At present is the twentieth anniversary of its final flight of the supersonic Concorde plane. It was quicker 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 industrial jetliner that might journey quicker than the pace of sound.” Each began work on secret initiatives, on the similar time that Britain and France — who have been much less hell-bent on imprinting their superiority on geopolitics, however blessed with lots of the world’s most interesting engineering minds — have been in pursuit of the identical purpose.
It has been recognized for many years that the three-horse race wasn’t run solely pretty. Whereas the Individuals, with their colossal and largely pointless Boeing 2707, by no means acquired near getting airborne (they scrapped the mission in 1971), the Soviet-built Tupolev Tu-144 gained the race in 1968. When it did, although, its design similarities to Concorde appeared to verify 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 identification 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 solely stunned 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, possibly a whole lot of individuals engaged on the mission, 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 may, 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 a variety 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 appeared remarkably like Concorde, once we thought… ‘Ah’.”