Plane Spotting

The Concorde Experience, The Museum of Flight, East Lothian

Since it ceased to fly, there have been many words spoken about Concorde, most of them cliched. A recent television documentary described the plane's career as 'a love story spanning three decades'. If so, it proved to be an aeronautical mistress whose adorers needed deep pockets and perpetual forgiveness.

As the American statesman Robert McNamara, who was charged with developing an American rival, observed, Europe paid 'one hell of a price' for that infatuation. Development costs of £1.4bn were reportedly ten times the original estimate.

The projected worldwide fleet of 250 shrank in the face of international hostility to a meagre 16 operated by the parent nations. Concorde was to Britain and France what the Apollo Mission was to America; a project powered more by political testosterone than the prospect of lasting technological advances.

Yet the mystique of Concorde is undiminished. I have lost count of the times I have read that it was 'an icon of the 20th century'. Most of us were content to be iconophiles, happy to do no more than stare as the exotic big bird flew overhead.

Its austere beauty was a fortuitous by-product of technology. In retirement, the few remaining planes can only be worshipped on the ground. One of those, promoted as Scotland's Concorde, the aptly named Alpha Alpha, is now on display at the Museum of Flight outside Edinburgh.

There is a certain poetic circularity in the choice of location. The East Fortune airfield, an assembly of windswept hangars and drab Nissan huts, is nevertheless a scheduled monument, the departure point in 1919 for the first east-west Atlantic crossing by the historic airship R34.

In 1977 Alpha Alpha provided the first scheduled supersonic commercial service between London and New York. The National Museums of Scotland (NMS), led by its eloquent curator of transport, Alastair Dodds, did well to persuade the powers-that-be that this was a suitable home for Concorde.

In the face of a flying ban, it was conveyed through the streets of London by night, floated on a giant pontoon down the Thames past the Houses of Parliament and then shipped up the coast of Britain before more road transport and a final trundle across muddy fields on special tracks laid by 39 Engineer Regiment.

Greeted by hundreds of Scots, two pipers, a cultural minister and curators, Alpha Alpha maintained a ladylike dignity in the face of its bizarre final journey.

In a few frantic months the NMS has done this Concorde proud. She sits chaste, well-buffed and uncluttered, surrounded by light and air redolent of her natural element. There is a strange Dr Who feel to the site. From outside, the hangar looks small.

Inside, like the Tardis, space expands and the plane seems huge and astonishingly potent. Those who are privileged to claim a boarding pass have the opposite experience, for the interior of the plane is narrow and constricting. No wonder the cabin crew called her the flying toothpick.

The sheer opulence of Concorde, the smell of leather, the taste of champagne and caviar, and the fame or infamy of fellow passengers inoculated travellers against those twin fears of air travel: terror and boredom.

As Aviation Week reported, the flight 'delivered passengers in a remarkably fresh and unfatigued condition that will make them head back towards the seven-to-eight-hour subsonic crossing with the greatest reluctance'.

An early passenger reported a unique frisson in outpacing time, arriving in New York an hour earlier than he had left London. 'At 60,000 feet up, travelling at twice the speed of sound, you could see the curvature of the earth - the only drawback was you had to drink faster!'

The Museum of Flight will attract many extra visitors. The major difficulty will be that no matter how many want to see the airfield and exhibition, only a maximum of 300 each day will be able to board the plane. Success will cause problems.

Pre-booking is imperative now and will become even more so at peak times. Those who do mount the steps are provided with an excellent audio-guide that is simple to operate and well scripted. Information is transmitted through the voices of simulated cabin crew.

No other profession quite talks like that. And the strange freemasonry of airline pilots, with their enduring tradition of Biggles-like vocabulary and irrelevant weather information, is captured exactly - social history preserved with the precision of a beetle in amber.

The tour, for all its inherent difficulties, is managed with great charm by young, well-trained museum attendants.

The museum has done well to convey the affluent jet-set reputation of Concorde. The small exhibition that neighbours the plane and an excellent short cinema film articulate the delights and the drawbacks of the plane.

The environmental opposition to the supersonic booms and the safety concerns after the Paris crash in July 2000 are not shirked. Nor is the financial backlash following the events of 9/11.

The text and scripts of both these presentations strike a commendable balance between academic technical detail and unpatronising prose. They are a joy to read and listen to. Such clarity is becoming a rarity in contemporary museums: in most it seems to be mandatory for information to be pitched at the physical height and the intellectual level of the average seven-year-old.

I was left, however, with one query. The Concorde project is rightly lauded as an example of international cooperation. Yet there is not a single sentence of interpretative material available in French or any other language. Is this an oversight, or a result of budgetary problems at the NMS?

For aeronautical fanatics, plane-spotters and I-Spyers, East Fortune is clearly destined to become a place of pilgrimage. Those of us with a lower attention span for matters technological will rephrase Dr Johnson's judgement on the Giant's Causeway: 'Worth seeing, yes, but perhaps not worth going too far to see!'

Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish,
the North of England Open Air Museum