published 26 Mar 2007

“Report on SST Said to be Kept Secret,” New York Times, March 13, 1970, 50. House Subcommittee on Department of Transportation and Related Agencies Appropriations, Hearings on Supersonic Transport Program, 70-H181-32, 91st Cong., 2nd sess., April 23, 1970, 980–94; Garwin quote about 50 747’s, Ibid., 982; Garwin quote about immediate termination, Ibid., 988. Joint Economic Committee, Subcommittee on Economy in Government, Hearings on Supersonic Transport Development, 91st Cong., 2nd sess., May 7, 1970, May 11–12, 1970, pp. 904–20. Senate, Subcommittee on Department of Transportation and Related Agencies Appropriations, Hearings on 70-S181-34, 91st Cong., 2nd sess., August 28, 1970, 1621–1681.

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This story is about the differences between the worlds of scientists and science advisers; the Jasons tell it unasked and with marginal accuracy. In 1969 Richard Garwin began a rare second term on the President’s Science Advisory Committee, PSAC. One of the science-related issues then before the nation and PSAC was whether to build a commercial airplane that would fly faster than the speed of sound, the supersonic transport, called the SST, which the French and British were already building. The Nixon administration commissioned several ad hoc panels to study the feasibility of the SST; one panel was under the White House’s Office of Science and Technology, and Garwin was in charge of it. In March 1969 Garwin’s report—like the report of at least one other panel—recommended against the SST; Garwin’s recommended that the government drop the whole program.

Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper
by Geoffrey Gray
Published 8 Aug 2011

Its primary use is in very fast airplanes. Titanium is extremely resistant to heat. So, engineers crafted planes such as the SR-71 and prototypes for the Boeing Supersonic Transport from titanium. In light of the timing of the hijacking, the discovery of titanium sponge is curious. In the fall of 1971, Boeing canceled its Supersonic Transport program and laid off the program’s workers. Was it conceivable that a Boeing worker handled the titanium sponge while working on the Supersonic Transport, got particles of titanium sponge on his tie, then boarded Northwest 305 in a grudge-fueled moment after getting canned? More enticing is that extremely few companies processed titanium sponge for Boeing.

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She is living in a small house in Renton, south of Seattle. The sky is filled with Boeing airplanes. Renton is where the legendary 707 and 727 are manufactured. Renton is also where Boeing’s engineers are now busy trying to perfect the Supersonic Transport, a futuristic jet that can ferry passengers to London in only a few hours, and at the sound-breaking speed of 1,900 miles per hour. Designed to compete with the French Concorde and the Russian Tupolev, the Supersonic Transport program is controversial. The jet will fly too fast. Over time, the Supersonic will shorten the life expectancy rate, one scientist warns. Humans are not supposed to live life at those speeds.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
by Oliver Morton
Published 26 Sep 2015

Rockets, meanwhile, were starting to punch their way right through the stratosphere, leaving NOx and more in their wake – and if the Earth was really on the brink of a ‘space age’, there were going to be a lot more rockets. From the mid-1960s onwards the possibility that rockets and jets might damage the ozone layer on a global scale was being looked at by scientists, by military planners and by concerned environmentalists. In 1970 America decided not to go ahead with the development of supersonic airliners. It was a crucial moment in environmental history – the first time that, in part because of public concerns about the environment, a futuristic technology of the sort that had long enlivened the covers of popular science and science fiction magazines was deliberately foregone. Fears about the health of the stratosphere played only a part in this – by the time there was plausible scientific evidence of the damaging effects of the proposed airliners’ exhaust, the programme was already doomed by its cost and by a more immediate, if less global, environmental concern about sonic booms.

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Fears about the health of the stratosphere played only a part in this – by the time there was plausible scientific evidence of the damaging effects of the proposed airliners’ exhaust, the programme was already doomed by its cost and by a more immediate, if less global, environmental concern about sonic booms. But continuing research that built on what Johnston and Paul Crutzen – a wily and astute atmospheric chemist who, a couple of decades later, introduced the term ‘Anthropocene’ into science’s vocabulary – had discovered about NOx showed that a fleet of 500 supersonic airliners would reduce stratospheric ozone levels by 10–20 per cent worldwide. The idea that the ozone layer was fragile, and that human activity could significantly affect a fundamental part of the earthsystem, was firmly established. In the end, though, it was not through the nitrogen oxides produced by jet exhausts that humans began to do serious damage to the ozone layer.

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Because nitrous oxide is stable enough to stay around for decades, it has time to drift up to the stratosphere – where, in the presence of ultraviolet light, it finally breaks down into NOx compounds that attack the ozone. The first studies of chemical harm to the ozone layer by Paul Crutzen and Harold Johnston looked at just this problem, though they imagined the NOx coming from fleets of supersonic airliners. The airliners never materialized; the world’s concern shifted, rightly, to CFCs. But now CFC emissions have been slashed and their presence in the stratosphere has plateaued; emissions of nitrous oxide, on the other hand, are continuing to grow. As a result, nitrous oxide emissions, mostly from farmlands, are now doing more to slow the ozone layer’s recovery than emissions of any other anthropogenic chemical.

After Apollo?: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program
by John M. Logsdon
Published 5 Mar 2015

For example, on the morning of March 24, 1971, he met with several senators in a last minute (and unsuccessful) effort to avoid the Senate voting that afternoon against the supersonic transport program. Reflecting on his meetings, Nixon told his Congressional liaison Clark MacGregor that “the United States should 180 A f t e r A p o l l o? not drop out of any competition in a breakthrough in knowledge—exploring the unknown. That’s one of the reasons I support the space program.” Without pausing, he added “I don’t give a damn about space. I am not one of those space cadets.”13 Congressional refusal to continue funding for the supersonic transport was deeply disappointing to Richard Nixon, and may have reinforced his belief in the importance of the space program as a means of symbolizing America’s commitment to leadership in “exploring the unknown.”

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The president said that “the polls and the people to whom he talked indicated to him that the mood of the people was for cuts in space and defense.” Nixon also said that the people of the country seem to think all they want is a nice environment and a turning-away from challenge and sacrifice. Even so, thought Nixon, there were areas like “science, space, and the SST [supersonic transport] the nation must put money into.” Paine asked Nixon what he should tell the NASA workforce about the thinking behind the budget cuts. Nixon responded that the FY1971 NASA budget should be “rock bottom” and that he was “committed to the space program for the long-term future,” adding “we should have a strong space program and it should be on an increasing [budget] curve.”

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That is what it’s all about, and so when we look at . . . the space program, whether it’s Mars or whether it’s the shuttle or who knows what it is. I don’t care what it is, but the main thing is we have to go, we have to go, we’ve got to find out. The majority of the people in all of the polls show that they are against the SST [supersonic transport], they are against the space program. They just want to sort of settle down . . . If the United States just didn’t . . . have the problems of going to space, then what a wonderful country this would be. And the answer is it wouldn’t be at all. It would be a terrible country. It would be a country big, fat, rich, but with no sense of spirit . . .

Hidden Figures
by Margot Lee Shetterly
Published 11 Aug 2016

Johnson STEM Institute in 2016. 251 “Rockets, moon shots, spend it on the have-nots”: James Nyx Jr. and Marvin Gaye, “Inner City Blues,” What’s Going On, New York: Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 1971. 252 “pollution, ecological damage, energy shortages, and the arms race”: Robert Ferguson, NASA’s First A: Aeronautics from 1958 to 2008 (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2012). 252 “salt on the wounds”: Ibid. 252 “big fat money pot”: Alan Wasser, “LBJ’s Space Race: What We Didn’t Know Then, Part Two,” The Space Settlement Institute, June 27, 2005, http://www.thespacereview.com/article/401/1. 252 cancel its supersonic transport program: Christine M. Darden, “Affordable Supersonic Transport: Is It Near?” Japan Society for Aeronautical and Space Sciences lecture, Yokohama, Japan, October 9–11, 2002. 252 an “Apollo moment”: Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution, 102. 252 “setting dogs to barking”: Lawrence R. Benson, Quieting the Boom: The Shaped Sonic Boom Demonstrator and the Quest for Quiet Supersonic Flight (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2013), 8. 252 “death of pets and the insanity of livestock”: Ibid, 7. 253 “164 million”: “Exploring in Aeronautics: An Introduction to Aeronautical Sciences Developed at the NASA Lewis Research Center,” NASA Lewis Research Center, 1971, 1. 253 Langley announced a sweeping reorganization: Edgar M.

