Original subtitles

Concorde.

The fastest airliner on Earth.

Concorde really had The Voice of Jove,

it was a great sky God.

It was in a league of its own,

achieving something that seemed impossible.

It is an icon of speed...

We flew at twice the speed of sound.

Faster than a bullet from a gun.

...and beauty.

It looked like a piece of science fiction,

arriving in the real world.

But beyond the looks,

Concorde was born from a brutal three-way dogfight,

as Europe, Russia, and America battled it out for

the future of aviation.

Concorde was a Cold War warrior.

Espionage,

billion-dollar budgets,

and radical new designs.

To go bigger, to go faster, and go farther.

Nothing was off limits in the race to win flying's biggest prize.

If you could design a supersonic jet,

you would dominate the skies.

And so, the race was on.

In Brooklands, on the outskirts of London,

is one of the greatest airliners in the world.

She first flew in 1969.

We'd only just got colour television, for goodness' sake.

This is Concorde Delta Golf -

the first production Concorde built in Britain.

What the designers and the engineers did way back in the '60s

was one of the greatest technical achievements man has ever made.

You always have to watch your head, stepping into Concorde.

And back here, the cabin, of course,

with 100 people riding in Concorde's service.

We carried the rich and famous.

Michael Jackson, Sir Paul McCartney,

Mick Jagger used to get on and sit quietly at the back

reading his book.

Over two decades have passed since

Concorde flew the great and the good.

But it is not forgotten.

I miss the atmosphere, I miss the customers.

I miss looking after them.

I miss the speed and the excitement.

We shot through the sound barrier,

and for the very first time, I looked out and I saw

the curvature of the earth.

When we looked up, and the sky was black above us.

We were on the edge of space.

We fly faster than the Earth is rotating.

We'd see the sun rise again, in the West.

Concorde showed us what was possible in the future.

It's still the most futuristic aircraft that's ever

been built for passengers.

And we won't see it's like for some time in the future, if ever.

Concorde was the stuff dreams are made of,

providing an experience like no other.

But it was a dream born out of the ashes of war.

There's a fresh look to fun today.

Stylists have added new zest to recreation.

When the dust settles after World war I,

enthusiasm for a new technological future explodes -

even if some of the ideas are a bit...wacky.

There's an enormous amount of enthusiasm for technology

in the 1950s.

All of the young geniuses who had created the weapons of war,

were now let loose on the civilian sector.

And one wartime technology is the crown jewel in

their shiny new tool box.

Jet engine changed aviation forever.

It allowed to have planes flying further, faster, higher.

The race is on to transform this military tech

into a commercial jet airliner.

The country that pulls it off will be showcasing their superiority

in the new high-tech world order.

But it's not one of the two new superpowers,

Russia or America, that triumphs.

It's a war-torn European country.

The British won the race to build the first jet transport plane,

The De Havilland Comet.

Before the Comet came out, people travelled by ship.

Within a couple of months,

that all changed.

People flew on jets.

The Comet is fast -

50% faster than any propeller-powered airliner.

Travel time was reduced exponentially.

The Comet slashes transatlantic flight times from 15 hours

to just seven.

A new era has arrived...

...led by Britain.

The jet age.

The jet just suggests speed,

performance, power, excitement, thrill.

It was the idea that you could move quickly

and glamorously around the world.

How's that for smooth travelling?

Britain is riding high on the back of the fastest civilian

aircraft in the world.

Except there's one problem.

The Comet had structural defects.

And there were several fatal accidents.

The Comet was just withdrawn.

It came back later in 1958.

By that time, the Americans had got there with their big 707.

Britain and the United States may have been wartime allies,

but in peacetime, they are commercial rivals.

Welcome aboard.

Welcome aboard the spacious cabin.

Attractively decorated, air-conditioned, but draft-free.

The 707 was the jet age objectified,

it really was the machine that created that image of this new,

exciting high-flying lifestyle.

Britain's brief moment in the sun is over.

The United States was dominating all commercial aviation.

Great Britain realised they would have a hard time

breaking the monopoly the United States held.

