Secret harmonies ... Concorde prototypes from Bristol now up for auction in Toulouse
Concorde, that most charismatic of all civil airliners, always did look like a paper plane. Not just any old school playground paper dart, of course, but the most beautifully thought out and most aerodynamic aircraft possible, folded by the hands of brilliant, if still unsung, backbench aero-engineers.
Now we learn that Concorde engineers really did make paper aircraft at their drawing boards and workbenches, testing these outside the former British Aircraft Corporation workshops near Bristol during their lunch hours. Made of any scrap of paper or card available, these primitive, hand-propelled Concordes did their bit in the design process of the most famous, and dynamic, airliner of all.
This weekend, Concorde buffs will be able to bid for a number of such early models of the supersonic airliner at a sale at the old Corn Hall in Toulouse close to the Aerospatiale works where the French contribution to the design and construction of the droop-nosed aircraft was made from the 1950s to the 1970s. The 834 lots up for grabs include Mach-meters, temperature sensors and an entire nose-wheel assembly. Assume that every last item will be sold and probably well above the auction room's guide prices. Concorde might not fly today, but she (Concorde is always referred to in the singular) continues to soar in the collective hearts and minds of very many European aircraft enthusiasts.
Those early, lunchtime engineers' models are a moving reminder of just how much great engineering and design in the pre-computer era was done by any means possible. Inspired engineers and intuitive designers have often been able to see what needs to be done for any given project - car, locomotive, supersonic aircraft, building - in their minds' eyes. Sketches, sometime literally on the backs of envelopes, have often formed the basis for some of the most thrilling and popular design projects. Joseph Paxton, the Victorian gardener and engineer, made his first sketch of the radical Crystal Palace in ink on a modest piece of blotting paper. The real building looked very much like a vastly enlarged version of that first crude sketch.
Today, we expect to see design concepts presented in immaculately detailed, and luridly coloured, computer drawings. Many of these, though, are not really an improvement on the seemingly rough-and-sketches and superficially crude models made by design engineers of the Concorde era. They are simply tools of a more marketing-oriented age. Even today, in a class of primary school children, it's possible to spot a possible future engineer simply by the way they get a paper aircraft, of their own making, to swoop and soar when most flop and fall.
Britain suffers from a huge shortfall of engineers today; perhaps we could help nurture a future generation by encouraging schoolchildren to try their hand at low-cost experimental design in playgrounds at lunchtime, just as Concorde's engineers did half a century ago.
