ALLAN ROGERS RECALLS

A FLIGHT OF FANCY

The final Concorde flight is from
New York to London on October 24, when BA finally brings down the curtain on 27 years of supersonic service.

We have said good bye to the Concorde, a remarkable aircraft .
She made her first flight on the 2nd of March 1969, so as aircraft go, she’s not exactly young, but nothing else can touch her for elegance, speed, and popularity.

I heard the tale of a rather busy travel agent who had a phone call from a lady who asked how long Concorde took to get to America. “ Just a minute” he said., as he reached for the time table, and the lady, satisfied that her query had been answered hung up. Well it’s not quite that quick but it is pretty impressive.

When I tried it, we flew out of the East faster than a rifle bullet. It’s still regarded as one of the two great travel experiences, the other being taking the Orient Express to Venice, (but more on that another time.)
I joined Concorde on a flag waving flight from Warsaw. All eyes turned skywards when she flew over and on the motorway out to the airport there were lengthy traffic jams. Most of the car owning population of Warsaw seemed to have turned out to get a closer look at the first lady of the air.

Although I’d flown out in one of BA’s 757s I was one of the lucky hundred booked to fly home supersonic class. The cabin attendants did the usual pre-take off safety drill and my ears kind of pricked up when they casually announced,
“Very shortly now we will be departing for London, we shall reach a cruising speed of thirteen hundred and forty miles per hour, which is over twice the speed of sound.”
I wondered what that would feel like on my little motor bike.

The cabin was roomier than I expected. In spite of Concorde’s long slim pencil shape, or maybe because of it, there seemed to be more leg room. The dove-grey leather seats gave a really plush feel to it all.

We were in the mood for superlatives and we were not to be disappointed.
On the speaker above my head, we heard a voice from the sharp end telling us that the total power output from the four Rolls Royce Olympus engines was a quarter of a million horsepower, equivalent to three thousand private cars. It gave quite sporting acceleration as we whizzed down the runway. We left the ground at over 200 miles an hour, and went up steep and fast into the blue. We were about to go even faster, Concorde’s nose and visor were retracted, full power, with after burner were applied and the rate of climb increased to two miles a minute.

As you can imagine she consumes quite a bit of fuel. It’s burned up at the rate of twenty four thousand gallons an hour on the way up, but once levelled off and cruising it’s a little more economical, taking only about twice as much as a run-of-the-mill jumbo jet.

Of course other things are consumed too and the stewardess, Magda smiled my favourite words “ A glass of Champagne for you, sir?” In the interest of research I politely accepted and listened on as the captain explained that the plane was about to grow by ten inches. It expands with the heat created by friction as it speeds through the air.

The temperature on the nose of the plane rises to 120º C (That’s 20º above boiling point !) The Concords normally fly on scheduled routes to New York but at over £5000 return it’s only the elite or those on a right royal overdraft who can contemplate the trip. Lesser mortals had to be content with charter flights.
These steadily grew in number and ranged from day flights to package holidays where Concorde is used for part of the journey. The first ‘round the world’ holiday started ten years ago, but you need a well upholstered wallet for that one.
Other packages featured Cairo, New York, Greenland and Monaco for the Grand Prix.
For real flight buffs there was even chance to ‘fly’ the plane by spending two hours in the Concorde flight simulator at Bristol. The day visit cost just under £700.
The fact that BA has only got seven Concords and no more ould be made meant that flying in one was never going to be a particularly cheap but was an experience to savour and remember.

On our flight, after we went supersonic, and climbed higher and faster we had a superb commentary from the captain. It kept us enthralled and the only worry was a nagging feeling that it would all end too soon.

We reached eleven hundred miles an hour and over the North Sea, (at that speed, just minutes from Glasgow,) we made a large right hand turn and headed south. We slowed to subsonic speed to prevent the shock waves going forward and booming over the Dutch coast before turning above Clacton and heading in to land at London. Below us the traffic on the motorway seemed to move at a snail’s pace, but then we had travelled at 1310mph, that’s 22 miles a minute, a mile every 2.75 seconds.
Travel would never ever, quite be the same!