Last Days of the Concorde by Samme Chittum

Author:Samme Chittum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2018-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

9

Delays and Headaches

In his moving accounts of his aeronautical adventures, ace pilot and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry displayed an uncanny ability to be at once philosophically detached and viscerally engaged with the experience of flying, its joys and perils, and what it taught him about life and death. “And there I stayed a bit, ruminating, and telling myself that a man was able to adapt himself to anything,” he wrote in one of his great works, the 1939 memoir Wind, Sand, and Stars. “The notion that he is to die in thirty years has probably never spoiled any man’s fun. Thirty years, or thirty days…it’s all a matter of perspective.” Saint-Exupéry saw clearly and unflinchingly what was close at hand, but he also looked to the stars for solace. In the process, he became one of the most eloquent chroniclers of what it was like to fly into an impenetrable fog, to crash-land in the Sahara Desert, or to be stranded in a disabled plane atop a remote, frozen plateau without hope of rescue.

The modern world in which the Concorde flight crew lived and worked would have been at once familiar and strange to Saint-Exupéry, who was born in the year 1900 and lived only until 1944, when his Lockheed P-38 Lightning vanished during a reconnaissance mission off occupied France. Although he died in the service of the Free French military, Saint-Exupéry—like Christian Marty and his fellow pilots—spent most of his working life in the field of civil aviation, making long, perilous night flights over the towering Andes and the vast Sahara as a pilot for the French air mail service. He got his start in 1926 flying for the Compagnie Aérienne Française, a small airline based at Le Bourget Airport. Paris was his off-and-on-again home, and he even worked briefly in the public-relations department of Air France.

The balky, primitive planes he flew—propeller-powered Sopwith biplanes and triplanes with few instruments—bore no resemblance to the supersonic Concorde. But he surely would have been enraptured with the prospect of soaring high enough to explore the stratosphere and marvel at the curve of the Earth. His awe of the first supersonic passenger plane doubtless would have been tempered by his knowledge that it was no more than a machine built for travel. “The airplane,” he wrote, “is a means, not an end.” Its higher, overlooked purpose—to reveal “the true face of the Earth”—was open to discovery by a privileged few: pilots who were, like Marty, both disciplined and thoughtful.

Saint-Exupéry certainly would have appreciated the depth of comradeship that existed among three seasoned professionals working together in the confines of the claustrophobic Concorde cockpit. And he knew what it was to watch a friend climb confidently into the pilot’s seat before flying off into perfect blue skies, never to return. “For nothing, in truth, can replace that [lost] companion,” he wrote. “Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured, of quarrels, reconciliations, and generous emotions.

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