1970 – Flying Somewhere?
1970 proved to be one of those ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ years for aviation. The late 1960s had seen amazing developments in jet aircraft travel. Somewhat competitive, too, as in the USA the Boeing 747 was in development and testing, while in Europe, exactly the same process was being undertaken for the joint British/French Concorde. In 1970, both were flying and starting to sell. In different ways, each offered a new future for airline travel.
In some ways, the Concorde was the more remarkable aeroplane, all the more so because it was the result of Anglo-French cooperation and competition! Given that this was to fly twice as fast as any previous commercial aeroplane, there were many challenges. One of these had to do with the wings, which resulted in the use of very short-span, very thin trapezoidal wings such as those seen along the body of many missiles. However, to achieve enough lift these had to be extended along the fuselage as far as possible, so that the Concorde looked rather like a paper dart from below. The result was, to use the technical description, the Concorde was an ‘ogival delta winged’ aircraft, with a tailless design, though it did have a vertical tail fin.
However, the downside to this design was take-off and landing would have to be very “nose high” to generate the required lift, as well as extended landing gear to provide the needed angle while still on the runway. Given take-off had to be at a steep angle, the aircraft had to balance the need for streamlining to reduce drag and aerodynamic efficiency with giving the pilots an unobstructed view during taxi, take-off, and landing operations. To do this, the pilot could lower the distinctive ‘drop nose’ of the aircraft by 5° below horizontal for taxiing and take-off. Once airborne, the nose was raised. Prior to landing, the nose lowered to 12.5° below horizontal, and then back the 5° position when the plane was on the runway to avoid the risk of damage.
The other major issue was the need for powerful aircraft engines. Given concern over what could be unacceptably high costs to develop a new engine, Rolls-Royce proposed using its Olympus Mk 320 Turbojet, an engine being used in the subsonic Avro Vulcan bomber (another aircraft with a trapezoid design). However, these engines were very noisy, and despite various fixes, this remained a problem. In some ways, using the Olympus engines was a compromise: to achieve necessary high efficiency turbofan engines had been rejected, and hence the Olympus turbojet system was attractive, as well as using afterburners at take-off and ramping up to supersonic speeds. However, the jet engines were inefficient at low speeds, and Concorde burned two tonnes of fuel (almost 2% of the maximum fuel load) just in taxiing to the runway. Even when idling, the high thrust produced meant only the two outer engines were run after landing for taxiing. With a low weight after landing, the aircraft would not remain stationary, and the pilot had to keep the brakes on continuously to stop the aircraft from rolling along.
Much as the scientist in me loves all this technical stuff, if you want more there is an excellent overview provided in Wikipedia. [i] However, one final comment: this was the first airliner to have a ‘fly-by-wire’ control system. Construction of the first two aircraft began in February 1965, and it was a race between Concorde 001, being built by Aérospatiale at Toulouse, and 002, under construction by BAC at Filton, Bristol. Despite cooperation, and sharing on a daily basis, the French won. Concorde 001 made its first test flight from Toulouse on 2 March 1969, and was the first to go supersonic on 1 October. The UK-built Concorde 002 flew from Filton to a Royal Air Force base at Fairford five weeks later, and both travelled to the Paris Air Show in early June 1969, for a first time showing to the public. Fans and aircraft enthusiasts raced from one place to another in 1970, just to get a glimpse of either plane. However, scheduled flights didn’t commence until 1976, on the London-Bahrain and Paris-Rio de Janeiro routes.
Delays were inevitable, as those powerful engines had another consequence. Once the plane broke through the sound barrier, it was loud, very loud. This limited most of the routes it flew to be largely over water. Of course, all this added to its allure. If you could catch it at full speed, there was the ‘boom’. Even if you couldn’t, it was so … so space age! Before I left for Australia in 1975, I was often at London’s Heathrow Airport, and when I was told one of BA’s seven Concordes was going to be there, I joined all the other avid rubberneckers. I can still remember the first time I saw a Concorde: I felt a little let down, ‘is that it, that little plane over there?’