Britain's only hope of clawing their way back to the top

is to do something radical.

So, they partner with wartime ally France

for an astonishing new project,

based on a very simple idea.

If fast is good, faster is clearly better.

From piston engines, you get jet engines -

and so, from jet engines,

it seemed like the natural evolution would be supersonic.

But no-one has ever tried to make an airliner that flies

faster than the speed of sound.

The aim was for Britain and for France to beat the United States

in the key race of tomorrow.

Speed put Britain on the top of the aviation world once before.

Now, it's gambling everything on repeating the same trick.

Airliner of the future.

This is a model of a supersonic jet which Britain and France hope

will dominate transatlantic travel.

The project becomes known as Concorde.

Concorde was going to be the first airliner that could fly at Mach 2,

twice the speed of sound.

Mach 2 - over 1,300 miles per hour,

nearly three times the speed of a conventional jet.

And it would be able to keep up that speed flying across the Atlantic.

Concorde sensationally promises to fly the Atlantic

in just 3.5 hours -

just over half the time of America's 707.

Europe is going to steal back its lead with speed.

If the future of civil aviation was supersonic,

Britain had to be in it.

So, a gamble, but a necessary one.

The problem is, Concorde is walking into a ruthless high-stakes race.

This is the view from 60,000 feet,

at more than twice the speed of today's jet airliners.

It's what we'd see up there, flying in a supersonic transport.

We will be soon, you know.

The question is, will it be an American SST?

Will it be made in the USA?

President Kennedy felt that it was absolutely essential for

the United States to maintain its technological lead throughout

the world, in everything from space to medicine, to aeronautics.

If you could design a jet

that could fly supersonic and carry hundreds of people,

and turn a viable profit for the airliners,

you would dominate the skies.

This was really about national prestige.

But it was also about American jobs.

Kennedy throws down the supersonic gauntlet.

It is my judgment that this government should immediately

commence a new program me to develop the prototype of

a commercially-successful supersonic transport,

superior to that being built in any other country of the world.

And so, the race was on.

But none of the politicians really understand

just how difficult it will be.

When you develop the supersonic transport,

nothing is normal about this.

You are discovering that,

in fact, you know very little.

The shape of the Concorde was developed

in a way that's very different

to modern aircraft.

All the drawings for Concorde

were done on drawing boards.

It was all done on 2D drawings,

with no calculators.

These are unconventional engineers obsessed with aeroplanes.

The British engineers liked to go out at lunchtime

and throw paper aeroplanes around.

Every year, at Christmas-time,

we used to have a paper aeroplane competition,

to see who could fly the farthest.

A good one will just soar for a very long way beautifully.

Concorde was going to be in that state.

It would fly like a dart across the sky.

The challenge for the Concorde designers is that

they don't have much to go on.

If we look at the kind of jets that were achieving supersonic flight,

they weren't designed to carry hundreds of people.

So far, only tiny experimental and military aircraft

have managed to fly supersonically.

Creating a large supersonic airliner is much, much harder.

The biggest problem with supersonic transport is it has to be able

to take off at a very low speed,

and it has to be to fly at a very high speed -

and those are not compatible.

Squaring that circle seems impossible.

All comes down to the wing design.

Above the speed of sound,

an old-fashioned wing shape is too hard to push through the air.

You need something completely new.

If you start heading up towards supersonic speed,

that design is just totally impractical.

For supersonic flight, the ideal shape of the wing would be

to make it as streamlined as possible.

You have to shape your wing to become much more like a dart.

It's called a delta wing.

It's great for supersonic flight,

but comes with one very big problem for an airliner.

When it comes to land, it has too slow down

to normal airliner speed.

A delta wing wouldn't create the lift needed at a lower speed.

If Concorde can't fly slowly enough to use a conventional airport runway

without falling out of the sky, it's useless.

But the designers notice something curious when they tilt

the delta wing to an extreme angle.

It was found that would create these great spirals

of air called vortices.

Vortices are like tiny whirlwinds.

