Time Essay: Putting Up with the Ugly Duckling

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It is beyond dispute that the Concorde is louder than any subsonic plane; just how much louder has yet to be definitively answered. Since May 1976 the Federal Aviation Administration has been monitoring Concorde flights in and out of Washington's John Foster Dulles airport. The findings so far: the plane's noise level has almost always been below what most experts regard as the threshold of aural pain. Many of the airport's neighbors have even phoned in complaints about the Concorde when the offending craft has actually been a distinctly subsonic DC-9. In contrast to the high-pitched whine of a Boeing 707 or 747, the Concorde produces a throaty low-frequency rumble that rattles dishes and bric-a-brac. One FAA report notes that irritating though this is to airport neighbors, these vibrations have less impact on the structure of a house or apartment building than "non-aircraft events, such as doors closing."

The findings at Dulles may not be applicable to J.F.K. The impact of sound varies from person to person and place to place. Thus, how much additional discomfort the Concorde will inflict on the airport's distressingly noisy neighborhood can be determined only by on-site testing. The Concorde will not make the area any quieter; but it seems unlikely that the four daily flights the British and French are seeking will perceptibly add to the annoyance already caused by the nearly 1,000 daily landings and takeoffs by subsonic aircraft.

There is much to be said for authorizing Concorde service into the New York City area, at least on an experimental basis. For one thing, banning it might be a futile attempt to block the inevitable. Supersonic travel, after all, is probably here to stay, if only because greater speed has always been the primary goal of transportation development. The Soviet supersonic TU-144 is said to be hauling cargo between Moscow and Alma Ata, while nearly 15,000 passengers—admittedly, a small minority of transatlantic travelers—have already flown the Concorde to Europe. They are delighted by its speed, if not its comfort. For another thing, a ban on the Concorde would betray the American tradition of welcoming rugged but fair competition in the marketplace. The staggering development and operating costs of the Concorde may make the plane one of history's landmark commercial disasters, but if Paris and London are willing to keep subsidizing it they are entitled to a chance to serve the U.S.'s major travel market.

The Concorde's faults, like those of the first generation of almost any other technological breakthrough, make it the ugly duckling of its species. But through experience gained by maximum usage of the Concorde, developers of future SSTs should be able to move up the learning curve to design cleaner, quieter and more efficient supersonic planes. By banning the plane, New York would exclude itself from this pioneering process—an odd role for a city that prides itself on being a pacesetter for the world. Thus, before Concorde service at J.F.K. is ruled detrimental to the commonweal, the big bird deserves at least a chance to demonstrate—in a carefully monitored test—that it is not quite the monster its critics contend.

Burton Yale Pines