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From where Katherine Goble was sitting, upstairs in Langley’s hangar, the Soviet move looked rather like a new beginning for the NACA nuts. Skies all over the world bore witness to four decades of successful Langley research, from passenger jets to bombers, transport planes to fighter aircraft. With supersonic military aircraft a reality, and the industry moving forward on commercial supersonic transport, it appeared that the “revolutionary advances for atmospheric aircraft” had run their course. Furthermore, Langley’s high-speed flight operations, which had been migrating over the years from the populated Hampton Roads area to isolated Dryden, in the Mojave Desert, were officially ended by a 1958 NACA headquarters edict.

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With the Moon landing achieved, the victory over the Soviet Union in hand, there was no urgency to push beyond Project Apollo, whose last two missions narrowly escaped cancellation. The press surrounding the end of the Apollo program was clamorous, but the cancellation of another program also garnered headlines. In 1972, the United States decided to cancel its supersonic transport program, the SST, which many aerodynamicists had hoped would give them an “Apollo moment,” a glorious, high-profile display of their technology. The expensive program raised the hackles of those concerned about its negative impact on the Earth’s ozone layer, but it was the sonic boom “carpet” that swept across the landscape as the plane passed overhead that really inflamed public opinion.

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths
by Mariana Mazzucato
Published 1 Jan 2011

Figure 13 Origins of popular Apple products Figure 14 Global new investment in renewable energy (US$, billions) Figure 15 Government energy R&D spend as % GDP in 13 countries, 2007 Figure 16 Subsectors of venture capital within clean energy Figure 17 The global market for solar and wind power (US$, billions), 2000–2011 LIST OF ACRONYMS AEIC American Energy Innovation Council ARPA-E Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (US Department of Energy) ARRA American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ATP Advanced Technology Program BIS Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (UK) BNDES Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Brazilian Development Bank) CBI Confederation of British Industries CBO Congressional Budget Office (UK) CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research, Geneva DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (USA) DECC Department of Energy and Climate Change (UK) DEMOS UK think tank DoD US Department of Defense DoE US Department of Energy DRAM Dynamic random-access memory EC European Commission, Brussels EPA Environmental Protection Agency (USA) EPRI Electric Power Research Institute FDA Food and Drug Administration (USA) FINNOV FINNOV EC FP7 project (www.finnov-fp7.eu) FIT Feed-in tariff GDP Gross domestic product GE General Electric GMR Giant magnetoresistance GPS Global positioning system GPT General purpose technology GW Gigawatt GWEC Global Wind Energy Council HM Treasury Her Majesty’s Treasury (UK) IP Intellectual property IPO Initial public offering on stock market IPR Intellectual property rights MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology MITI Ministry of International Trade and Industry (Japan) MRC Medical Research Council (UK) MW Megawatt NAS National Academy of Sciences (USA) NBER National Bureau of Economic Research (USA, non-profit) NESTA National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (UK) NIH National Institutes of Health (USA) NIST National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA) NME New molecular entity NNI National Nanotechnology Initiative (USA) NSF National Science Foundation (USA) NYT New York Times (USA) OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OSTP Office of Science and Technology Policy (USA) OTA Office of Technology Assessment (USA) OTP Office of Tax Policy (USA) PhRMA Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (trade association) PIRC Public Interest Research Centre (USA, non-profit) PV Photovoltaic R&D Research and development S&P 500 Standard & Poor’s (S&P) stock market index, based on the market capitalizations of 500 leading companies publicly traded in the US SBIC Small Business Investment Company (USA) SBIR Small Business Innovation Research (USA) SITRA Suomen itsenäisyyden juhlarahasto (Finnish Innovation Fund) SMEs Small and medium enterprises SRI Stanford Research Institute (USA, non-profit) SST (American) Supersonic Transport project TFT Thin-film transistor TFP Total factor productivity TW Terawatt VC Venture capital WIPO World Intellectual Property Organization ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The book could not have been written without the intellectual stimulus and hard work of many colleagues and friends. First and foremost were inspirational exchanges with two of the world’s best economic historians: Carlota Perez and Bill Lazonick.

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Losers Picking the State We are constantly told that the State should have a limited role in the economy due to its inability to ‘pick winners’, whether the ‘winners’ are new technologies, economic sectors or specific firms. But what is ignored is that, in many of the cases that the State ‘failed’, it was trying to do something much more difficult than what many private businesses do: either trying to extend the period of glory of a mature industry (the Concorde experiment or the American Supersonic Transport project), or actively trying to launch a new technology sector (the Internet, or the IT revolution). Operating in such difficult territory makes the probability of failure much higher. Yet by constantly bashing the State’s ability to be an effective and innovative agent in society, not only have we too easily blamed the State for some of its failures, we have also not developed the accurate metrics needed to judge its investments fairly.

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Yet the returns to public versus private venture capital are compared without taking this difference into account. Ironically, the inability of the State to argue its own position, to explain its role in the winners that have been picked (from the Internet to companies like Apple) has made it easier to criticize it for its occasional failures (e.g. the Supersonic Transport project). Or even worse, it has responded to criticism by becoming vulnerable and timid, easily ‘captured’ by lobbies seeking public resources for private gain, or by pundits that parrot the ‘myths’ about the origins of economic dynamism. In the late 1970s capital gains taxes fell significantly following lobbying efforts on behalf of the US venture capital industry (Lazonick 2009, 73).

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900
by David Edgerton
Published 7 Dec 2006

Compared to a hypothetical pressurised water reactor (PWR) programme the total loss was predicted to be around £2bn in 1975 prices.44 When the electricity industry was privatised, the Magnox reactors could not be sold; the AGRs were effectively given away free. A second great project of the 1960s derived from military precedents, the Anglo-French supersonic airliner Concorde, was also, according to cost-benefit analysis, a dreadful waste of money. The prototype flew in 1969, and commercial, if that is the right term, flights started in 1976. Would there be any returns? The airlines said that they could not fly Concorde profitably even if it was given to them for nothing, as effectively happened in the cases of British Airways and Air France, who operated them for around thirty years.

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The ironer, a machine to iron clothes, diffused to 10 per cent of Canadian households, but rather than being the beginning of a new wave of household automation, promptly disappeared, much as the British tea-making machines would.16 The airship, a technological wonder of the early decades of the century, went out of use quickly from the 1930s. The miracle insecticide DDT was to disappear faster than the mosquitoes and other insects it was used to kill. Concorde looks like being the first and the last supersonic airliner. Manned hypersonic aeroplanes disappeared in the 1960s. At the end of the twentieth century, nuclear power, once the technology of the future, was set to be phased out in many countries. And in medicine too, many treatments invented in the twentieth century were discontinued, lobotomy and ECT being prominent examples, though the last is still occasionally used.

Kelly: More Than My Share of It All
by Clarence L. Johnson
Published 1 Jan 1985

They have more and larger forging presses than the United States. In-flight refueling, developed to give the SR-71 global range, has become routine. By the early 1980s we had made more than 18,000 of them and can refuel in the air anywhere. In fact, I have suggested that mid-air refueling could alleviate the sonic-boom problem for supersonic transports. We’ve had to be very careful where we flew with the Blackbirds because of that problem—shock waves carried to earth in the wake of the aircraft. Inevitably we’ve heard complaints on sonic booms—everything from claims that they disturbed fishing in Yellowstone Park to one insistence that they made pack mules want to jump trail.

