Or, How Jakob Neilsen Killed Concorde.
If there's one good thing to come out of the the last flight of Concorde on Friday, it's that at least France got three hours further away from the USA, something I know will warm the hearts of many fellow citizens. Being British, nae Scottish in fact, I have to say that the French have always been held in a certain high regard by Scots under the terms of the "Auld Alliance". In simplistic parlance, both the Scots and the French used to like to gang up on the English and slap them about a bit, until the Act of Union took all the fun out of it. But I'm not supposed talking about the French, I'm supposed to be talking about Concorde which, I suppose, is a French word and was a French concept to start with, so cut me some slack.
Concorde (the supersonic passenger jet) was designed to make the world a smaller place and therefore with it's passing, the world must have just gotten a little bigger. That is, of course, unless you happen to be the crew of a Blackbird SR-51 spyplane. We know that the Web too, was supposed to make the world a smaller place - a "global village" to use the vernacular of the times.
Could it be that poor old Concorde could just no longer keep up with the new planetary dietician on the block - the Web? Or, more likely, have we just gotten too good at saving time in almost everything that we do, so efficient and fast as a species by virtue of great design and usability (see Mr Nielsen) ; in our cars, mobile phones, with our traffic reports, our washing machines, video recorders, text messages, emails, web sites, 24 hour news channels, fast food, RSS news aggregators, quickie divorces, drive-thru chapels of love in Vegas and so the list would go on - if I had the time - that we just can't save any more time? So much so, in fact, that a three hour transatlanic time saving just doesn't cut it these days.
Thirty years ago Concorde was about the biggest time saving device on the planet. Today it isn't, quite literally since you can't fly on it now - but you get the picture.
In other words, Concorde had gotten too slow for us, it never kept up with the times, actually the more I think about it, the more I see an equation emerging; a slower and bigger capacity 747 Jumbo with 400 passengers each carrying a mobile phone or a PDA, probably saves at least twice as much time as 100 passengers on a single Concorde flight over the same distance.
Whomever they choose to design the next generation passenger jet - Jakob Nielsen would be a good place to start - they should ensure that the time saving characteristics of the plane should not simply be confined to it's stupendously ridiculous airspeed.