Fri, Feb 01, 2002 page19

• Concorde still manages to turn heads as it returns to the skies

  Pilots say decades-old volcanic smog has now finally cleared out of the upper atmosphere -- making it easier to see the curvature of the earth from inside the supersonic planes when they cruise at a height of 18km

  • By Joe Sharkey / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  Here is a typical workweek as once described to Mike Bannister, the chief Concorde pilot for British Airways, by a British executive for an American bank.

  "Monday morning, leave London on Concorde at 10:30am, arriving in New York at 9:25am to spend four hours in a conference room at JFK," Bannister recalled last week while waiting at Kennedy Airport to fly the daily supersonic flight to London.

  

  Captain Mike Bannister, British Airways' chief Concorde pilot, stands inside a terminal at Kennedy International Airport with his supersonic plane in the background.

  PHOTO: NY TIMES

  "Get on the 1:40pm flight back, arriving at 10:30 at night, and home to the wife and kids," he continued, counting off the itinerary points on his fingers. "All day Tuesday in the London office, home that night. Wednesday, again in the London office. Then get on the 7pm flight to New York, arriving at ten minutes to six, in time for a business dinner. All day Thursday in the New York office, plus Friday morning, and then back to London on the afternoon flight, arriving at 10.30 at night, and home again to the wife and kiddies."

  Now, you and I might regard anyone who performs this kind of grind for the company as a prime candidate for institutionalization. But Bannister's point was that this man was actually lamenting the demise of his back-and-forth routine after Concorde flights were grounded in the summer of 2000, when an Air France Concorde crash killed 113 people in Paris.

  With its 3-hour-and-20-minutes flying time between New York and London, it seems, the Concorde enabled this fellow and others like him to basically beat the clock. Which, Bannister said, explains why the hard core of Concorde users was clamoring for the resumption of service despite the cost. The regular round-trip fare is US$12,774 on British Airways and US$10,404 on Air France between New York and Paris.

  Before service resumed in November, both airlines had kept in contact with frequent Concorde flyers, 80 percent of whom are business travelers, to apprise them of progress on safety modifications and cosmetic improvements in the fleet of 12 supersonic planes. "The response we got was, yes that's very good, thank you very much, but what we're interested in now is when are you going to be back in the air?" said Bannister, 52, who has been flying the Concorde since 1977.

  Though British Airways and Air France resolutely post Concorde fares at full retail price, both airlines are known to offer unspecified discounts to their top corporate customers. In addition, both have been trying to entice new customers with one-way Concorde flights tied into discounted packages for long-haul and around-the-world leisure travel.

  Since November, British Airways Concordes have been flying about 75 percent full -- "higher than we thought it would be," Bannister said, although the schedule between New York and London has been reduced to one flight each way from two on most days.

  For both airlines, the Concordes, which cruise at twice the speed of sound, are valuable corporate symbols, despite the fact that they have been in service for 25 years. The Concorde is still capable of turning heads. Even veteran airport workers tend to stop and watch whenever the needle-nose aircraft roar into the sky or swoop down to land.

  British Airways also regards the Concorde as a strategic necessity to maintain a position in the cut-throat air-travel market between continental Europe and the US, said Joe Brancatelli, a travel consultant and writer whose Web site, www.joesentme.com, is known for its hard-nosed appraisals of the airline industry.

  "The Concorde is the last great ride left in the air," Brancatelli said in a moment of uncharacteristic warmth toward an airplane. "These days, what else is exciting about travel?"

  Bannister himself confesses the same enthusiasms. Piloting a commercial airliner over the Atlantic can seem almost as routine as driving a cross-town bus. But commanding the cockpit of a Concorde, soaring at 2,173kph through the upper atmosphere where the sky turns indigo blue, is a shirt-sleeve excursion into what is still the frontier of flight.

  "I remember my training flights in Concorde 24 years ago, on a route to Bahrain," he recalled. "We'd fly subsonic across Europe until we were just past Venice, then we'd go supersonic down the Adriatic and across the Mediterranean. Up at 18km, the thing that struck me looking out of the window at Cypress and Malta and Crete and the Mediterranean coast was, it looked just like the maps I'd seen when I was a kid at school. There was all of Cypress, exactly as it appeared on the atlas."

  From that high up, "you can just see the curvature of the earth" on a clear day, he said. During the 1980s and 1990s, he added, the earth's upper atmosphere was so dusty, thanks to Mount St. Helens and other big volcanic eruptions, that the far horizon was usually obscured.

  But now the majesty of the globe has returned to view. "Since we started flying again, it seems that the upper atmosphere has cleared out," Bannister said. "You can now just see the curvature of the earth again. And what a stunning, marvelous sight it is."
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