A sad week for British aviation
I've just read Jeremy Clarkson's excellent epitaph, in the Sunday Times, to something that I will sadly miss.
I have never made enough money to fly on her and whilst this has always been in the back of my mind, today it really has got me down. Friday, this week, will see the last ever passenger flight of Concorde.
Whilst I have seen Concorde many times, I have only ever truly seen her once. A holiday on Nantuket involved a return flight from JFK. It was around 6pm and the sun was a massive golden ball, sillouetting the towers of Manhatten. And then she appeared. I did not see her at first, but the sudden silence amongst the thousands in JFK's departure lounge alerted me to something important. I cast my eyes in the direction of the masses and there she was. Nose drooped to the horizontal, standing on her engines, turning base over New York's cathedral's of commerce, the golden sun behind her. Never has anything looked so beautiful.
As she turned final, you could hear a pin drop. What had been a gathering of the loud, the precocious, the delayed and the weary suddenly turned into a collection of people sharing the same feeling. A recognition of something so good and so different that whether you were eight or eighty, it commanded the same respect.
As she touched her wheels down, I felt a tear in my eye. I have never been so proud to be British. In a country that, often rightly, claims to have the best of everything, several thousand people had been silenced by something so beautiful and so timeless that they could only look on in homage. In homage to something so profoundly British.
I will feel the same tear in my eye on Friday, for a different reason.
Concorde, RIP.
Last edited by bar shaker; 19th October 2003 at 23:37.