And they are usually very bad news, because they create drag -

exactly what the delta wing is trying to avoid.

But these vortices do something surprising.

Given the right conditions,

they can actually create extra Lift.

It gives them a radical idea.

Let's enlarge it and direct it over the surface of the wing,

so that it can create lift.

It goes against everything that would've been thought about

when you're designing a wing.

Incredibly, this radical idea works.

When Concorde took off, it went, "Scchwum!"

It shot off like a jet fighter.

It's being pulled up by the mathematics,

the shape, the design of its wing.

This was utterly revolutionary.

The Americans would not be left out of this race.

President John F Kennedy initiated a design competition among

America's most prolific and distinguished airplane designers.

The Boeing model, called the 2707,

goes forward as the winner of this competition.

The 2707 was so ambitious.

It was going to be like the Six Million Dollar Man -

stronger, faster all that stuff, better than Concorde.

The Boeing aeroplane is twice the size of the Concorde.

Where Concorde carried 100-120 passengers,

the Boeing aeroplane would carry 280.

It was 300 feet long.

The aeroplane would barely fit on a football field,

and it would fly faster.

Where Concorde flew Mach 2,

the Boeing SST would fly at Mach 2.7.

If they can pull this off,

the 2707 could cross the entire Atlantic

in barely two-and-a-half hours.

But Boeing can't avoid the same wing-design problem as Concorde.

How do you make a supersonic plane fly slowly enough to take off

and land at a conventional airport?

They must solve this problem to avoid falling behind Concorde.

Their solution is even more radical -

make a wing that can change shape.

Boeing introduced what was called the variable geometry wing.

It could be pushed forward almost straight out,

and this would be optimal for landing and take-off,

and then, the wings would sweep back and meet the tail

for supersonic flight.

The swing wing had never been used for something that large.

No-one could accuse the 2707 design of lacking ambition.

Flying at 65,000 feet and flying at Mach 2.7

was something that really hadn't been done.

This is the American way -

to go bigger, to go faster, and go farther.

The supersonic battle is looking like a two-horse race -

which is odd, because in every other post-war race for

the technical high ground, there's been another player -

America's rival for the world superpower crown,

communist Russia.

THEY CHANT

You saw this string of fantastic Soviet victories

in science and technology.

They firstly put a satellite in orbit, Sputnik.

They sent a dog into space first.

They sent a man into space first.

They sent a woman into space.

And every time, Americans were caught flat-footed.

The Soviets seemed to be quite ahead of things,

in terms of aerospace.

Technology becomes the marker of superiority.

The leader of the world, in the 20th century,

had to prove it was the leader in science and technology.

But, while Americans and Europeans are racing

to win the supersonic prize,

the Soviets are nowhere to be seen.

What are they up to?

Finding out what the Soviets are doing is difficult.

After the Second World War, the Cold War started.

It was this intense rivalry between East and West.

The Cold War pits the new superpowers of capitalist America

and communist Russia against each other.

The fading European powers are caught somewhere in the middle.

Both sides want to win - by any means necessary.

In those years, espionage was everywhere.

It seems inconceivable that the Russian's wouldn't want

the supersonic prize, too.

The problem was proving it.

It was considerably easier for the Soviet Union to spy on the West,

with its open, free society,

than it was Western powers to spy on the closed regimes

behind the Iron Curtain.

The first suspicion that Russia might be playing

the supersonic game comes from Belgian intelligence agents.

Since 1961, Jean-Paul Soupert,

a former chemist from Switzerland,

was under suspicion of the Belgian government.

Soupert had a very lavish lifestyle.

He spent a lot of monies in very luxurious hotels

and restaurants.

All of this was quite strange for a person who was retired

and shouldn't have a lot of money.

Soupert was also travelling regularly to countries in Europe -

some of them communist.

Something was really suspicious.

The Belgians trail Soupert to the notoriously strict

Friedrichstrasse checkpoint, into Soviet East Berlin...

...where he is waved straight through like an old friend.

The Belgians are convinced -

Soupert is a Soviet spy.

