c o n c o r d e
a tribute
I first glimpsed a Concorde in flight at the age of 10. It was the 20th August 1977 and my mother had bundled us into her old mini van to race us down the road towards Duxford Airfield to see Concorde 101 fly low over the South Cambridgeshire village and touch down on the runway. Brian Trubshaw was at the controls for this historic flight - as he had been for the first British test flight out of Filton some eight years before.
For
the last thirteen years of Concorde's commercial service I lived on its flight
path in West London - looking and listening out for it's miraculous daily
super-sonic return from New York. On special occasions it would even
fly past my flat accompanied by the red arrows. It didn't matter that I'd
never fly on it myself - I just loved to watch it.
But on the 16th January 1996 I queued up at Heathrow Terminal 1 to enter the Concorde lounge. BBC Radio had asked me to report on the 20th Anniversary of Concorde's first commercial flight. It was hard to believe I was going to ride the big bird. Listen to Radio 5 Report
I sat next to Brian Calvert, (Concorde's first commercial pilot) as we roared
along the runway at Heathrow. Leaning out into the aisle I looked up
towards the cockpit and watched the narrow fuselage wobbling up and down with
every bump and jolt from the runway. The structure has to be that flexible
to deal with the heating and cooling that Concorde goes through in its
acceleration beyond MACH 2, explained Brian. As we accelerated
sub-sonically out of British skies, climbing up
over
Wales and out into the Atlantic. Our speed climbed too - until we were cruising
along at just under the speed of sound. The MACH indicators in the cabin
registered MACH 0.95. "Listen out for the re-heats on the engines" Brian
prompted. It was the only sign we were breaking the invisible sound
barrier.
Around me the business men beavered away on clunky lap tops and shuffled papers, seemingly oblivious to the barrier we'd just broken. But I felt the ghosts of the men who'd lost their lives attempting to break this legendary barrier 50 years before. The MACH indicator continued to climb until it settled at 2.15. We were travelling a mile every two and a quarter seconds.
Outside my window, warmed to the touch by the fast moving air outside, the sky was bordering on black, and a gentle curve of the horizon betrayed our height - at twice that of Mount Everest - some 60,000 feet.
I sipped my buzz
fix
and dined on Caspian caviar - sipping it from a mother of pearl spoon as I stared out into the
troposphere - desperate to soak up every nuance of the experience - and every
second of the day.
About half way towards New York I was invited up onto the flight deck to
interview the crew. Cruising at its top speed the fuselage was now
heated to well over 100 degrees centigrade and the entire plane had expanded by
about a meter - opening up a gap at the bulk head where the flight engineer
could put his hand. We joked about him leaving it there during
deceleration and cooling when the gap closes up.
Just over three hours after leaving London at around Noon on flight BA 001 we were in America. It was nine o'clock in the morning! Glancing down at the snow covered roves of Manhattan from the top of the Empire State building I caught site of my watch - still set on GMT. It was about 5pm in London and with the Sun still so high in the New York morning sky I had the feeling that, despite the low temperatures, it must be summer. It was still the 16th January in London when at 11pm I sat back in my flat with a little model of the Empire State Building on my table. I glanced at the world map on my kitchen wall. I'd crossed the Atlantic twice since lunch time! Ten years later I still find that fact unbelievable!
~
I was at the Farnborough Air show on the 25th July 2000 - the day the Air France Concorde crashed, killing all on board. The lose of life was terrible. But I also felt like grieving that day for the loss of a machine. It was the beginning of the end for supersonic passenger flight.
It took another three years for all prospects of Concorde's complete return to flight to evaporate completely. On the 9th October 2003 the roads around Heathrow were choked with people all waiting for the big bird to come home for the last time.
Plane spotters, mothers with children, grandmothers with grandchildren. Sitting in cars, sitting on grassy knolls, right along the A30 to Staines. It was a fresh autumnal day – crisp and bright with dappled white clouds in a winter blue sky.
A transit van advertising a web site chugged past me – the owner defiantly cheering at the wheel and accompanied by the rousing tones of Freddy Mercury from his radio “Don’t stop me now I'm having such a good time…. …..I wanna make a supersonic man out of you…”
On the dot of four the first of three distinctive wedges materialised in the blue and one by one they glided down north of us and out of site behind the service buildings. The cheers of delight changed to a collective sigh of frustration as the actual landing was blocked from view by the hangers.
“It was like the big birds were coming home to roost” one man said.
Walking back to the car it suddenly dawned on me that I’d never see another white arrow cross the skies over my house, never again hear the supersonic Rolls Royce growl from miles away and rush to the window to watch the miracle cross the skies.
That night going in my front door I looked up at the regular planes coming in over the roofs - bland shape after shape - crosses of straight subsonic wings. There would be no more sleek delta wings. The skies were less exciting that night and the heavens a poorer place. On the tube the next day a large picture of Concorde dominated the front page of the Evening Standard. One word was stamped above the picture - “Goodbye” it said.
I had one more, unexpected, encounter with the Big Bird which I had been unprepared for. In the Spring months of early 2004 Concorde G-BOAA nosed its way on a truck through my little village of Isleworth and onto an immense barge which would take it to its final resting place - at the Museum of Flight in East Lothian, Scotland. The engineers who had masterminded this final journey were aware that the tides had to be just right to get this unique cargo under all the London City bridges and out into the North Sea. They would have to be patient to get it just right and this meant a wait of several weeks by the tiny Isleworth dock. Each day - when time allowed I would detour to travel past it once more - paying my last respects.
Then, one day, without warning, the tide took it away. Concorde was gone forever.
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