Concorde did many of its supersonic trial flights during 1975/1976 under control of the UKADGE. They didn’t want to have frequent frequency changes and we set up a common frequency shared by Neatishead, Boulmer, Buchan, Saxa Vord and Benbecula.
Concorde would be handed over to Neatishead coating out over East Anglia and be cleared to climb and go high speed heading north and would then be handed from controller to controller as they flew a large loop north of Sax and then back down the Irish Sea. I never saw or controlled anyone trying an intercept against them, but it is possible.
I did control one flight in a weekend when Boulmer wasn’t manned and the controller at Buchan had a U/S radio, so they called the Saxa controller to their Ops room - and all the time Concorde was heading north at 20nm a minute. I eventually handed them over just about abeam Aberdeen - I was just thankful they were at FL600.
I remember the first such trial, which was controlled by one of the old Warrant Officer controllers. The crew had been told to call Neatishead and obviously knew nothing about the names and locations of the AD radar sites as, after they checked and were cleared to accelerate they asked him to spell Neatishead and then when quiet for a couple of minutes as they tried, and failed, to find it on their flight documents. They then asked him for our location and, gleefully echoing the words of the FC recruiting film of the day, solemnly replied we were, “An Air Defence radar site, somewhere on the east coast of England”.....
Last edited by ORAC; 3rd Nov 2019 at 20:46.