Following the revelation (Sunday Times, 11/3/07) that an airline owned by Oxford patron Wafic 'Enough' Saïd is running an empty passenger jet every day between Heathrow and Cardiff solely to retain its valuable London runway slot, an even bigger energy-waste scandal is emerging.
It appears that vast resources (another £520 million just announced) have for years been quietly pumped into a mammoth higher-aviation venture in the midlands that, experts are beginning to admit, is likely never to leave the ground. In an exact reverse of British Mediterranean Airways' daily empty 'ghost flights' to Cardiff, it has been revealed that 3,300 passengers are permanently trapped on the ground in a huge long-hall hot-airbus in Oxford that shows absolutely no prospect of ever taking off.
The multi-billion-pound Congregator project, an ancient forerunner of today's mumbo-jumbo jets, was launched by Dim Air in the 1240s and is now running way over budget and way behind schedule. "This alma mater is simply never going to fly," confided an engineer at Aerial College. "Its stone fuselage structures are just too heavy; its right and left wings are always pulling in opposite directions, its seats are archaic and uncomfortable, its control systems have failed totally, its tail is woeful, and no-one dares even to imagine the state of its undercarriage."
There are echoes in the affair of the BAEsystems bribery scandal, in which Wafic Saïd is also involved. It was only when the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) got permission to inspect the Syrian arms-dealer's Swiss bank accounts that they learnt of his multi-million-pound bungs to the university's controversial business-jet school opened in 2001 to train suicide bankers. The SFO's discovery prompted Saïd's friend Tony Blair to intervene and halt the investigation. A sequel to the Al Yammer-yammer deal, the suspect BAE contract is to supply Saudi Arabia with 72 'Typhoon' Eurofighters, claimed to be the world's most advanced interceptor, boasting computer-controlled variable-geometry wings and flexible-morality aerodynamics that enable it to out-manoeuvre all other foreign policies currently flying.
Some critics regard the Eurofighter, like the Congregator, as an expensive irrelevance, a prestige project with little practical application in modern-day circumstances. "It reminds me of Concorde," said one critic, "a grand fantasy and a beautiful aircraft - a sort of horizontal dreaming spire, but in practical business or military terms always a white elephant, a dumbo jet. It was inevitable it would end up as just a museum-piece. The Congregator belongs to an even earlier era when flying meant buttresses, and when the nearest thing to a control tower was your local church. All that was superseded long ago. The 1970s saw the advent of the Openair University and of one-to-one television. Then came degrees in colour. Now we have the worldwide web and virtual learning. Who is going to spend £20,000 a year for the supposed privilege of quaffing silver-served plonk at supersonically high altitude when these days everyone can surf the Internet for free and fly Ryan AiR nearly so? All that booming, all that pollution, all that money, just to humour a few hooray henries who fancy they can get to the top an hour or so quicker than the rest. Who needs it?"
Concorde was, famously, an Anglo-French co-project, while the new Eurofighter involves four countries, with the front and rear fuselage and the engines being made in the UK, the mid fuselage being made in Germany, the left wing being made in Italy, the right wing being made in Spain and the money and the fuel being made in the Middle East. However, even this limited four-nation venture has from the start been bedevilled by bickering and indecision between the partners. As the different countries' internal politics and external policies have changed, so have their different orders and requirements for the plane, resulting in a series of loop-the-loop decisions and flip-roll specifications.
With the Congregrator it appears that these same problems have been multiplied and prolonged ad absurdam by the participation of no less than thirty-six separate corporations, each with its own structure, agenda and priorities. As a result, "seven centuries of mystery" have enshrouded the programme, with its perpetually grounded passengers still unsure of the plane's function or destination, lulled into zombie-like submission by an endless round of food, drink and on-board entertainment. In New College, for example, an early wooden air-to-air missile system known as the port cannon still provides after-dinner target practice for the stewards.
"And all for what?" asked one disaffected Eng. Lit. don. "In all that time and with all that money, what has ever actually flown from here? What literature, what art, what music, what science even? Oh there was Shelley of course, but what happened then? A crash landing rivalled only by the Hindenberg's! The whole project is a dead duck, and its captain a lame one." Another, a frustrated stunt pilot, complained: "We are terminally bound by our ancient foundations, our deadweight statutes, our ridiculous procedures. Imagine, we are supposed to radio in our positions in Latin! I have been flapping my gown here for over thirty years now, but have never achieved more than a few inches of lift-off. I've even forgotten where my joystick is. Most people's spirits are very down."
The Congregrator does, however, still enjoy a few supporters in high places, some of whom see it as a lucrative visitor attraction, to which rich air-travellers will be drawn from the USA, Saudi Arabia and the Far East, providing badly needed revenue. Already, a deal has been agreed to build a secret kerosene pipeline from the Middle East in exchange for a regular concession of first-class seats. Others see it as a future space capsule, outside time and money altogether, drifting All-Soul-like through a hyper-reality quite unconnected with the Earth - a distant, private asteroid of wisteria'd quadrangles and walled gardens.
But most commentators are aghast at the flagrant waste of precious national resources, pointing to the Congregator's enormous endowment footprint stretching right across the country and beyond. Chief Executive John Hood has even suggested that the plane's range extends as far as the USA, claiming that, with a masonry nose-wheel already built on the ground in New York, and its US landing rights established for over 30 years, it will never need to fly at all, as by definition it now constitutes one long transatlantic runway. Aviation experts are unconvinced by this argument, predicting that the IRS may soon close the loophole and withdraw the British airline's taxiing privileges.
Then, say the critics, there is its cost in terms of pollution: the vast quantities of carbon dioxford, carbon monoxford, GBO (Governing Body Odour), HEFCEs and the other toxic and hothouse gases the Congregator pumps every day into the higher atmosphere, an output matched only by its fenland rival CamambAir, with its slightly more modern but equally flightless 3,800-seat Rejentliner. It has been estimated that if these two ancient leviathans continue pouring concrete, burning fossil languages and polluting the air at their present rates, within just ten years their combined Greencollege effect will have raised the temperature in the provinces by over 18,000 degrees, perhaps causing desertification across the whole sector.
The university has suggested that its pollution may be ameliorated by means of a system of "cambridge dioxford trading", whereby more profitable graduate and research students from around the world can be offset against loss-making "topped-up" UK undergraduates, and the dioxford books brought into apparent balance. But protestors claim that this is just an insidious form of privatisation which will have little effect on the Congregator's overall admission levels.
On one thing, though, all observers agree: that Tony Blair's forthcoming probable succession by Gordon Brown is likely to result in a far sterner logic being brought to bear upon the finances of the whole project, perhaps bringing it down to earth with a bump.