Seventh Month of the Project: Opposition to Concorde

We are now entering the seventh month of the project, and the open afternoon for this month will be focused on the opposition to Concorde.

It has been interesting to learn throughout the project about the kind of opposition faced by Concorde during its development and the early years of flight.

Most of this opposition seemed to focus on issues of noise, pollution and cost or even fears of structural damage brought on by sonic booms and the documents we hold regarding opposition to Concorde are a mix of material circulated by the Anti-Concorde project and documents regarding the hearings on Concorde and flight into JFK, as well as documents regarding the sonic boom tests in Oklahoma City that caused many of the initial fears about the effects of sonic boom.

Most interesting find of the month

Which brings us to the most interesting find of the month

(Credit BAE Systems)

This document is not so much an example of the opposition documents we hold, but rather an example of something caused by them. This image comes from an annotated draft version of a document produced by BAC, giving commentary on whether the photographs chosen for the piece are appropriate or not. The text reads “This is now a bad “pollution” picture. Any clear ground shot would be better” showing that there was an awareness of what kind of images may be fuelling those opposed to Concorde and that fears about pollution caused by Concorde would not be improved by seeing smoky images of 002.

If any of the above sounds interesting, please pop by the archive for the open afternoon between 1:30-3:30 on Thursday the 25th of April to see these documents on display. Normal museum admission applies, but no extra ticket will be needed to enter the archive.