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Of course, this was developed in great secrecy and there still were those at the time who said it couldn’t be done. Or who would have anticipated that in only five years, from 1977 to 1982, the cost of a jet transport would rise 300 percent? Or that jet fuel would skyrocket from seventeen cents to $1.50 a gallon? In retrospect, this country was wise not to have gone ahead with its supersonic transport in the 1960s. And Lockheed was fortunate to have lost that design competition. The SST would have hit the fuel crisis head on. And the noise would have been unacceptable. It is not an airplane we can afford to fly today in commercial use. The Concorde, of course, enjoys government subsidies by Great Britain and France.

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To be economically sound, an SST will require development of another series, or two, of jet engines with much greater thrust-to-weight ratio that can achieve supersonic speed without afterburner. Whether we develop these improved engines by the year 2000 is dependent on availability of development funds. And for successful commercial airline use, the supersonic transport first must overcome the noise problem. This, too, will yield to advanced engine development. There is a technique, not a solution, that could be used right now to reduce takeoff noise but I have not been able to persuade others that it would be acceptable to passengers. The passengers wouldn’t even know when it was taking place.

Future Shock
by Alvin Toffler
Published 1 Jun 1984

Geneva: World Student Christian Federation, p. 224. 431 Research and development figures are from [169], p. 24. 431 Lapp is quoted from [290], p. 29. 432 Lack of science policy is charged in OECD report [335]; see also The New York Times, January 13, 1968. 433 Technological likelihoods are discussed in [159], pp. 51-52. 434 OLIVER's potentials are explored in "Computer as a Communications Device" by J. C. R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor in Science and Technology, April, 1968, p. 31. 435 For discussions of the supersonic transport, see "The SST and the Government: Critics Shout into a Vacuum," Science, September 8, 1967, and "Sonic Booms from Supersonic Transport" by Karl D. Kryter, Science, January 24, 1969. 436 The proposal for an artificial ocean in Brazil is described in "A Wild Plan for South America's Wilds" by Tom Alexander in Fortune, December, 1967, p. 148. 439 On forecasting value change, see "Value Impact Forecaster—A Profession of the Future" by Alvin Toffler in [131]. 440-41 Scientists' resistance to regulation is commented on in "Change and Adaptation" by Amitai Etzioni in Science, December, 1966, p. 1533. 441 The case for the regulation of technology is argued in "The Control of Technology" by O.

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We will soon, no doubt, be able to put super-LSD or an anti-aggression additive or some Huxleyian soma into our breakfast foods. We will soon be able to settle colonists on the planets and plant pleasure probes in the skulls of our newborn infants. But should we? Who is to decide? By what human criteria should such decisions be taken? It is clear that a society which opts for OLIVER, nuclear energy, supersonic transports, macroengineering on a continental scale, along with LSD and pleasure probes, will develop a culture dramatically different from the one that chooses, instead, to raise intelligence, diffuse anti-aggression drugs and provide low-cost artificial hearts. Sharp differences would quickly emerge between the society that presses technological advance selectively, and that which blindly snatches at the first opportunity that comes along.

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Fourth and finally, we must pose a question that until now has almost never been investigated, and which is, nevertheless, absolutely crucial if we are to prevent widespread future shock. For each major technological innovation we must ask: What are its accelerative implications? The problems of adaptation already far transcend the difficulties of coping with this or that invention or technique. Our problem is no longer the innovation, but the chain of innovations, not the supersonic transport, or the breeder reactor, or the ground effect machine, but entire inter-linked sequences of such innovations and the novelty they send flooding into the society. Does a proposed innovation help us control the rate and direction of subsequent advance? Or does it tend to accelerate a host of processes over which we have no control?

Air Crashes and Miracle Landings: 60 Narratives
by Christopher Bartlett
Published 11 Apr 2010

At the end of its life, much of it was ‘old technology’—with production having ceased, there was no incentive to make costly improvements, even to the tires. With so few flights, it fell statistically from one of the safest aircraft to one of the most dangerous when disaster befell. [Air France Flight 4590] Concorde’s History The world’s first supersonic airliner, the Concorde 001, rolled onto the tarmac in 1967, but according to CNN it took two more years of testing and fine-tuning of the powerful engines before it made its maiden flight over France on March 2, 1969. The original plan was for a production run of 300, but in the end, the production run was limited to just 14.

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148 Reason, Professor 40, 59, 325 Red Alert 68 Regulatory Framework 330 restarting the APU 25 Risk of Flying and Driving 330 Rogers III, Captain William C. 299 Rolls-Royce 65 Rolls-Royce A380 incident 65 Rose, David 162 runway extension 99 Runway Overrun, Qantas 55 Runway Overruns xv S SabreTech 155 Safest Airline 55 Safest Seat 334 Sainte Odile 265 SAM 131 Sarin 243 Sasaki, First Officer Yutaka 115 Sato-Tomita, Jane 232 Saudi Arabian Airlines 135 Saudi King’s 747 138 Saudia Flight 163 135 Scandinavian Airlines Flight 686 & Cessna Citation CJ2 94 scenario fulfillment 91 Schornsteimer, Captain 232 Schreuder, Flight Engineer 78 Schreuder, KLM Flight Engineer 333 seat belt buckle 191 secondary radar 108 Shappell, Scott A. xiii Shootdown 297 SilkAir 89, 173 Singapore Airlines Flight 006 86 single-mindedness 140 Skiles, First Officer Jeffrey 22 Skyguide 72 Sliney, Operations Director, Ben 316 Smith, Patrick xiii Smoke in Cockpit Forced Pilots to Land Short 133 smuggling marijuana 15 Some Air Traffic Control Exchanges in French 92 Sopwith Camels 277 Sour Aftertaste 54 South African Airways Flight 201 223 South Pole 256 spy in the cockpit 247 SQ006 86 St Elmo’s fire 9 Staines 167 stall xvi States, Captain Edward 175 sterile cockpit rule 182 Stewart, Stanley 39 stick pusher 168, 184, 185 stick shake 269 stick shaker 113, 143, 168 Stockholm syndrome 312 Strong, James 63 structural flap 231 suicide 89, 122, 123, 172, 173, 324 Sullenberger III, Captain Chesley B. 19 supersonic airliner 161 swamp 155 Swiss Cheese 59, 325 Swissair 111 158 Swissair Caravelle 282 Swissair Flight 306 282 Swissair Flight SR111 158 T TACAN. 116 tail strike 121 Tailspin 297 Taipei 86 Takahama, Capt. Masami 115 Tenerife 179 Teterboro 21 THE DC-10 CASE:A Study in Applied Ethics, Technology, and Society 103 The Main Academic Models 324 threshold 15, 56, 60, 64, 65, 67, 93, 159 Ticehurst, Second Officer 170 titanium strip 163 TOGA 57, 195 Tompkins, Madeline (Mimi) 232 Trans World Airlines Flight 800 150 Transat 18 transponder 108 Trident 167 Trident tri-jet 228 TriStar 104, 135, 250, 253, 254, 285 Turkish Airlines DC-10 107 Turkish Airlines Flight 981 107 Twin-Towers 313 U U.S. airline, Delta 298 UA232 125 UA811 238 Unbuckled Passengers Hit Ceiling Panels 198 Unforeseen Consequences of Good Intentions 331 United Airlines Flight 173 27 United Airlines Flight 175 313 United Airlines Flight 232 125 United Airlines Flight 811 238 United Airlines Flight 826 252 United Airlines Flight 93 313 US Airways flight 1549 19 US$2.5 million 140 USS Montgomery 300 USS Sides 307 USS Vincennes guided missile cruiser 299 V ValueJet Flight 592 152 ValuJet situation 153 van Zanten 78 Varig Flight 820 133 Vaughan, Diane 327 vents 25, 103, 110, 123, 241, 325 Vents 105 Vidal, Gene 5 Vidal, Gore 5 Video Recorders 333 Vladivostok 297 vomiting 11 W wake turbulence 174 water-repellent 62 We are going to invert!

