The Air France Concorde stranded in New York flew home to Paris safely today, 9/21/00. It was met at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport by an emotional group of Air France pilots, flight attendants and other personnel, plus scores of aficionados of the supersonic transport. The crash of a Concorde in Paris last July took 113 lives, and the airworthiness certificates for all the Concordes were officially withdrawn in August. The aircraft, which flew only under the flags of Britain and France, may never fly again. For me, as for most people who had the privilege of traveling at least once in a Concorde, today's final flight compounds the terrible sadness begun with the awful crash in July. That was the first and only crash of the supersonic transport in its 30-year history of flight. We all thought that it was, like the Titanic, "unsinkable," and, as did the tragedy of the Titanic, we were taught once again that there is no guarantee against disaster. I flew the Concorde in the spring of 1981. In calculating the information given at the time of the fatal crash in the year 2000, I deduced that the plane that fell outside Paris may well have been the very one on which I traveled from Rio de Janeiro to Paris 19 years ago. The news reports stated that it was an aircraft put into Air France's service in November 1980. At the time, I recall being told on board by a flight attendant that the plane on which I was a passenger had only been flying since the previous Christmas holiday season. If it was, the painful thought placed me among the passengers who perished that day in August 2000. Little did I know when I climbed aboard with half-a-dozen friends after celebrating Carnival in Rio in 1981 the horror that lay in store for those later passengers on what should have been the most thrilling flight of a lifetime -- instead of the brutal end of so many lifetimes. I cannot but think of it in these terms because the adventure of flying the Concorde was akin to the exhilaration no doubt experienced by astronauts outward bound from a launching pad. On my flight, the excited, internationally mixed passengers all joined in vocalizing the LED countdown to lift-off displayed at the front of each of the two cabins which seated fifty travelers apiece. The flight attendants -- tall, beautiful women, each dressed in French designer uniforms -- directed our counting with graceful gestures as if they held a conductor's baton in their hands: "UN, deux, trois...." to the final "...DIX!" when we gasped as the plane whooshed along the runway and burst into the sky. The long ascent to 55,000 feet above the surface of the earth was accomplished as we drank from crystal glasses of champagne and tossed down delicate canapés of toast spread with pate de foie gras and caviar. Leveling off was another thrill because our speed increased in Mach numbers shown on the LED read-out from 300 to 400 to 600 to a thousand to 1200 miles per hour! That was even more heady than champagne, providing us with sufficient emotional compensation to overlook the vague discomfort of the thin and smallish seats and the somewhat cramped space from one side of the aircraft to the other. We were up and down in three hours, landing in Dakar in West Africa for an hour's refueling. As no ramps in Rio or Dakar were high enough in those days, we climbed up and down steep, portable metal stairs to board and disembark. But we didn't care. Everyone was primed for high adventure after a week of fabulous Carnival festivities in Rio and then the plane ride of all plane rides available to the average man since human flight began. Another three hours in the air brought us cheering to earth in France -- a total of seven hours for a flight that took 16 hours by regular jet! The lights of Paris sparkled below us like diamonds, and our eyes told the tale to everyone who saw us emerge at Charles de Gaulle -- shining like headlamps. We had shared a foretaste of space travel. We had almost gone to the stars and then flown back again. We had chosen to fly the Concorde at that time because it was a foregone conclusion that the commercial supersonics were to be grounded by 1983 for various reasons such as exorbitant operating costs for little financial return and drastic engine noise levels over the neighborhoods adjoining the few airports in the world capable of accommodating the Concorde. It seemed like the last chance in 1981, but the planes kept on flying and flying into 1983 and beyond until that one fateful day, those few final minutes, the last explosive seconds of fire, falling, splintering and death shortly after a new century began. Rudyard Kipling wrote in his lyrical poem "If": "If you fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run, yours is the earth and all that's in it, my son." That has been my credo since I first read it in boyhood. "Carpe diem!" Seize the day!   Goony Bird Sex is Safe Sex

Someone wrote me today to say that "the Concorde was fine...A piece of a 747 that flew previous to it fell off and was the cause of all the damage." Per the resports I have read, he is right. The fault for the fatal crash of the Concorde last July lay in the metal strip that fell from another plane to the runway and punctured the Concorde's tires (tyres). As with so many things these days, it is quite possible that the reasons for grounding all Concordes is the almighty dollar (pound, franc) on the bottom line. The Concordes have operated in the red throughout their commercial existence and promised never to to turn a profit. Expensive to operate and expensive to fly, they never found a world market beyond the super-rich, celebrities, and the corporate masters -- many of whom own or charter luxury jets for temselves. The July crash, for which the magnificent flying machine may have been essentially blameless of itself, perhaps provided a perfect excuse for the expensive fleet to be retired. When the Concordes started flying 30 years ago, they were heralded as the first of ever-faster aircraft to be manufactured in the future. They were slated to overtake the lumbering jets in the jumbo class -- the DC-10, the