Concorde

Concorde is Exhibit A for the 'things are not getting any better any more' brigade. And what an Exhibit she makes! This gives you one of the pilots talking about what she was like to fly - and how he once did a complete barrel roll in one. And there are some lovely shots of the needle nose and delta wing over green fields, as if that 1950s-ish vision of clean, modernist, nuclear future had come to pass.

The bit for the secular stagnationists is this. In his interview, the pilot says, "In the history of aviation, no other single vehicle has remained at the top of the stack for 10 years. Concorde has been there for 10; it will be there for another 10." Well, Concorde was introduced into service on 21 January 1976. It remained at the top until it fell off the stack, and the stack shrank a little bit.