If you wanted something big, really big, there was the Boeing 747, the ‘jumbo’. Of course, it wasn’t that big! Many years before, there had been a really, really big aeroplane, the HK-1, or, as it was more popularly known, the Spruce Goose. If you believe some people like to think big, Howard Hughes thought enormous! In 1942, having joined the war alongside the British, the US War Department needed to move ever increasing supplies, machinery and personnel over to the UK, but this was at the height of the battles in the Atlantic Ocean, and U-boats were sinking troop and cargo ships with alarming ease. The solution would be aircraft that could carry large payloads, and ship-builder Kaiser teamed up with Hughes to construct a large ‘flying cargo-ship’, and later that year won the contract to manufacture three aircraft.
Hughes was a perfectionist, and the process was slow. After considering several very different designs, work began on a single-hulled flying boat, fabricated from wood, (and some fabric), (necessary as there were wartime restrictions on metals, especially aluminium, which were needed for fighter and bomber aircraft). To produce a strong enough framework, the plane was built using a new laminated plywood and resin technology, together with a specialised birch wood veneer. At the time, this was considered an outstanding advance in timber technology. Despite the fact that the laminate was mainly birch, the aircraft, the HK-1 Hercules, was nicknamed the Spruce Goose, although some rather unkindly called it the Flying Lumberyard!
Hughes design allowed the HK-1 to carry a payload of 150,000 pounds, which could be 750 fully equipped troops or two 30-ton M4 Sherman tanks. It had a wingspan of 320 feet, the largest of any aircraft that had ever flown until 2019, when the Scaled Composites Model 351 Stratolaunch with a wingspan of 385 feet, flew for the first and only time in April 2019. Incidentally, many of the Model 351 aircraft systems were adapted from the Boeing 747, including the engines, avionics, flight deck, landing gear and other systems, greatly reducing development costs.
Entirely new in design and construction, Hughes had to solve many problems to complete the HK-1 Hercules. For example he “devised a system of interleaving thin layers of wood, copper, and glue to prepare the spar for an electrical current that, when passed through the sandwich, melted it rigidly into place. … A flotation system included inflatable beach balls stashed between ribs and a pair of Franklin engines on the flight deck provided juice for the avionics, hydraulics, and other systems. … Each of the flying boat’s eight Pratt & Whitney 28-cylinder engines produced 3,000 horsepower and sucked down 100 gallons of fuel per hour. These powerplants each bathed in 32 gallons of oil flowing through four banks of seven cylinders; the engines had two spark plugs per cylinder for a total of 448 spark plugs.” [ii] The Spruce Goose only flew once, in 1947, long after the end of the Second World War. It is now housed by the Aero Club of South California. Testimony to the materials used, it is in excellent condition, the mechanical equivalent of a white elephant. It had cost $23m to develop, or well over $220m in 2020 dollars.
In the 1960s, however, it was commercial passengers, not war requirements, that were driving the aircraft industry. While Concorde was being developed in Europe, Boeing was asked to build a passenger aircraft more than twice the size of the popular Boeing 707, given airport congestion. With increasing numbers of passengers carried on relatively small aircraft, too many aircraft were landing hourly at major airports, clogging terminals and airbridges. Studies for new plane, assigned the model number 747, were initiated, but on the basis the plane would be superseded by a supersonic plane, given the development of the Concorde. Boeing decided the 747 would need to be easily modified to carry freight when sales of the passenger version declined. This approach accelerated the development of standard aircraft shipping containers, those we see still in use in 2020. In April 1966, Pan Am ordered 25 Boeing 747-100 aircraft, a commitment from their CEO, a strong advocate for the development of the new aircraft.
The original design included a full-length double-deck fuselage with eight-across seating and two aisles on the lower deck and seven-across seating and two aisles on the upper deck. However, worries about evacuation and a need for greater cargo-carrying capability saw this scrapped and replaced with a wider single deck configuration. As we now know, the double deck concept was to return, successfully, in the Airbus 380. The cockpit was placed on a shortened upper deck resulting in the 747’s distinctive ‘hump’. In early models it was not clear what to do with the small space behind the cockpit, and this was initially used as a lounge area. Flying first class from India to Malaysia in a 747 in 1975 (how I ended up in First is another story), I loved the bar and casual seating upstairs, which, sadly, didn’t last through many models.