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

France nationalised the utilities and the carmaker Renault, in retaliation for the owner’s alleged collaboration with the Nazis. In the 1960s there was an effort in many countries to build up “national champions” in sectors such as aerospace and electronics, in a belief that this would enable Europe to close the gap with the US; in part, this motivated the creation of the Anglo-French supersonic airliner, Concorde. Mergers were encouraged in the hope that large companies could benefit from economies of scale. 23 Alfred Muller-Armack coined the term “social market economy” for a structure that was a middle way between socialism and a laissez-faire economy. This structure also attempted to balance the aims of economic efficiency and income redistribution.24 Welfare programmes were a key part of this balance.

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Google’s search algorithm was funded with the help of a grant from the National Science Foundation, while touchscreen technology was developed by publicly funded academics.21 Marianna Mazzucato, an economist at University College, London, argues that a myth has been created in which the state is always lumbering and bureaucratic, whereas in reality it has been vital in funding high-risk investments in areas like pharmaceuticals and technology.22 In 2013 countries in the OECD spent about $40bn on publicly funded research and development, and another $30bn on tax breaks for R&D.23 It is tough to assess the long-term record of government investment. For all the successes noted by Ms Mazzucato, there have been plenty of examples of governments backing “white elephant” projects; Concorde, the supersonic airliner, for example, or costly nuclear power stations. The private sector makes mistakes as well, of course. But once governments commit themselves to these projects, it can be very hard for politicians to admit their mistakes and cut their losses. But it is pretty clear that there is a public interest in funding long-term research.

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration
by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees
Published 18 Apr 2022

If the United States and other countries decided to prioritize sending humans to Mars to the same degree as the Apollo program, few would disagree that astronauts could reach Mars well before 2050, and probably by 2040. However, the prevailing political and commercial reality creates a large gulf between what can be done and what will be done. Consider that the Concorde, the first supersonic airliner, which entered service four months before the first Apollo landing on the moon, made its final flight almost twenty years ago, with no detailed plans for any successor. NASA’S JUSTIFICATION FOR HUMAN SPACE EXPLORATION Those who turn to the NASA website “Beyond Earth: Expanding Human Presence into the Solar System” will find that the section “Why We Explore” includes the assertion that “curiosity and exploration are vital to the human spirit and accepting the challenge of going deeper into space will invite the citizens of the world today and the generations of tomorrow to join NASA on this exciting journey.”

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
by Adam Greenfield
Published 14 Sep 2006

It will call itself by different names, it will appear differently from one context to another, and it will almost always wear the appealing masks of safety or convenience. And as we've seen, the relevant choices will be made by a relatively large number of people each responding to their own local need—"large," anyway, as compared to the compact decision nexus involved in the production of a fission plant or a supersonic airliner. Who, then, will get to determine the shape of the ubiquitous computing we experience? Designers, obviously—by which I mean the entire apparatus of information-technology production, from initial conceptual framing straight through to marketing. Regulators, too, will play a part; given everyware's clear potential to erode privacy, condition public space, and otherwise impinge on the exercise of civil liberties, there is a legitimate role for state actors here.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

True, as recent scholarship has revealed, Gimpel exaggerated the case for an outright medieval industrial revolution.5 Yet, where the technological plateau of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was followed four centuries later by a second industrial revolution in England, 236 The Future of Utopias and Utopianism Gimpel fears that the plateau that he discerns in the modern West, including North America, will become a permanent condition. Ironically, the example that Gimpel singles out as symbolic of “the entry of the United States into her aging or declining era”—the refusal of the Congress in 1971 to allocate funds for the supersonic transport (the SST)—has been viewed by others as an immensely hopeful sign. Thirty-some years later, Britain and France, the two nations that were taken in by this “technological imperative,” had to bail out entirely, awash in a sea of red ink.6 Recall, by contrast, William Morris’s celebration of so much of medieval society as he understood it but also romanticized it: not least, its small-scale workshops, with tools in the hands of skilled and dedicated craftsmen and craftswomen.

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P. 113–114, 121, 122 social engineering 107–108, 109–110 social forecasters and utopianism 12–13 social media 193–194 284 Index social sciences 101, 102–104, 107, 121, and social engineering 110, societal benefits of science and technology 119 socialism 2, 10, 24, 26, 31 Morris and 59 Marx and Engels and 66–67 see also Fabianism Socialist League 59 Socialist Second International 251 Society for Utopian Studies, The 242 Sokal, Alan 160 solar power 150, 157 Sontoku, Ninomiya 20 Sony Electronics 220 Sorai, Ogy u 20 South Africa 171 Soviet Union 104, 108, 113, 244 collapse of 1, 156, 242 space flight 187 space shuttle disasters 140 “spaceship earth” 245–246, 247 Spanish Civil War 35, 252 Speed Handbook, The: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (Duffy) 164 speed, significance of 164–165 Spent Fuel Storage Installation, Bailey Point Peninsula, Wiscasset, US 149 Spinoff (NASA journal) 140 Spirit Fruit in Ohio and Illinois 25 Sputnik I 108, 113 Stages of Economic Growth, The (Rostow) 105 Stalin, Joseph 243, 244 Stalinism and utopia 244 Star Trek (series) 200 Star Trek Empire 199–203 Star Wars films 202, 204 “Star Wars” missile defense system 115, 141, 187–188 Staton, Mary 92 Steele, Allen 9 Stokes, Donald 120–121 120 Stoll, Steven 79 Story of Utopias, The 1 Strategic Defense Initiative 142 Strauss, Lewis 143 Stukel, James J. 206, 207–208, 210, 211, 213, 215, 250 Sun Yat-Sen 18 Superconducting Super Collider, Texas 122, 141 supersonic transport (SST) 237 Swift, Jonathan 200 Sy Syms (company) 216 “System” 78 Systeme de politique positive (Comte) 58 Systems Engineering 110–111 critiques of 112 failure of 112 systems experts 160 T. H. E. Smart Classroom 205–206 ta thung and thai phing 18 Ta Thung Shu (Book of the Great Togetherness) 18 Takemura, Eiji 19–20 “Taking Charge of Change” 214 Taoist concepts 19 Taylor, Elizabeth 195 Taylor, Frederick 104, 164 teaching machines 203 Teague, Walter Dorwin 34 technocracy 24, 96 false prophets of technocracy 106 science fiction and technocracy 9 social impact of technocracy 96 technocracy and progress 106 techno-fixes 159, 187–188, 211 technological advances 78, 113, 235, 255 high-tech attitudes toward 203 Industrial Revolution 50, 163 reservations and skepticism about 58, 167, 245 Technocrats and 96 US attitudes 78, 82, 84, 116 utopianism and 19, 32, 35, 53, 54, 56, 58, 60, 63, 127–131, 244 technological behaviors 219–220 technological determinism 82, 102, technological imperative 82, 237 technological inadequacy 165 technological unemployment 83–84 technology and utopianism 2, 51, 67, 89–96, 239 assembly line model of technology 119 development of term 51–52 perceptions of technology 192 “Technology in Schools: What the Research Says” 206 techno-mania 187, 190 Tellico Dam 111–112 Temko, Allan 245 Tenner, Edward 167 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) 94–95, 111–112 text messaging 193 Thomson Reuters 211 Thoreau, Henry David 79 Thoughts on Matter and Force: Or, Marvels that Encompass Us (Ewbank) 80 Three Hundred Years Hence (Griffiths) 91, 92 Index 285 Three Mile Island, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania 147, 152, 155 Thurston, Robert Henry 90 tidal power 157 Time Warner Cable 192–193 Toffler, Alvin and Heidi 118, 161, 162, 167–168, 186 Alvin 163, 207, 236, 250 Tokyo 20 Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (Blair) 190 “total quality management” (TQM) 217 touchscreens 219–220 Tower of Peace 252 traces of existing societies and utopias 251, 254 Transcendentalism 25–26, 247 “trans-national rights” 253 Truman, President Harry S. 108 TRW (company) 110 “tsunamis of change” 250 Turkle, Sherry 194 Turner, Frederick Jackson 37 Turner, J.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland
Published 15 Jan 2021

Motion sickness is a conflict between our eyes and our sense of balance.4 In extreme cases, it can even be the result of an unconscious assumption that we have been poisoned.5 People with long car commutes are more likely than others to have high blood pressure, to suffer from fatigue and to have difficulty in focusing their attention – they are even prone to excessive anger.6 In hindsight, the supersonic airliner Concorde was an engineering marvel that was incompatible with humans. It produced a deafening boom that prohibited it from overland travel, and the time zone changes across the Atlantic meant it flew too fast for the circadian rhythms of its passengers to adjust. It was the most extreme example of an inherently biological limitation: jet lag.