He was arrested in 1964 and starts to speak.

The story Soupert tells his interrogators

reveals the lengths he went to for his Russian spy masters.

Soupert's goal was to gather information on industrial projects.

The most difficult part was to bring them to Soviet Union.

A technique was to put microfilms in toothpaste tubes.

These were left in the toilets of first-class cabin of the trains

between Belgium and Warsaw.

And then, a sign was left in the toilet to make known

that the microfilms was there.

And what is hidden in the tubes of toothpaste sends shock waves

through Britain and France.

Soupert stole many documents on Concorde,

and many of them were about electronics.

It was a very important topic to Soviet Union,

because it was the field where the Soviets were most behind.

How extensive is the infiltration of the supersonic project?

It was only the tip of the iceberg.

Less than a year later, the head of Soviet airline Aeroflot,

in France, is arrested outside a Parisian restaurant.

The Intelligence Services have now neutralised

two major Soviet spy rings.

But it's left them with a mystery.

After Soupert and Pavlov's arrest,

we know that Soviets are gathering information on Concorde.

But why?

During Le Bourget airshow, in Paris,

we understand why Soviets are gathering

so many information about Concorde.

They're working on their own Concorde -

Tupolev 144.

And in fact, the Soviet Union has been working on

a supersonic transport since approximately 1962.

Russia has been in the supersonic race since the very beginning.

The Soviets entered the race,

but entered quietly,

and in stealth mode.

The Soviet specifications were for a larger

and faster aircraft,

because they wanted to show that they were not just equally capable,

they wanted to show that they were actually superior.

The Soviet Union decides that it would be the Tupolev Bureau -

led by Andrei Nikolayevich Tupolev,

a legendary figure in Soviet aviation -

which would design and build the Soviet supersonic airplane.

The Soviets have given Tupolev just one overriding aim.

Beat their competitors into the air.

Being first was seen as a major milestone.

Even if you only managed to beat your opponents with

a very short amount of time, you would still be first,

and this would be noted in the history books.

By producing the first supersonic plane,

it's time for the Soviets to show their superiority.

Luckily for Tupoleyv,

Concorde's schedule is turning out to be unexpectedly elastic.

The first test flight of Concorde was meant to be in 1966.

But by 1966, it hadn't flown.

And the American design only exists on paper.

It became very apparent that,

for the United States

to beat Concorde into service -

well, it wasn't going to happen.

Between the Anglo-French Concorde and the Soviet Tupoley,

it was neck-and-neck as to which one would hit that crucial milestone

of having the first test flight.

But cracks are showing in the Concorde project.

There is an irony that a project called Concorde -

which comes from the Latin for "harmony" or "agreement” -

would actually see so much bickering and acrimony

between Britain and France.

They couldn't actually even agree on the spelling.

The British government insisted that the spelling was British.

C-0-N-C-O-R-D, no E.

For the French, of course, it's C-O-N-C-O-R-D-E.

And they're separated by more than just politics.

The fiendishly complex structure the politicians have created

to get the plane designed and built doesn't help.

And then, there was the difference in culture.

The two sets of engineering teams were, initially, you know,

chalk and cheese - I mean, chalk and from age.

We would quite often have a sandwich for lunch,

sit at our desk, and eat it and carry on.

But, when we went to France, they always had a main course.

There was red wine and a vat of white wine,

and you just went along,

and you had a carafe of whichever you fancied.

And at the end, there was a load of empty carafes.

Sometimes, if you had a difficult meeting,

they would save the difficult subjects until after lunch,

in the hope that you may have had a bit too much wine -

but we didn't, usually. HE CHUCKLES

Even the most basic engineering conversations are a challenge.

There was a technical issue,

that the British worked in imperial measurements -

feet and inches, yards.

They did not work in millimetres, centimetres, and metres,

like the French.

So, during the development, the drawings were done in two sets -

imperial set of drawings, metric set of drawings.

That's pretty strange.

But, like many relationships,

money becomes the biggest issue.

By the late 1960s, the costs of Concorde begin to spiral.

