Time Essay: Putting Up with the Ugly Duckling

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.