Last Concord into Cardiff

Taken with MZ 50.

Ahhh, what a nice bird this was. I wish I could have seen her fly. Too late now...

Prieni

They flew out of Leeds Bradford Airport for a while, we live near the flight path.

The noise was fantastic and what a sight to see as the Speedbird climbed into the blue.

So sad BA had no foresight.

Richard Branston did but BA would not sell them to him, he would have made a profit from them.

It was a regular occurrence to hear the double bang of the sonic boom as it left UK high above Cornwall for the states...around about 11 every morning, as I recall....technology seems to be going backwards!



Rob

I have not herd a sonic boom for years

Beautiful bird. We only live a couple of miles away from Aintree Racecourse, and on Grand National day Concord would circle around at low level.....Amazing site.

Did a tour of the Concord at Manchester (G-BOAC) and got to sit in the pilots seat,plenty of buttons and knobs to play with I can tell you. A little guessing game here for you, and as told by the tour guide. A certain very famous man always booked the same 2 seats when travelling on Concord, one for him and one so that nobody could sit next to him, he also had a towel over his head for the whole journey. Any guesses who it was:

I too remember the babang from my days in Cornwall.

As to the Branson thing - it is a lot more complicated than that. The counter argument is that Branson publicly expressed an interest in it because he knew the answer would be no, and he could use that as negative publicity against BA (they're not best mates:wink.

The truth was that she was hobbled at birth by the American environmental lobby and lived on borrowed time. The Paris crash did her no good at all. In the end it was financial and engineering considerations that did for her.

Shame as she is one of the icons of the twentieth century and a pinnacle of engineering.

The view from row 16 wasn't bad either

I saw her first commercial flight from Heathrow - we lived near there, but not under the flight path- we could see them take off and fly parallel to our road.

My youngest brother got to fly on her for his 40th birthday. My eldest brother organised a courier trip for him. two years later all I got was a bottle of champagne .

We have had a few sonic bangs here lately when the Dutch air force has been scrambled to deal with rogue aircraft.

I had a two hour flight in one and it's a most awesome experience. We were at mach 2 for about 10 minutes. Exhilarating is an understatement.

Have thay kept one for air shows or is the Concord now dead, dead.

I seem to remember they are all grounded. Was it not to expensive to keep them going after the crash in France

Yep, well and truly all grounded,but who knows what the future holds

They were always too expensive to operate.

Flights did resume after the fatal crash in France when the fuel tanks had been modified with anti-puncture linings.

All Concord/Concorde aircraft were taken out of service soon after.