There was a lot of friction between British and the French

over the budget.

The original budget for Concorde was £135 million.

By 1967, it had risen to half a billion pounds.

It had more than tripled in just a few years.

And Concorde's financial pain is not unique.

The Americans have already spent $300 million

without making anything.

And exactly how much the Soviets' TU144 has cost

is a closely-guarded secret.

But it's a lot.

Developing a supersonic airliner costs a fortune.

New British Prime Minister Harold Wilson tries to kill

the rising costs.

Harold Wilson comes into power

and one of the first things he does is to try to cancel Concorde.

The problem is French President de Gaulle is an incredible

enthusiast for the project,

sees Concorde as the key way in which France and Europe

can defeat the US in civil aviation.

Wilson finds himself backed into a legal corner.

The Concorde Agreement said that, if either party pulled out,

the other one basically, in simple terms,

could sue the others through the international courts.

The withdrawing partner

had to pay all of the costs

of the entire project.

It was like a suicide pact, and they couldn't get out of it.

Even so, Concorde is in better shape than its US rival.

Boeing was looking at this idea of a swing wing.

They were very confident that it would work.

But their confidence turns out to be misplaced.

You can always design anything you want into an aeroplane,

but the problem you have is that it gets heavier

and heavier, and at some point,

your aeroplane just can't go anywhere,

the engines aren't powerful enough,

you don't have enough fuel to fly it -

and this is what happened for Boeing.

That whole mechanism became too heavy.

On an airliner that's supposed to operate on a more continuous basis,

I don't think that is really a feasible solution.

Despite years of design work,

Boeing haven't built a single part for a functional aircraft.

Now, they've hit a brick wall.

Boeing had to redesign the aeroplane.

Get rid of that extra weight, of that swing wing,

and make a much more simple design of a double delta.

It's basically like a big Concorde.

Five years on from President Kennedy's great announcement,

the American SST needs a ground-up redesign.

The Americans are struggling with a very ambitious project.

But the French and the British,

they have more success.

In fact, they're ready to roll out the first prototype -

Concorde 001.

It was a glorious moment.

The excitement of seeing something in the flesh -

or in this case, in the aluminium alloy -

was enough to keep the politicians

on both sides quiet for a while.

I mean, this was a truly impressive achievement.

The prototype is presented to the public, with a promise

that it will fly in 1968.

But despite the fanfare, behind the scenes,

there is still a huge amount of work to do.

There are so many technological problems,

the engines aren't ready.

Unknown to the public,

a flight in 1968 is never going to happen.

Concorde won't be in the air until 1969 at the earliest.

And it's almost as though the Russians know this.

The Russians had started a huge propaganda effort,

announcing that the TU144

will be the world's first supersonic transport.

The marching orders from Moscow, in no uncertain terms, were,

"You will fly in 1968."

What makes them so certain they'll be first?

There is one obvious possibility.

Despite destroying the Soupert and Pavlov networks,

Russian spying on Concorde has never stopped.

The full extent of Concorde espionage will not become known

until after the Soviet Union's collapse,

and the end of the Cold War.

In 1991, a Russian called Vasili Mitrokhin

turns up at the British Embassy in Riga, Latvia.

He claims to be a valuable defector,

and he says the proof lies in his battered suitcase.

The suitcase had his personal belongings -

some clothes, some sausages, other personal items.

But underneath the clothes and the food

were top-secret KGB material.

Mitrokhin claims he was an archivist for the notorious

Soviet secret police...

...the KGB.

And he says he has tens of thousands more pages of Soviet secrets,

hidden around his cottage, just outside Moscow.

Mitrokhin started to write down what he could remember from

the archive during his day's work.

He would smuggle handwritten notes,

hidden underneath his shoes, hidden in his clothes.

He would roll them up and put them in milk churns

in his countryside retreat.

He would bury them in the garden.

MI6 dispatch agents to Mitrokhin's cottage,

just outside Moscow.

Their job is to find out if Mitrokhin's tale is true.

It is.

The Mitrokhin Archive was absolutely explosive.

