Museum of Flight may land Concorde

By Seattle Times staff

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Seattle may finally have its supersonic jet — though not the one everybody was hoping for a generation ago.

Officials at the Museum of Flight confirmed they're making a bid for a Concorde from British Airways, which terminated supersonic service last week.

British newspapers and a respected aviation journal say Seattle is one of two U.S. sites in line for Concordes. The other is the Intrepid, an aircraft-carrier-turned-aviation-museum in New York City.

A third Concorde, retired by Air France, last summer joined the National Air and Space Museum's annex outside Washington, D.C.

The Museum of Flight scheduled a news conference this morning to make "an important announcement for the museum and the Pacific Northwest." Museum of Flight spokesman Craig O'Neill said earlier in the day the museum was "hopeful" a Concorde will end up at East Marginal Way.

Seattle would seem a natural home for one of the world's rarest planes (only 20 were produced and 18 still exist), though there is a touch of bittersweet irony. Just 32 years ago, Boeing and Seattle were at the center of a huge U.S. government effort to build a supersonic plane to surpass the European government-financed Concorde.

At the time, supersonic flight was widely viewed as an obvious next step for travelers. Seattle, seeing itself at the center of this revolution, named its basketball team the SuperSonics.

But while the Concorde began flight tests, Boeing's larger and more ambitious SST ran into trouble in Congress before it got off the drawing board. Opponents included environmentalists concerned about sonic booms and then-Sen. William Proxmire, the anti-profligacy crusader from Wisconsin.

In 1971, Proxmire succeeded in cutting off SST funding, and Boeing — already suffering from an airline recession — fell into the worst crisis of its history.

Meanwhile, though the Concorde was a flop financially, the precedent it set for European government subsidies helped give rise to Airbus, which this year will eclipse Boeing as the world's biggest jet maker.

Staff reporters Dominic Gates and Jon Savelle contributed to this story.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company