Thousands Cheer Arrival of Concordes

by Douglas B. Feaver

Tuesday, May 25, 1976

With their beaks lowered like those of giant birds, Concorde supersonic jetliners from London and Paris descended on Dulles International Airport yesterday to the cheers of thousands of people packed on the terminal observation deck.

British Airways and Air France, whose controversial airplane has been decried by environmentalists as too noisy and too noxious, thus inaugurated passenger service between the U.S. and Europe at twice the speed of sound.

Moments before the first landing. Capt. Norman Todd, co-pilot of the British Ailrways Concorde carrying 76 passengers, radioed air traffic control, "Incidentally, we missed that fellow by about 400 feet." That fellow was an unidentified propeller-driven light plane.

The incident occurred at about 3,000 feet six miles east of the airport. All aircraft under the air traffic rules that applied to the light plane at the time had been asked minutes earlier by air traffic control to stay 15 miles away from Dulles.

The air traffic controller had warned the British Airways Concorde about the light plane and had told him there was a "partial failure" in the air traffic radar.

The British Airways Concorde, whose radio call sign was “Speed Bird 579,” then landed a bit roughly on the south end of Dulles runway IR at 11:33 a.m., as scheduled. Air France's Concorde followed about two minutes later with a smoother landing. "They beat us on that one, I have to give them that," said one British official who was with reporters at the end of the runway.

People who came to watch stood with their cameras behind the fences around the airport, on top of one of the water towers in the area and jammed into every available cranny in the terminal building itself.

The two planes, the product of $3 billion and a 13-year cooperative effort between the British and the French, then taxied nose to nose in front of the terminal following the landings.

At the noise-monitoring station that the Federal Aviation Administration and Fairfax County were operating in a field a mile from the end of the runway, the sound measured from each Concorde was less than that recorded for a Pan American Boeing 707.

Although the approaching Concorde could be heard sooner than a 707 by a reporter standing near the end of the runway, subjectively the roar of the two Concordes and the 707 seemed about the same at touchdown.

The Concorde noise level was expected to be equivalent to that of a 707 on landing. It is on take off that the Concorde is expected to be louder. The Air France Concorde will leave Dulles for Paris today at noon. British Airways will follow 30 minutes later.

After the joint inaugurals are over, Air France will begin regularly scheduled service to Washington on Wednesday. British Airways will follow on Saturday.

The inaugural flights to the United States carried almost as much non-paying guests and reporters as they did ticket-buying passengers. Air France had 31 guests out of 81 on board, while British Airways had 40 guests out of 76 on board.

And after the planes had landed and all cleared customs, many went to a giant cocktail party and press conference in the Portals Restaurant at Dulles, which had been rented for the occasion.

A few passengers were whisked by limousine from Dulles to Washington National Airport so they could catch flights to other points in the U.S.

At the Portals, while a huge crowd milled around, drinking champagne and admiring the twin Concordes parked outside the window, diplomats, airline executives and plane manufacturer stood on a platform and congratulated each other. They were welcomed to the United States by Deputy Transportation Secretary John Barnum.

Secretary William T. Coleman Jr., whose personal decision permitted the Concorde into the United States, had a previously scheduled engagement in Detroit, Barnum said.

Capt. Todd, who had made the radio transmission describing the encounter with the light plane, told a reporter that there had been "no danger of collision. Radar told us there was an airplane there, but it didn't know the altitude. We looked and we saw it." Was it a near miss? "Good God no," Todd said.

After the pilots had been warned by air traffic control about the light plane but before the Concorde passed under it, Todd, 51, had radioed: "I hope he [the plane] can see us."

Capt. Brian Calvert, 42, the pilot of the British Airways Concorde, was asked what happened. He praised air traffic control, said he had been warned about the light plane, had seen it and had no reason to dive or take other action.

Finally, as the questions continued, he said, "Won't somebody ask me, 'was I scared.' The answer is no," Later, he said, "I'd rather [the plane] hadn't been there, and I'm sure It shouldn't have been there.”

According to a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman, the light plane would be violating rules if were within 500 feet of the Concorde. So if Capt. Todd's estimate of 400 feet is correct, there was a technical violation.

Robert Logan, the air traffic control chief at Dulles, said in an interview late yesterday afternoon that the noncommercial light plane air traffic around Dulles was very heavy before the Concordes arrived and doubtless included many airborne sightseers.

Planes operating without instruments, called "VFR traffic" (for visual flight rules), were ordered to stay 15 miles away from Dulles and told they could not land for about 30 minutes, or until the Concordes were down.

“Things started building up on the controller," Logan said. "We've done this before with heavy traffic to expedite flow." However, he said, compliance with such a request on the part of a small-plane pilot is voluntary, not mandatory.

The controller's problems were worsened when the part of his computer radar that reports altitudes and other identifying data went out, the "partial radar failure." That situation is not necessarily dangerous, but it does impose added tension and work on the controller, who then has to reprogram the computer half of his radar system.

One of the proud witnesses to yesterday's landings was Sir Frank Whittle, 68, the Briton who invented the jet engine. "I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime," he said. "I knew it was possible in 1936, when I was doing engine performance calculations up to 1,500 miles per hour." Concorde flies at about 1,350 mph.

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