L-1011, the 747 -- and pass them, sleek supersonics slashing through not only the sound barrier, but also the barrier of time -- New York to Paris in an hour by 2001! Oops! Here we are already at 2000! Wha' happened? Well, the DC-10s and L-1011s crashed on the right and on the left and were weeded out of competition as unsafe or too risky, much like the current crop of athletes banned for drugs at the Sydney Olympics 2000 almost en masse. That left the 747, with improvements, flying high and carrying large enough passenger and cargo loads to hit the bottom line with the green of beaucoup bucks, a far cry from the Concorde's embarrassing blobs of red ink. Smaller jets of the airbus type have proliferated, wedging people in like tinned sardines. The aviation industry has chosen to fly for the gold instead of shooting for the stars. If you add up the death toll of all the crashes in the last 30 years by aircraft type, you will find that hundreds upon hundreds of lives have been lost in 747 accidents as a natural consequence of the big plane's being so fully packed with doomed humanity. Note that it was a piece of a 747, fallen to the runway, that led to the destruction of the high-flying Concorde. The Concordes are one of the safest planes ever produced except for the old (born in 1935) twin-engine, 33-pasenger Dakotas, i.e. the DC-3, which is still flying commercially on many small, localized commuter airlines throughout the world. To aficionados of the beloved "Goony Bird" (DC-3 conversion by the U.S. Navy in W.W.II), piloting the DC-3 was considered better than sex. Well, maybe not quite, but I can attest to sex ON BOARD a DC-3 being pretty good stuff. I used to be a commercially licensed multi-engine aircraft pilot, yet my greatest ambition was not to fly for some snotty, bullshit airline (despite its great routes, I used to despise Pan Am), but to qualify to pilot a Dakota. What a dream! I never thought it would come to pass, but in the course of my travels I returned several years ago to a country I had known in my youth -- Southern Rhodesia, changed now to Zimbabwe. In the capital (Salisbury, now Harare), I went to a bar where I used to get lucky a lot. It turned out that an old friend of mine had bought it and turned it strictly straight from its previous half-and-half clientele. He had been a flying buddy. We had learned to fly together "by the seat of our pants" with some friends in a cloth-fuselage Taylorcraft (T-craft) when we were young, using an abandoned dirt strip outside town. I discovered that he and some buddies of his had invested in a still airworthy old Goony Bird, a.k.a. Dakota or DC-3, which they kept in good repair and flew in rotation on weekends. I went with him the following Saturday. We flew from the capital to Victoria Falls, a series of great cascades upcountry quite a ways. After circling over the magnificent waterworks (the Niagra Falls of Africa, they say, or like Iguassu Falls in South America) and thrilling me to the ass with sharp banks to the left and right, he let me take the controls for the return trip and talked me through a landing at his home field. It was truly a sexual experience for me being at the controls of a Goony Bird. I recall that my dick was stiff as a stick when we touched down on the runway coming home. I had never had my co-pilot sexually in youth, although I knew he used to play. I had slept over at his house one night with other friends and never forgot the sight of him sprawled sleeping on his bed in his undershorts with a morning hard. Life had changed both of us. We were more mature, and he was now a married man. That did not stop him, however, from taking a gander at my crotch when we left the flight deck and went into the cabin to debark. Age had made him bold, I think, plus my not being local anymore and therefore no threat to his marriage scene. "My Goony Bird affects you the way it does me," he said. "Look here." Pointing to his fly, he stroked a raging hard-on that crawled down the leg of his pants. "Would it be out of line for me to suggest a quick poke? My wife's in her sixth month. I'm rather in need." "I owe you for letting me fly the Goony," I grinned. "I thought maybe you'd left the gay thing behind, like so many of you English types -- gay when young, but straight flyers later on. Hee hee!" "Don't believe everything you hear, Yank!" he chuckled. I dropped my pants and bent over. "Have a poke," I said. "I'm yours." I was not interested in romance, nor was he, to judge from the simmering look in his eye when I exposed my bubble butt to him. It didn't take much time, but I can still feel it after all these years. He pressed against me from behind and grasped me firmly by the hips after wetting his dick with spit. I reached around and helped him find the spot. I hung on to the back of a passenger seat and took it all in his first lunge. Ouch! Images of him hard in his underwear that long-ago day in his bed helped fuel my passion in his DC-3. He was hot! He went into the short strokes before I had time to cum. I felt him suddenly rise up on his toes, his legs stiffened by the force of the oncoming eruption. He snorted and shot high inside me with a tremendous load, then fell back on the flat of his feet. Panting from the strain of his powerful orgasm, he brought his handsome head heavily to rest on my back. His forehead was pumping beads of sweat. I was jerking off with my hand, my own head braced against the back of the seat. I went off soon after and spurted plenty of love juice into my palm. He was still inside me, but my violent spasms pushed him out. "Oh, God, what a royal poke!" he muttered as we pulled ourselves together and left the plane. So much for sex and the DC-3. We seldom used condoms in those days before AIDS, but as the Goony Birds are still considered the safest aircraft in history, could I say that we had "safe" sex? The humble Dakotas still fly after the first were born 65 years ago, but the proud Concorde has been reduced to ashes in only half the time. I don't quite believe it yet. Surely so majestic a bird will, like the phoenix, rise from the ashes to fly again. THE END