At this time is the twentieth anniversary of its final flight of the supersonic Concorde plane. It was sooner than the pace of sound, travelling at speeds of 1,350 mph (2,170 km/h).
Lengthy-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared an article from the Telegraph:
Because the house race raged and dominated headlines, the U.S. and the Soviet Union have been equally aggressive about being the primary post-war superpower to create a business jetliner that would journey sooner than the pace of sound.” Each began work on secret tasks, on the identical time that Britain and France — who have been much less hell-bent on imprinting their superiority on geopolitics, however blessed with most of the world’s most interesting engineering minds — have been in pursuit of the identical purpose.
It has been identified for many years that the three-horse race wasn’t run fully pretty. Whereas the People, with their colossal and largely pointless Boeing 2707, by no means bought near getting airborne (they scrapped the challenge in 1971), the Soviet-built Tupolev Tu-144 received the race in 1968. When it did, although, its design similarities to Concorde appeared to substantiate suspicions that the blueprints might need been leaked by espionage. Within the late Nineties, it was revealed that an aeronautical engineer codenamed Agent Ace was one such spy. Recruited in 1967, he allegedly handed over some 90,000 pages of detailed technical specs on new plane — together with Concorde, the Tremendous VC-10 and Lockheed L-1011 — to the KGB, the overseas intelligence and home safety company of the Soviet Union.
The id of Agent Ace is revealed in Concorde: The Race for Supersonic, a brand new two-part documentary by the UK public broadcasting station Channel 4.
The Telegraph provides:
With the wealthy advantage of hindsight, John Britton is not fully shocked there was a Soviet mole within the manufacturing unit. It was a very long time in the past, 1965, however one thing — or somebody — at Filton Aerodrome appeared fishy. “We had dozens, perhaps a whole lot of individuals engaged on the challenge, and we did not have sufficient everlasting employees so we took on contractors, all types of characters,” Britton says. On the time he was a 19-year-old apprentice engineer, working for British Aeroplane Firm (BAC) within the design workplace for a supersonic, passenger-carrying plane. An plane that might, ideally, fly earlier than the Soviet Union’s competing effort did.
“There was one chap working there… He used to remain behind, he’d do quite a lot of additional time within the drawing library, taking prints off the microfilms of designs…” Britton, who’s now 76, initially assumed the person — he thinks his identify was George — was merely conscientious and wanted copies for his work. He can titter on the reminiscence now. “It was solely afterwards, when the Soviet plane got here out and it seemed remarkably like Concorde, once we thought… ‘Ah’.”