Anti-Concorde Project
The Anti-Concorde Project, founded by environmental activist Richard Wiggs, challenged the idea of supersonic passenger transport, and curtailed Concorde's commercial prospects.
By the early 1970s however, opposition led to bans on commercial supersonic flight in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, West Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, Canada and the United States.
[2] The article claimed that the Concorde's sonic booms would produce effects varying from annoyance to physical shock, breaking windows and causing structural damage to buildings.
[4] Public figures who wrote to newspapers expressing concern about the development of Concorde included Alec Guinness, and Pamela Hansford Johnson, and Baroness Snow.
[citation needed] A primary school teacher, conscientious objector and vegan from Letchworth, Hertfordshire, Richard Wiggs,[5] wrote to The Observer inviting people to write to him.
Before the new Labour government took office in October 1964 with a £700m annual deficit, Government-funded "prestige projects" such as the Concorde (with escalating costs) had been shortlisted for cancellation.
[citation needed] Following his initial letters to the newspapers, Wiggs enlisted an Anti-Concorde Project Advisory Committee: A sonic boom is a shock-wave, or pressure disturbance, caused by the movement of the plane through the air, much like the wave produced by the bow of a ship as it moves through water: just as the bow wave is produced for the entire journey of the ship, so the sonic shockwave occurs throughout the duration of a supersonic flight.
This pressure wave extends as much as 25 miles on either side of the flight path, and may be experienced as a loud sound, with accompanying vibration severe enough in close proximity to break windows and damage buildings.
[10] Residents submitted claims for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages from sonic booms for broken windows, cracked plaster, tile and brick.
In addition, routine exercises flown by supersonic US Air Force jets resulted in $3,800,000 in sonic boom damage claims in a three-month period in 1967.
When measured in 1977, the British Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) noted:[16] On departure, the Concorde was generally a few PNdb noiser than the older long-range jets at the fixed monitoring points and noticeably noisier both closer to and further from the airport.
In late 1969, the British Aircraft Corporation referred to "the assumption that supersonic flight will be allowed only over the oceans or over areas with sparse populations" as "extremely pessimistic" saying that they "do not expect that its sonic boom will be unacceptable to the great majority of the public.
A few months later, Edsell, together with Dr. William A. Shurcliff, a physicist and senior research associate at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, founded the Citizens' League Against the Sonic Boom in March 1967.
Opposition and route restrictions aside, the BOAC and Air France maintained plans to fly supersonic over "sparsely populated" regions such as the deserts of Africa, Saudi Arabia and Australia.
Concorde was also denied permission to overfly India as the United Kingdom government was unwilling to grant additional flight slots or Fifth freedom rights.
