Heritage Concorde

A French Concorde was once used to fly a rare snake bite serum to Africa for emergency treatment as the poor victim only had a couple of hours or so left to live, amazingly he lived due to the time saved by Concorde.

BA Concordes were used to carried diamond shipments to the USA

BA Concordes were also used to fly live human organs for transplant requirements/purposes

There have been more US astronauts than BA Concorde pilots.

One BA engineer is said to have hid in the toilet during take-off from JFK to get a free flight back to Heathrow

BA Concordes were used to carry major currency between the USA and the UK, there was a safe fitted in the rear baggage hold for this purpose

Fred Finn was on the first and last Concorde flight and holds the Guinness World Record for the most Concorde flights as a passenger.In total, he flew 718 times on the Queen of the Skies between 1976 and 2003 – all of them in the same seat, 9A.

Each flight consisted of the pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer and six cabin crew.

In 1993, Barbara Harmer, a former hairdresser from Bognor Regis, became Concorde’s first female pilot.

British Airways limited their cabin crew to a maximum of three years’ service to allow as many people as possible the chance to work on Concorde.

Pilots wanting to fly Concorde had to complete an intensive six month conversion programme consisting of a six week technical course, nineteen weeks on the simulator, route briefing and route flying training.

For its first few years, Concorde operated at a loss. The British Government, which financed the British side of the Concorde project, took 80% of Concorde’s revenue.

It was discovered in the early eighties that public perception of Concorde was that it cost more to fly on it than it actually did. So the prices were put up to what people thought they were, and with oil prices reducing, Concorde began making money.

In 1984, financial ownership of the crafts was passed over for the government to British Airways who operated the crafts at a profit.

It is believed that part of the reason for the crafts being retired in 2003 was that, while they were grounded, British Airways and Air France realised that they made more profit out of the passengers who would have flown on Concorde by them flying First Class on their standard aircrafts.

Concorde was an ogival delta-winged (“OG delta wing”) aircraft with four Olympus engines based on those originally developed for the Avro Vulcan strategic bomber. The engines were jointly built by Rolls-Royce and SNECMA. Concorde was the first civil airliner to have an analogue fly-by-wire flight control system. It also employed a trademark droop snoot lowering nose section for visibility on approach.

The Concorde programme’s primary legacy is in the experience gained in design and manufacture which later became the basis of the Airbus consortium.[citation needed] Snecma Moteurs’ involvement with the Concorde programme prepared the company’s entrance into civil engine design and manufacturing, opening the way for Snecma to establish CFM International with General Electric and produce the successful CFM International CFM56 series engines.

Although Concorde was a technological marvel when introduced into service in the 1970s, 30 years later its cockpit, cluttered with analogue dials and switches, looked dated. With no competition, there was no commercial pressure to upgrade Concorde with enhanced avionics or passenger comfort, as occurred in other airliners of the same vintage, for example the Boeing 747.

The key partners, BAC (later to become BAE Systems) and Aerospatiale (later to become EADS), were the joint owners of Concorde’s type certificate. Responsibility for the Type Certificate transferred to Airbus with formation of Airbus SAS.

By around 1981 in the UK, the future for Concorde looked bleak. The government had lost money operating Concorde every year, and moves were afoot to cancel the service entirely. A cost projection came back with greatly reduced metallurgical testing costs, but still, having lost money for so many years, the government was not keen to continue. In late 1983, the managing director of BA, Sir John King, managed to get the government to sell the aircraft outright to (the then state owned, later privatised) BA for 16.5 million plus the first year’s profits.

After doing a market survey and discovering that their target customers thought that Concorde was more expensive than it actually was, BA progressively raised prices to match these perceptions. It is reported that BA then ran Concorde at a profit, unlike their French counterparts. The plane was reckoned to make an operating profit for British Airways after the British and French governments agreed to write off the development costs of the plane. BA’s profits have been reported to be up to 50 million in the most profitable year, with total revenue of 1.75 billion, before costs of 1 billion.

While commercial jets take seven hours to fly from New York to Paris, the average supersonic flight time on the transatlantic routes was just under 3.5 hours. In transatlantic flight, Concorde travelled more than twice as fast as other aircraft – other aircraft frequently appeared to be flying backwards. Up to 2003, Air France and British Airways continued to operate the New York services daily. Concorde also flew to Barbados’s Grantley Adams International Airport during the winter holiday season. Until the AF Paris crash ended virtually all charter services by both AF and BA, several UK and French tour operators operated numerous charter flights to various European destinations on a regular basis.