API Marketplace Engineering: Design, Build, and Run a Platform for External Developers
by Rennay Dorasamy
Published 2 Dec 2021

There are a number of other factors to consider such as the number of passengers it can carry, the fuel consumed, the range or distance the aircraft can cover, and the maintenance and lifespan. These factors determine the financial viability of the aircraft. A real-world example of this scenario is the retirement of the supersonic airliner, the Concorde, which is an engineering marvel but unfortunately, not the most economical. In much the same way, the technical delivery team has a responsibility for the commercial trajectory and financial viability that influences the lifespan of an API Marketplace. In all honesty, I would classify this very much as a privilege and challenges the Engineering team to maintain a view on commercial objectives when designing and building solutions.

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing
by Peter Robison
Published 29 Nov 2021

It was the General Motors strategy: Sell young buyers a Chevrolet before they could afford a Cadillac. Reluctantly, Allen decided to design a new plane. * * * — And so the 737 was born—quick and dirty. Most of Boeing’s engineering resources were going into the massive 747, not to mention the hugely ambitious project for a supersonic transport. The company’s first successful sales meeting, with Germany’s Lufthansa in 1965, didn’t have an auspicious start. Boeing had shipped to Cologne a hardwood box with massive hinges and a Yale lock, containing charts and diagrams about the plane’s performance, for the airline’s board to examine.

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“I told ’em point blank I thought it would be an unmitigated disaster,” Sutter later wrote—coordination would suffer, costs would rise, logistical challenges would increase, and schedules wouldn’t be met. The profligate spending proved to be ill timed, coming just as government funding for the supersonic transport also ran out. Boeing’s downturn was so deep that in 1969 it found itself two months from running short of cash. Wilson, by then having inherited the mantle of chief executive, laid off eighty-six thousand people and, at age forty-nine, suffered a heart attack. Fred Mitchell, a young Boeing worker then, remembers seeing desks stacked thirty feet high on the factory floor and swivel chairs piled unceremoniously in a corner.

Tyler Cowen - Stubborn Attachments A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
by Meg Patrick

So the neighbor might envy the wealthy man’s new car, but still the happiness gains from wealth, and from better cars, do not dissipate through envy. Better cars really do make us better off. Or put it this way: it is better to envy your neighbor’s car than to envy his horse and buggy. Envying his supersonic transport would be better yet. On top of all of those considerations, happiness isn’t a single, simple variable which can be measured unambiguously. Happiness means a lot of different things to different people. Some persons may seek temporary stimulations, others may want to feel fulfilled at the end of their lives, and others may seek to maximize the quality of their typical day.

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
by Tyler Cowen
Published 15 Oct 2018

So while the neighbor might envy the wealthy man’s Mercedes, the happiness gains from wealth (and from better cars) do not dissipate through envy. Better cars really do make us better off. To put it another way: it is better to envy your neighbor’s Mercedes than to envy his horse and buggy. Envying his supersonic transport would be better still. On top of all of these considerations, happiness isn’t a single, simple variable which can be measured unambiguously. Happiness means a lot of different things to different people. Some people may seek temporary stimulations while others may want to feel fulfilled at the end of their lives, and others may seek to maximize the quality of their typical day.

Inviting Disaster
by James R. Chiles
Published 7 Jul 2008

Though the size and power of our machines have risen enormously, it still doesn’t take much to trigger a disaster. The catalyst for the crash of an Air France Concorde in July 2000 was a mere strip of titanium that had fallen onto the runway from the engine of a DC-10 minutes before. The strip was only eighteen inches long, but when the main landing gear for the supersonic transport hit it on takeoff, a tire blew out (see Figure 1). According to French investigators, the exploding tire launched a ten-pound slab of rubber, which slammed against the underside of a wing tank called “Fuel Collector Tank No. 1.” The impact caused shock waves throughout the tank. These focused to blow out a big section of the tank wall from the inside.

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Reason was jolt from deployment of landing legs, which sensors misinterpreted as touch-down on surface. Problem was not noticed on Earth during checkout tests because of a wiring error when tests were conducted; wiring was fixed later but relevant tests were not redone. Air France Concorde supersonic transport: crash Departing Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris, France July 25, 2000 Titanium debris on runway caused tire to burst on takeoff. Ten-pound fragment of tire hit left wing tank and impact caused shock wave in fuel that broke out section of tank wall from inside. Rapid fuel leak (26 gallons per second) opened forward of engine intakes.

Interplanetary Robots
by Rod Pyle

This effort would see two smaller, more streamlined orbiter/lander combinations launched on two cheaper Titan rockets for a landing in 1976.6 It should be said that a number of Viking managers later said that the advance work done for the Voyager Mars program helped them to design the later Viking mission to Mars, so perhaps not all the money spent over the seven-year life of Voyager Mars was wasted after all. Oh, and the cost of the Viking program? Also about a billion dollars. But at least it worked, and brilliantly. Nineteen seventy-six was a good year. The world's first supersonic airliner, the Anglo-French Concorde, was finally flying; Nadia Comaneci would earn the first perfect score in Olympic gymnastics; and punk was just emerging onto the music scene (whether or not that was good news depended on whom you asked, of course). In space news, NASA had officially unveiled its plans for the new space shuttle.

Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart
by Tim Butcher
Published 2 Jul 2007

Democracy was shunned by Mobutu, who defied calls for free and fair elections and centralised power into the hands of a close-knit cabal of friends, family and cronies. There was a certain brilliance to Mobutu's evil. He was the consummate showman, luring George Foreman and Muhammad Ali to his capital, Kinshasa, for the most famous bout in boxing history, the 1974 'Rumble in the Jungle'. Concorde, the world's only supersonic airliner, would be chartered specially to fly supplies of pink champagne from Paris to his jungle palace complex at Gbadolite in the north of the country. The runway was specially extended so that the jet could land. Symbolically, Mobutu was the first leader of the Congo to tame the mighty river, building the only bridge to span the Congo River, the Marshal Mobutu suspension bridge.

Invention: A Life
by James Dyson
Published 6 Sep 2021

People who do well on exams in school are not necessarily those who do well at work. Students are rewarded for following the train of thought set in textbooks. If they think for themselves or question textbook knowledge, examiners can’t give them the marks their original minds may well deserve. I love the story of Concorde engineers, at the early design stage of the supersonic airliner, making paper planes and throwing them around in their drawing offices to test ideas for an ideal wing. Some of these models are in the safekeeping of the Science Museum in South Kensington, a happy reminder of how things teachers and examiners might well disapprove of might just lead some young people toward some of the greatest designs of all time.

Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World
by Vaclav Smil
Published 4 May 2021

Cruising speeds have not changed much: the Boeing 787 Dreamliner cruises at 913 km/h, and London–New York flights still last about 7.5 hours. The expensive, noisy, and ill-fated supersonic Concorde could do it in 3.5 hours, but that bird will never fly again. Several companies are now developing supersonic transport planes, and Airbus has patented a hypersonic concept with a cruising speed of 4.5 times the speed of sound. Such a plane would arrive at JFK International just one hour after leaving Heathrow. But do we really need such speed at a much higher energy cost? Compared with the Sirius’s time in 1838, we have cut the crossing time by more than 98 percent.