As with Concorde and Spruce Goose, there were many new technologies and modifications required. Boeing introduced an approach called fault-tree analysis, which studied the impact of the failure of one part on other components and systems. One of the consequences of this approach was to introduce such safety measures as structural redundancy, duplicate hydraulic systems, quadruple main landing gear and dual control surfaces. Engine power was critical, and the engine technology developed for military cargo aircraft was adapted by Pratt and Whitney to develop a new high-bypass turbofan engine for the 747. Without getting into more details of technology, the process was similar to that for the HK-1: a bigger aircraft required new and rethought technologies everywhere, the result of a great deal of testing and checking.
One important test involved the evacuation of 560 volunteers from a cabin mock-up via the aircraft’s emergency chutes. The first full-scale evacuation took two and a half minutes instead of the mandated maximum of 90 seconds. Several volunteers were injured and evacuations from the upper deck remained a source of trouble until a safer system was developed. The use of the evacuation systems was used in a ‘screen test’ at Universal Studios some years later. On five mock up sets from Airport 77, volunteers could experience 2-3 minutes of a scene. One was jumping out of a 747 into the ocean (OK, into a tank of water about three feet below the aircraft door!). When I went to Universal Studios with my family in the late 1970’s one daughter, not yet a teenager, was a volunteer for that scene: she loved it!
The early years of the 747 were far from easy. The first test flight in 1969 went well, but later testing revealed there was a severe problem with high-speed wing flutter. The way to solve it at the time was to put spent uranium counterweights in the outer shells of the two engines furthest from the fuselage. You can imagine this led to another flutter, of anxiety, especially when a 747 crashed in Amsterdam in 1992, in this case with 622 pounds of uranium in in the tail (another fix to stabilize the horizontal alignment). There were also challenges with the engines, just as had been the case with the Concorde. However, the aircraft was ready to be displayed at the 1969 Paris Airshow, alongside the Concorde, and it was cleared by the FAA at the end of the year.
1970 was a big year for both aircraft. The Anglo-French Concorde went to air shows, soliciting sales. High interest that year was not sustained, however, in part because a Tupolev 144, a competing supersonic aircraft, crashed at the 1973 Paris Airshow and dented enthusiasm. Eventually, 14 Concordes went in to service, seven each for British Airways and Air France. Despite subsidies and support, the Concorde was never an economic proposition. Meanwhile, in the US, Pan Am’s first 747 was ‘christened’ by the President’s wife, Pat Nixon on January 15, 1970. Instead of champagne, red, white, and blue water was sprayed on the aircraft. The 747 entered service a week later on Pan Am’s New York–London route. The ‘Jumbo’ enjoyed a fairly smooth introduction into operation, and following Pan Am, other airlines bought the 747 to stay competitive, and began adding 747s on to various routes. That promising beginning was soon to be dissipated, however, as the longer term effect of a recession in 1969-70, together with the impact of the 1973 oil crisis, led to a drop passenger bookings combined with higher operating costs. It took more than ten years, and several variations in the original configuration before the aircraft began to sell in the numbers need to pay off the development costs.
Fifty years ago, flying was more dangerous than it is today. In 1970, the five-year moving average for passenger fatalities per trillion kilometres flown was around 3,250, and has declined ever since, to the point it is below 50 per trillion kilometres flown today. Of course, individual years can be exceptional. 1972 was the year the highest number of deaths in commercial aviation were recorded, with 2,313 fatalities. In the last decade, there have been two years with more than 500 deaths, most recently in 2018/9 when two crashes involving the Boeing 737 MAX accounted for 349 fatalities. Despite rigorous certification processes by the FAA, we later learnt that in the case of this aircraft some of the testing had been outsourced to Boeing itself.
1970 was also the year in which we followed the dramatic explosion on Apollo 13. Two missions had successfully landed astronauts on the moon. Apollo 13, a spacecraft consisting of a command module, Odyssey, and a lunar module, Aquarius, took off from the Kennedy Space Centre on April 11, but an explosion in two oxygen tanks on the command module left it without oxygen. Its systems were shut down and the crew transferred to Aquarius as their ‘lifeboat’. With improvisation and dedication, and almost against all odds, they were safely returned to Earth on 17 April. Thinking of flying somewhere? If it’s to a destination on the earth, it’s safer than driving, but flying into space? That’s still very risky.
[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde
[ii] https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2016/december/01/spruce-goose-dominates-oregon-museum. There is also a helpful discussion of the HK – 1 in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_H-4_Hercules
