Photo: Dallas Morning News
Four afterburning turbojets, room for up to 120 high-paying passengers, and a top speed of just over Mach two limited not by the engine's capabilities but by the fact that the aircraft's skin stood a chance of warping if it went any faster. These are just a few of the positive traits attributed to the Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde. This prized old bird's been out of commission for 20 years now. But that doesn't mean we can't sit back and appreciate the 50th anniversary of when Concorde touched down on U.S. soil for the very first time.
Keep in mind that Europe's novel supersonic hyper-airliner didn't plant its flag at New York's JFK or Los Angeles' LAX, as you might expect. Instead, a single British Airways Concorde was treated to a hero's welcome at the newly constructed Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on September 20, 1973. A vast consortium of aviation fans, the international press, and the curious public at large, over 100,000 strong, were on hand to greet Concorde as it touched down on Texan soil. The newly completed airport cost the twin cities of Dallas and Fort Worth a combined $700 million. In modern money, this works out to a staggering $4.8 billion just to finish the construction project.
With the hard part now ostensibly out of the way, Concorde served as a fitting party piece for the opening of what would become one of the world's highest-trafficked international airports in the entire world. A sense of child-like wonder befell the frenzied Dallas crowd as Concorde touched its massive landing gear wheels down on the freshly laid landing strip in the city's new flagship airport. This Super Bowl-like fervor continued as the hyper-futuristic European airliner made its way down the taxiway towards a sea of human souls who'd likely not flown on anything more advanced than a piston-engine DC-7 by this stage of the early 70s.
By all expressible measures, Concorde wowed every human soul who gazed on its glory that day. It was the start of DFW Airport's meteoric rise to the third busiest in the world by aircraft traffic and the second largest globally by passenger volume. Ironically, because later rules regulating when and where domestically traveling airliners could break the sound barrier and create sonic booms, Concorde flights were most often limited to international routes over open oceans. Only a handful of routes out of DFW Airport to places like Washington D.C. were flown, and only then for a very brief period between 1979 and 1980 and then again for a time in 1988.
As it turned out, these handful of appearances were all that was needed to help Dallas become one of the world's most important cities in all of air travel. For this reason, we owe Concorde our thanks once again.
With the hard part now ostensibly out of the way, Concorde served as a fitting party piece for the opening of what would become one of the world's highest-trafficked international airports in the entire world. A sense of child-like wonder befell the frenzied Dallas crowd as Concorde touched its massive landing gear wheels down on the freshly laid landing strip in the city's new flagship airport. This Super Bowl-like fervor continued as the hyper-futuristic European airliner made its way down the taxiway towards a sea of human souls who'd likely not flown on anything more advanced than a piston-engine DC-7 by this stage of the early 70s.
By all expressible measures, Concorde wowed every human soul who gazed on its glory that day. It was the start of DFW Airport's meteoric rise to the third busiest in the world by aircraft traffic and the second largest globally by passenger volume. Ironically, because later rules regulating when and where domestically traveling airliners could break the sound barrier and create sonic booms, Concorde flights were most often limited to international routes over open oceans. Only a handful of routes out of DFW Airport to places like Washington D.C. were flown, and only then for a very brief period between 1979 and 1980 and then again for a time in 1988.
As it turned out, these handful of appearances were all that was needed to help Dallas become one of the world's most important cities in all of air travel. For this reason, we owe Concorde our thanks once again.
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