This is the inner workings of the KGB.

And this wasn't just something from a distant past,

but involved agents in operations that were still live,

as the Soviet Union was collapsing.

The Soviet secrets are now held at Churchill College Cambridge.

Access is restricted.

The original material cannot be shown on television.

Calder Walton has spent more time studying it

than almost anyone else.

One of the greatest revelations is the scope and scale

of Soviet science and technology espionage.

You had a specific Soviet Government body

that was responsible for

collecting industrial espionage.

So, members of Soviet industry could go to this government body,

and they could request information on Western systems.

One specific target...

...was Concorde.

And the undiscovered KGB spy networks probably keep

their Soviet masters well-informed

about the true scale of Concorde delays.

The Russians had the dates for Concorde.

That was a good bit of espionage.

That Concorde was going to fly then,

and they just made sure they did it first.

Knowing Concorde will not fly before 1969

would explain why the Soviet Central Committee rolls the dice

and orders the TU144 into the air by the end of 1968.

Because they believe they can win.

The 31st of December, 1968,

in the Tupolev assembly line,

there is a lot of stress and anxiety,

because it's the very last day

to meet the request of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Tupolev, Dad and son, are on the tarmac.

The hangar doors open to reveal the future of air travel -

the TU144 prototype.

No supersonic airliner has ever flown before.

The Soviets have one day left to keep their promise.

All of a sudden, this plane

gloriously rises with this,

you know, famous nose,

and it's so elegant and so unusual.

This high-tech dagger flying out of the test airfield up

to the edge of space and back.

It's a great day for the technicians, the designer.

And when the Tupolev finally lands on the runway,

there is a lot of joy in the faces of everyone,

because they did it.

The Concorde did not fly,

and the Boeing 2707 is just on paper.

But Tupolev 144 is in the air.

It's a great coup for the Soviet propaganda.

Concorde has lost the race into the air.

Concorde loses by barely two months,

but now, it will forever be second.

It was just that thing, that niggling thing that

the Soviets had got there first.

Concorde was right behind it.

I mean, just a matter of months.

But the Soviets aren't done yet.

After their first successful flight,

they're ready to go for another record -

to fly supersonic.

Just six months later,

Tupolev 144 breaks another barrier -

the barrier of sound.

Another first for a civil airplane.

Argh, the Russians again.

The TU144.

First supersonic airliner.

The impression is that Soviets are winning the supersonic race.

They are the first in every single field,

but the actual race is far from being over.

In America, the future of Boeing's heavily-revised 2707

hangs in the balance.

It has already cost over $600 million.

Are American taxpayers prepared to stomach an even bigger bill

to get it airborne?

Money is going out the door, but isn't coming back in.

But, despite the huge costs,

despite all the delays,

and despite government opposition,

US President Richard Nixon doubles down on America's Supersonic dream.

The supersonic transport is going to be built.

The question is whether, in the years ahead,

the people of the world will be flying in American supersonic

transports, or in the transports of other nations.

National pride is now driving the fast-approaching supersonic world.

In America, it saves the 2707.

In Russia, it gets them into the air first and fastest.

And in Europe, it produces this sleek and beautiful machine.

Concorde was ready to go.

The future seems positive.

There are options for 74 aircraft from 16 airlines.

Concorde may have lost the race into the skies,

but the supersonic battle isn't over yet.

The multi-billion-dollar prize

comes from getting a commercial airliner into service.

And all three planes are in the fight.

A fight for the future of aviation.

In this whole era in the 1960s was this incredible optimism

about the future.

And the SST became, really, the symbol of that.

The idea is that supersonic flight will be the future.

This idea in that moment is stronger than ever.

It seems nothing can stop the new supersonic world.

1969 really is perhaps almost the last year of that

great technological optimism.

Things are pushing ahead fast, and people tend to believe in it.

The next decade, the '70s, is going to change everything.

There's a great faith in the supersonic dream that supersonics

would be the future of civil aviation, throughout the 1960s

and into the 1970s.

That dream fell apart enormously quickly.

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