grumpy old man:
Franglais:
Eddie Heaton:
What a contrast between Concord ( or Concorde if you prefer } to the Neanderthal FG in the foreground. I remember watching it take off from Heathrow in the mid 70s with Brian Trubshaw at the controls .
I never came even close to flying on one of them , ( chance would have been a very fine thing indeed ), and I have no idea how many were manufactured , but a few years before my retirement, I was engaged in the operation of emptying the John Ryland’s library in Deansgate Manchester and taking all the books and Egyptian manuscripts etc. from there to storage facilities in those underground salt caverns near Northwich .
On one particular afternoon , as I was returning back to Manchester from Northwich along the A556 , I heard this tremendous roaring sound , and when I looked up , I saw this bloody girt plane , seemingly only a few hundred feet above me and flying parallel with the A556 at what appeared to me to be little more than the speed at which I was travelling , although I realise that ground speed compared with air speed is often an illusion when viewed from the ground .
Turns out it was one of the last Concords on its final flight into Ringway .
The plane is still there, in its own hangar for people to view . There’s another one that I know of at Charles de Gaulle just outside Paris, and there’ll be many more of them dotted about the place I’m sure , but these are the only ones that I’ve personally seen .I saw a low pass by a Concorde at Hurn (Bournemouth) airfield. It had left Heathrow and was off to the USA, but did a visit to the airshow there. I`m sure that commercial flights are not allowed to do that sort of thing today.
Beautiful plane.
Apparently only 20 were built, and 6 of those were never used commercially, so a very small operating fleet. A very different type of aircraft, but there have been over 1,500 747s built.Aye, and if the Americans had invented it there would have been a hell of a lot more Concordes built and it would still be flying.
I think the spike in oil prices following the 1973 middle east war did more damage to the chances of Concorde succeeding than the Yanks spitting the dummy out when they failed to come up with their own version.