Commuter City: How the Railways Shaped London
by David Wragg
Published 14 Apr 2010

Modernisation The 1955 Modernisation Plan was the most ambitious programme ever prepared for Britain’s railways. The initial plan called for investment of £1,240 million (around £14,880 million today) but this was later increased to £1,500 million, which was, ignoring inflation, three times the cost to the British taxpayer of the Concorde supersonic airliner project in the early 1970s, and rather more if the inflation-prone 1950s, 60s and 70s were included. The plan was the scheme that should have been introduced immediately following nationalisation, and was the brainchild of a Conservative government. It was meant to dispense with the Victorian and Edwardian railway, of which so much was still in evidence, and create a truly modern railway.

Democratizing innovation
by Eric von Hippel
Published 1 Apr 2005

Relevant nonuser groups included “anticyclists,” who had a negative view of the bicycle in its early days and wanted it to fail (Bijker 1995). When one takes the views of all relevant groups into account, one gets a much richer view of the “socially constructed” evolution of a technology. As a relatively recent example, consider the supersonic transport plane (SST) planned in the United States during the 1970s. Airlines, and potential passengers were “groups with a problem” who presumably wanted the technology for different reasons. Other relevant groups with a problem included people who expected to be negatively affected by the sonic boom the SST would cause, people who were concerned about the pollution its engines would cause in the stratosphere, and people who had other reasons for opposing or supporting the SST.

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
by Carl Sagan
Published 11 May 1998

And not every prediction of disaster, even among those made by scientists, is fulfilled: Most animal life in the oceans did not perish due to insecticides; despite Ethiopia and the Sahel, worldwide famine has not been a hallmark of the 1980s; food production in South Asia was not drastically affected by the 1991 Kuwaiti oil well fires; supersonic transports do not threaten the ozone layer—although all these predictions had been made by serious scientists. So when faced with a new and uncomfortable prediction, we might be tempted to say: "Improbable." "Doom and Gloom." "We've never-experienced anything remotely like it." "Trying to frighten everyone."

Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut's Journey
by Fred Haise and Bill Moore
Published 4 Apr 2022

Gliding was so enjoyable to me that I took my wife and daughter for flights. * * * — Through 1963, I lived out a pilot’s dream: I flew a variety of aircraft and was involved in a number of test programs almost every day. For example, Bill Dana and I flew a Navy A5A, in a simulated supersonic transport to Los Angeles International, in conjunction with the FAA, to evaluate air-traffic-control’s handling of the supersonic airplanes that the British and French were developing. Bruce Peterson, noted for his dramatic crash in a lifting body test that inspired the opening scene of the TV show Six Million Dollar Man, gave me my first checkout flight in the F-104 Starfighter.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

The Vietnam War had placed intense strain on the U.S. military budget. The successful moon landing had ended the bonanza of space-age contracts; NASA’s 1971 budget was half of what it was in 1966. Budget anxieties and environmental concerns had contributed to Congressional “no” votes on big-ticket projects like the Supersonic Transport (or SST), America’s answer to the Atlantic-hopping Concorde jet produced by an Anglo-French consortium in 1969. The cancellation of the SST in early 1971 threw its designated contractor, Boeing, into an economic tailspin, and set off a deep, years-long recession in the aerospace giant’s hometown of Seattle.

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Wallace, 30, 31, 35 Stewart, Milton, 219 Stone, Larry, 210, 261, 293, 335 Strategic Air Command, 45, 48 Strategic Computing Initiative (SCI), 225, 246, 260 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI; Star Wars), 246–50, 259, 260, 300 Sundstrom, Bob, 322 Sun Microsystems, 223, 267, 275–78, 291, 305–7, 321, 332, 340, 341, 346, 354, 356, 364, 370, 392 Super Bowl, 243, 247, 265 Supersonic Transport (SST), 89–90 Supreme Court, U.S., 180, 330, 360 Swaine, Michael, 265–66 Swanson, Bob, 180 Swisher, Kara, 400 Sylvania, 15, 31, 43, 77, 110 Symbionese Liberation Army, 133 System Industries, 96, 166, 261–62 Tandem Computers, 3, 201–4, 363 Tandy, 182, 187–88 Tauzin, Billy, 347 Taylor, Bob, 64–65, 130 TechNet, 337–38, 339, 344, 347, 350 Technological Society, The (Ellul), 121 Technology Access Foundation, 322 Technology Education Act, 218–19, 224 Technology Opportunities Program, 125 Technology Reinvestment Program (TRP), 310, 311 Technology Venture Investors (TVI), 230 Telecommunications Act, 330 Teller, Edward, 114, 246, 259, 402 Tenenbaum, Marty, 68, 288, 290–91, 305, 310, 311 Tenet, George, 386 Terman, Fred, 9, 21–22, 24, 27–29, 30–32, 34, 35, 37, 40, 48, 49, 58, 67, 81, 90, 109, 127, 129, 204, 254, 263, 280, 307, 363, 404 Terman, Lewis, 21 Terman, Sybil, 22 Terrell, Paul, 140–41, 148 Tesla, 402, 405 Texas Instruments (TI), 99, 181, 187, 202, 211, 237 Thiel, Peter, 252–54, 355, 370, 380, 384–87, 395, 399, 403 Third Wave, The (Toffler), 187 Time, 20, 22, 188, 189, 190, 204, 205, 236, 274, 278, 303, 343, 369, 372 Time Warner, 149, 358 Toffler, Alvin, 121–22, 186, 187, 193, 323–25, 369 Toffler, Heidi, 121, 325 Tom Swift Terminal, 131–32, 145 Tools for Conviviality (Illich), 132 Traf-O-Data, 154 Trenton Computer Festival, 140 Treybig, James “Jimmy T,” 3, 202–4, 264 TRS-80, 157, 182, 183, 187–88, 257 Truman, Harry, 23, 25, 71, 125–26 Trump, Donald, 403 Tschirgi, Robert, 116 Tsongas, Paul, 192, 196, 215, 218, 222, 246, 292 Twitter, 372–74, 388–89, 398–99, 403, 410 2001: A Space Odyssey, 85, 236, 377 Tymes, LaRoy, 60–61, 63–64, 312 Tymnet, 60–61, 63–64, 255 Tymshare, 59–61, 105, 255–56, 382 Ullman, Ellen, 352 UNIVAC, 28, 113–14, 123–24, 153, 237, 382 University Computing Company, 58 University of California, Berkeley, 22, 27, 68, 90, 92, 113–15, 127, 129, 133, 137, 213 Upside, 286 USA Today, 377 Usenet, 257–59, 287, 310, 328 U.S.

Frommer's Seattle 2010
by Karl Samson
Published 10 Mar 2010

You’ll also see one of the famous Blackbird spy planes, which at one time were the world’s fastest jets (you can even sit in the cockpit of one of these babies). There’s also a rare World War II Corsair fighter that was rescued from Lake Washington and restored to its original glory. Visitors also get to board a retired British Airways Concorde supersonic airliner. An exhibit on the U.S. space program features an Apollo command module. Of course, you’ll also see plenty of Boeing planes, including a reproduction of Boeing’s first plane, which was built in 1916. The museum also incorporates part of Boeing’s old wooden factory building, a remnant from the company’s earliest years.

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight
by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears
Published 24 Apr 2024

Although the real causes of relative economic decline had more prosaic origins in a long-term failure to invest and reform management, Harold Wilson’s Labour Party also caught the virus. It promised to transform a creaking Britain through the ‘white heat of technology’. The subsequent experiments with hovercraft, air-cooled nuclear power stations and the Anglo-French supersonic airliner Concorde all cost taxpayers a fortune while receiving precisely zero export orders, even as national prestige received another blow with the devaluation of the pound in 1967 and trade union strikes challenged the wage policies that had been used to control inflation. Wallis ended up with Sir Frank Whittle, the inventor of the jet engine, as embittered guest speakers at meetings of the racist Conservative Party faction known as the Monday Club where they could moan on against immigrants, unions and socialist governments.103 But it was Powell who wove together all these feelings into a new, radically right-wing economic programme.

