Putting Up with the Ugly Duckling
By Burton Yale Pines
After the wheel was invented, some cave dwellers undoubtedly complained that ruts would ruin the footpaths. Many millenniums later, in the 1840s, farmers of New York's Suffolk County rebelled against another recent invention; they tore up railway tracks, put the torch to depots and caused wrecks by loosening rail ties. The iron horse was evil, they complained; its sparks set fields afire, its bells and noisy clatter shocked cows into withholding milk, and its soot soiled laundry. Decades later, the first autos were denounced for scaring horses and for spewing objectionable fumes.
Major technological innovations, it seems, have often been rejected by large segments of the public possessed by an almost Luddite aversion to change. That still seems true today. Witness the current international flap over whether the Concorde supersonic passenger jet will be allowed to land at New York City's John F. Kennedy airport. Supporters of the Concorde hail the sleek, needle-nosed jet as a revolutionary globe-shrinker. Meanwhile, legions of determined opponents damn it as a threat to their community's quality of life and a menace to the world's environment.
A number of doomsday arguments have been raised against the Concorde, as well as against the ill-fated Boeing SST that was scrapped in 1971. There were prophecies that supersonic aircraft would emit such great quantities of water vapor that a permanent cloud barrier would shut out the sun; this "greenhouse" effect would dangerously raise the earth's surface temperature. There were also predictions of skin cancer epidemics: nitrogen oxides released by the SSTs would destroy the ozone layer that partly shields the earth against the sun's lethal ultraviolet radiation. Then too, the SST's fumes were denounced as a potential new cause of massive pollution.
By and large, these dangers have turned out to be exaggerated. Most scientists now believe that it would take a fleet of at least 100 SSTs to produce even a minimal greenhousing effect; no more than 16 Concordes are likely to be manufactured. Future generations of SSTs will probably be designed to emit much less water vapor. As for pollution, the plane's emissions fall within generally accepted levels. The available evidence does not substantiate the fears of ozone destruction. Compared with the thousands of U.S., Soviet and West European supersonic warplanes that crisscross the skies, the tiny Concorde fleet could not possibly have much impact on the ozone.
The most serious remaining objection to the Concorde is the noise it inflicts on people who live near airports. As long as the Concordes are limited to speeds below Mach 1 (660 m.p.h. at sea level) while flying over land, the black visions of perpetual sonic boom and house-crumbling roars are without any substance.
It is beyond dispute that the Concorde is louder than any subsonic plane; just how much louder has yet to be definitively answered. Since May 1976 the Federal Aviation Administration has been monitoring Concorde flights in and out of Washington's John Foster Dulles airport. The findings so far: the plane's noise level has almost always been below what most experts regard as the threshold of aural pain. Many of the airport's neighbors have even phoned in complaints about the Concorde when the offending craft has actually been a distinctly subsonic DC-9. In contrast to the high-pitched whine of a Boeing 707 or 747, the Concorde produces a throaty low-frequency rumble that rattles dishes and bric-a-brac. One FAA report notes that irritating though this is to airport neighbors, these vibrations have less impact on the structure of a house or apartment building than "non-aircraft events, such as doors closing."
The findings at Dulles may not be applicable to J.F.K. The impact of sound varies from person to person and place to place. Thus, how much additional discomfort the Concorde will inflict on the airport's distressingly noisy neighborhood can be determined only by on-site testing. The Concorde will not make the area any quieter; but it seems unlikely that the four daily flights the British and French are seeking will perceptibly add to the annoyance already caused by the nearly 1,000 daily landings and takeoffs by subsonic aircraft.
There is much to be said for authorizing Concorde service into the New York City area, at least on an experimental basis. For one thing, banning it might be a futile attempt to block the inevitable. Supersonic travel, after all, is probably here to stay, if only because greater speed has always been the primary goal of transportation development. The Soviet supersonic TU-144 is said to be hauling cargo between Moscow and Alma Ata, while nearly 15,000 passengers--admittedly, a small minority of transatlantic travelers--have already flown the Concorde to Europe. They are delighted by its speed, if not its comfort. For another thing, a ban on the Concorde would betray the American tradition of welcoming rugged but fair competition in the marketplace. The staggering development and operating costs of the Concorde may make the plane one of history's landmark commercial disasters, but if Paris and London are willing to keep subsidizing it they are entitled to a chance to serve the U.S.'s major travel market.
The Concorde's faults, like those of the first generation of almost any other technological breakthrough, make it the ugly duckling of its species. But through experience gained by maximum usage of the Concorde, developers of future SSTs should be able to move up the learning curve to design cleaner, quieter and more efficient supersonic planes. By banning the plane, New York would exclude itself from this pioneering process--an odd role for a city that prides itself on being a pacesetter for the world. Thus, before Concorde service at J.F.K. is ruled detrimental to the commonweal, the big bird deserves at least a chance to demonstrate--in a carefully monitored test--that it is not quite the monster its critics contend.
Burton Yale Pines
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