The roar of the Rolls-Royce Olympus engines, combined with being pushed back into your seat, was like no other civilian aeroplane.” “Each takeoff was a phenomenal experience, the performance such that we had to warn the passengers in advance what to expect. It had no flaps or slats (high-lift devices on the wing) and always used full power with reheat for takeoff,” explains former British Airways Concorde captain John Tye. “Concorde was vastly different from subsonic aircraft at the time. But there was always a status symbol to being in the front section.”ĭiscos and gyms: Fun airplane ideas that never took off “The two sections were identical – not like one was First Class and one was Business. There was a front section, then a middle lavatory, and then a rear section,” explains Quest. “The actual layout of the plane was in two sections. The SST had a single aisle, with a two-two seating configuration. With an interior fuselage width of about eight and a half feet (2.63 meters), Concorde’s cabin was just wider than that of today’s Bombardier Regional Jet. It was noisy, extremely noisy, but I challenge anybody not to have a smile from ear to ear when they got on it.” It had more like office chairs, bucket seats, and very small windows. “Concorde was extremely small, only about 100 seats. “You were aware of being part of a very small group of people that were privileged enough to be on Concorde. “The flight attendants loved being on it the passengers loved being on it,” says CNN’s Richard Quest, who flew Concorde five times. With superlative service and cuisine, exclusive airport lounges and stratospherically high airfares, Concorde passengers flew far above other flights, and cruised faster than fighter jets to their destinations.īut what was it really like to rub shoulders with the rich and famous on a Concorde flight? CNN Travel asked some former passengers what it was like to fly on one. Only 20 of the sleek, delta-winged SSTs were built, and just 14 were delivered to two airlines – seven each to Air France and British Airways. In 1976 – over 40 years ago – elite passengers were crossing the Atlantic in under three and a half hours, flying at twice the speed of sound in the Anglo-French Concorde. The Concorde 001 prototype took off from Toulouse, piloted by André Turcat, and first went supersonic on October 1. Half a century ago, the legendary supersonic passenger airliner Concorde made its first test flight, on March 2, 1969. Record-setting, perhaps, but for a subsonic airliner. Last month, a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 787 Dreamliner hitched a ride on a powerful jet stream and flew from Los Angeles to London in a record-setting nine hours and 13 minutes, hitting 801 miles per hour as it flew over Pennsylvania.
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