The Locavore's Dilemma
by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu
Published 29 May 2012

Not surprisingly, unfavorable events and trends were often attributed to human actions, be they insufficient offerings to climate deities, sinful behavior, swamp drainage, agriculture, and massive deforestation to the invention of lighting conductors, extensive gunfire during the First World War, the development of short-wave radio communication, nuclear explosions, supersonic transport, space traffic, and air pollution. Carbon dioxide produced through human activities—primarily the burning of carbon fuels—is now the focus of much policy attention, but it is just the latest suspect in a long line of potential large-scale “climate criminals.”75 (Of course, carbon dioxide is also plant food, and, as such, higher concentrations of this gas should ultimately prove beneficial for agricultural production, but we will not address this issue here.)

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It
by Timothy Noah
Published 23 Apr 2012

Nixon’s first term alone saw the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission; passage, under Nixon’s signature, of a tax bill that raised the maximum capital gains rate, eliminated an investment tax credit, reduced the oil-depletion allowance, and limited depreciation of real estate; and a congressional cutoff, over Nixon’s protests, in funding for Boeing’s supersonic transport plane. Business, which had prospered since the end of World War II, hit a rough patch. Corporate profits as a share of national income peaked in the mid-1960s and fell sharply in the late 1960s and early 1970s; they wouldn’t really resume their upward climb until the start of the Great Divergence.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell
Published 21 Jan 2020

Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, then less than a decade old, the president announced to the young airmen a public-private initiative to build commercial jets that would move at twice the speed of sound: “Some of you will fly the fastest planes that have ever been built,” he said. “We are talking about a plane in the end of the ’60s that will move ahead at a speed faster than Mach 2 to all corners of the globe.” A year later, Lockheed was projecting a supersonic transport that would go at three times the speed of sound. That never happened. American capabilities in the area of transportation steadily declined. Great Britain and France collaborated on a short-lived experiment in supersonic flight, the Concorde, but fewer than two dozen were ever built. The United States, more focused on military applications, never participated.

Cosmos
by Carl Sagan
Published 1 Jan 1980

There seems to be no way for information to travel back to those left behind any faster than the speed of light. The designs for Orion, Daedalus and the Bussard Ramjet are probably farther from the actual interstellar spacecraft we will one day build than Leonardo’s models are from today’s supersonic transports. But if we do not destroy ourselves, I believe that we will one day venture to the stars. When our solar system is all explored, the planets of other stars will beckon. Space travel and time travel are connected. We can travel fast into space only by traveling fast into the future. But what of the past?

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
by Michael Shermer
Published 1 Jan 1997

Whether or not a culture pursues science and technology does not make one culture better than another or one way of life more moral than another or one people happier than another. Science and technology have plenty of limitations, and they are double-edge swords. Science has made the modern world, but it may also unmake it. Our advances in the physical sciences have given us plastics and plastic explosives, cars and tanks, supersonic transports and B-l bombers; they have also put men on the moon and missiles in silos. We travel faster and further, but so do our destructive agents. Medical advances allow us to live twice as long as our ancestors did a mere 150 years ago, and now we have a potentially devastating overpopulation problem without a corresponding overproduction solution.

What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly
Published 14 Jul 2010

In a 2005 debriefing that analyzed why the now-defunct U.S. Office for Technology Assessment, which existed from 1972 to 1995, did not have more of an impact in assessing upcoming technology, the researchers concluded:While plausible (although always uncertain) forecasts can be generated for very specific and fairly evolved technologies (e.g., the supersonic transport; a nuclear reactor; a particular pharmaceutical product), the radical transforming capacity of technology comes not from individual artifacts but from interacting subsets of technologies that permeate society. In short, crucial second-order effects are absent from small, precise experiments and sincere simulations of new technologies, and so an emerging technology must be tested in action and evaluated in real time.

Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution
by Richard Whittle
Published 15 Sep 2014

The Air Force Thunderbirds flew patriotically painted F-16 fighter jets in heart-stopping formation aerobatics. Army paratroopers floated down to targeted spots on the field with remarkable exactitude. For $985, spectators could circle out over the nearby Pacific Ocean at Mach 2—twice the speed of sound—in an Air France Concorde supersonic transport. Kids of all ages loved the show. More than two hundred thousand people attended. No one would have guessed that the organizers would wind up owing the City of San Diego and other creditors more than four million dollars, bankrupting the Air/Space America organization and making its first edition its last.

The Right Stuff
by Tom Wolfe
Published 1 Jan 1979

Talking about the Ships of Tomorrow had made it all seem far off. But now, ten years later, they were already bringing such systems into the hardware stage. They were even working on a system to land F-4s automatically on aircraft carriers; the pilot would take his hands off the controls and let the computers bring him down onto that heaving slab. The supersonic transports and airliners would be so automated they would give the pilot an override stick just so he could push on it every now and then and feel like a pilot; it would be a goddamned right-stuff security blanket. They were even developing an automatic guidance system to bring the X-15 back through the atmosphere at a precise angle of attack.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

Though little read today, for instance, Lewis Mumford was among the most eloquent and popular of the antiautomationists. In The Myth of the Machine, he turned a cold eye on post– World War II technological research. While noting that the era had given rise to a new “experimental mode” and to such varied technologies as nuclear energy and supersonic transportation, Mumford argued that it had also brought into being a new generation of technocrats and a new generation of technologies through which they might rule: “With this new ‘megatechnics’ the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, superplanetary structure, designed for automatic operation.

Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies
by Jared M. Diamond
Published 15 Jul 2005

Merely having a bigger, faster, more powerful device for doing something is no guarantee of ready accep- tance. Innumerable such technologies were either not adopted at all or adopted only after prolonged resistance. Notorious examples include the U.S. Congress's rejection of funds to develop a supersonic transport in 1971, the world's continued rejection of an efficiently designed typewriter keyboard, and Britain's long reluctance to adopt electric lighting. What is it that promotes an invention's acceptance by a society? Let's begin by comparing the acceptability of different inventions within the same society.

Frommer's Washington State
by Karl Samson
Published 2 Nov 2010

You’ll also see one of the famous Blackbird spy planes, which at one time were the world’s fastest jets (you can even sit in the cockpit of one of these babies). There’s also a rare World War II Corsair fighter that was rescued from Lake Washington and restored to its original glory. Visitors also get to board a retired British Airways Concorde supersonic airliner. An exhibit on the U.S. space program features an Apollo command module. Of course, you’ll also see plenty of Boeing planes, including a reproduction of Boeing’s first plane, which was built in 1916. The museum also incorporates part of Boeing’s old wooden factory building, a remnant from the company’s earliest years. 9404 E.

Winds of Change
by Peter Hennessy
Published 27 Aug 2019

The Prime Minister said that he felt there was no objection to countries co-operating to make these armaments, if they could then be bought outright … He felt that this was essential to avoid a position of dependence on the United States in this respect … this independence was essential, if it was ever to be possible to make the United Europe which was his dream. He was very glad that some co-operation had been possible between Britain and France in regard to the supersonic airliner [Concorde]. President de Gaulle said that there was co-operation, not only in the supersonic civil transport, but also in the space rocket programme. France had never refused to make joint arrangements with Britain in these respects.21 All very courteous, amicable and non-binding, but it was not deal-making conversation.

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 1995

Its approach was consistent with those taken by French governments for at least the past five hundred years: a group of bureaucrats in Paris drew up plans for the promotion of technology, which it carried out through protection of domestic industries, subsidies, government procurements, and (after the Socialist victory in 1981) outright nationalization of a number of high-tech firms, including the entire electronics sector. This type of unapologetic industrial policy or dirigisme yielded some results: a viable aerospace industry, including the Concorde supersonic transport; a series of exportable military aircraft; an active space launch program; and, with the help of its European consortium partners, a commercial airliner, the Airbus.1 But the overall record of French high-tech industrial policy has been dismal. The government’s Plan calcul of the late 1960s predicted that computing power would be concentrated in just a few mammoth time-sharing mainframe computers, and on the eve of the microcomputer revolution it subsidized development in this direction.2 The French computer industry, nationalized and heavily subsidized in the early 1980s, began to hemorrhage money almost immediately, increasing the government’s budget deficit and depressing the franc.

Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam
by H. R. McMaster
Published 7 May 1998

He recommended that “some kind of mission be found for LeMay” to “keep him occupied and not making statements to the press,” such as an inspection tour of U.S. and allied air bases overseas.6 On January 28 Clifton suggested that LeMay might not be interested in the assignment and recommended instead that he serve as the president’s consultant on the supersonic transport. General Taylor, eager to find a more pliant officer to serve as Air Force Chief, began to consider whom to recommend as LeMay’s replacement and solicited General Lemnitzer’s opinion of General John P. McConnell.7 In early spring LeMay learned from Zuckert that McNamara was not recommending his reappointment because he could not get along with civilian officials in the Department of Defense.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
by Vaclav Smil
Published 23 Sep 2019

Glaeser, E. L. 2011. Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. New York: Penguin. Glaeser, E. L., et al. 1992. Growth in cities. Journal of Political Economy 100:1126–1152. Glancey, J. 2016. Concorde: The Rise and Fall of the Supersonic Airliner. London: Atlantic Books. Glazier, D. S. 2006. The 3/4-power law is not universal: Evolution of isometric, ontogenetic metabolic scaling in pelagic animals. BioScience 56:325–332. Glazier, D. S. 2010. A unifying explanation for diverse metabolic scaling in animals and plants. Biological Reviews 85:111–138.

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base
by Annie Jacobsen
Published 16 May 2011

Working at Beatty meant running multiple jobs, and there was a second aircraft Barnes was in charge of tracking—the XB-70. This experimental program was all that remained of General LeMay’s once-beloved B-70 bomber now that it had been canceled by Congress, despite four billion dollars invested. The X in front of B-70 indicated that the bomber was now an experimental test bed for supersonic transport. It was a behemoth of an airplane, the fastest-flying six-engined aircraft in the world. On June 8, 1966, the mission for the day was a photo op with the XB-70 as the centerpiece. An F-4, an F-5, a T-38, and an F-104 would fly in formation alongside. Barnes was in charge of monitoring telemetry, radar, and communications from the Beatty tracking station.

A History of Modern Britain
by Andrew Marr
Published 2 Jul 2009

Even then the pound, still a world ‘reserve’ currency, would be under constant pressure. This was bad enough. Labour had been elected promising a more generous welfare system, better pensions, spending on schools and much more. That was immediately in jeopardy. Prized national projects including the supersonic airliner project jointly developed with the French, Concorde, were under threat of being axed. The Governor of the Bank of England, Lord Cromer, regarded by Labour ministers as a Tory reactionary, was quickly insisting that the deflationary squeeze must be tighter still and that other pet Labour projects such as the renationalization of steel must be dropped.

State of Emergency: The Way We Were
by Dominic Sandbrook
Published 29 Sep 2010

Another acerbic observer, Private Eye’s Auberon Waugh, told Time magazine that Britain had become ‘something between Nkrumah’s Ghana and Anthony Hope’s Ruritania’. ‘Many of us here are more or less permanently on strike,’ Waugh explained. ‘We are all paid far too much and expect to be paid much more. It is true that the public services in London are breaking down even while Mr Heath pursues his grandiose schemes to build supersonic airliners and dig railway tunnels under the Channel to France. It is true that electricity supplies are more or less permanently threatened by industrial action, and urban violence is just beginning.’ And yet it seemed that most people were far more interested in ‘the spectacle of two totally absurd young people being driven around London in a glass coach’.

Voyage
by Stephen Baxter
Published 23 May 2011

In December 1971 Fletcher learned that Nixon had decided in principle to go ahead with the Shuttle. The decisive factors were the arguments put forward in Weinberger’s and Fletcher’s memos, the fact that so many high-technology programs had already been cut, and — given the decision already to cancel the proposed Supersonic Transport (SST) project — the desire to start some new aerospace program that would avoid unemployment in critical states in the 1972 election year. On January 5, 1972, Nixon issued a statement announcing the decision to proceed with the development of “an entirely new type of space transportation system designed to help transform the space frontier of the 1970s into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavor in the 1980s and ’90s…” So ended the tortuous post-Apollo decision-making process.

A Man on the Moon
by Andrew Chaikin
Published 1 Jan 1994

It wasn't easy to think about leaving Edwards, but NASA was headed for the moon. The week he flew the X-15 to the heights, NASA put out the call for the second group of astronauts. One day, Armstrong and a fellow NASA pilot named Bill Dana were mulling over their respective plans. Dana said he thought there was a much better future flying the Supersonic Transport that everyone was talking about. Armstrong told him, “You can do whatever you want to about that, but space is the frontier, and that's where I intend to go." June 1969 Flight Crew Training Building, Kennedy Space Center Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stood side by side in the Lunar Module Simulator.

Eastern USA
by Lonely Planet

STEVEN F UDVAR-HAZY CENTER The Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum’s Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center ( 703-572-4118; 10am-5:30pm), located in Chantilly near Dulles airport, is a huge hangar filled with surplus planes and spacecraft that wouldn’t fit at the museum’s DC location. Highlights include the space shuttle Enterprise, the B-29 Enola Gay, SR-71 Blackbird and a Concorde supersonic airliner. While the museum is free, parking costs $15. ARLINGTON Just across the Potomac River from DC, Arlington County was once part of Washington until it was returned to Virginia in 1847. In recent years the gentrified neighborhoods of Arlington have spawned some tempting dining and nightlife options.

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed.
by Patricia Schultz
Published 13 May 2007

Though still a work in progress, the museum is already the largest construction project in Smithsonian history, big enough to allow display of some of its biggest birds in open hangarlike settings. The main Aviation Hangar, ten stories high and three football fields long, houses more than 100 aircraft, some on its main floor, others suspended from two hanging levels beside elevated overlooks. Highlights include a Concorde supersonic airliner; the Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima; and the only surviving Boeing 307 Stratoliner. There’s also a collection of 45 aircraft engines and more than 1,500 smaller artifacts such as uniforms, models, aerial cameras, and displays on famous aviators, including Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart.

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980
by Rick Perlstein
Published 17 Aug 2020

Gore Vidal published a cover article in Esquire touting Nader for president, and 78 percent of columnist Mike Royko’s readers who sent back a questionnaire he published said they wanted him as the Democrats’ presidential nominee. Another new independent regulatory agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, was born. Congress passed bills requiring childproof packaging for poisonous substances, killing federal subsidies for a supersonic transport plane, restricting lead in house paint, and establishing safety standards for recreational boats. Nixon signed them—not because he was a closet liberal, but because, as his aide Bryce Harlow, a former lobbyist for Procter & Gamble, delicately explained to the American Advertising Federation, though “President Nixon profoundly respects the critical contribution made by industry to the vitality and strength of the American economy, if this respect were to over-influence his actions, I am certain that the fall of 1972 would bring a new and hostile team to the White House.”

USA Travel Guide
by Lonely, Planet

STEVEN F UDVAR-HAZY CENTER The Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum’s Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center ( 703-572-4118; 10am-5:30pm) , located in Chantilly near Dulles airport, is a huge hangar filled with surplus planes and spacecraft that wouldn’t fit at the museum’s DC location. Highlights include the space shuttle Enterprise, the B-29 Enola Gay, SR-71 Blackbird and a Concorde supersonic airliner. While the museum is free, parking costs $15. ARLINGTON Just across the Potomac River from DC, Arlington County was once part of Washington until it was returned to Virginia in 1847. In recent years the gentrified neighborhoods of Arlington have spawned some tempting dining and nightlife options.