My dear wife knows how I feel about silly old lumps of aloominium, that leave the place where her feet are always planted, so she gave me a very special birthday treat of a flight in Concord out of EGCC, well, I thought, sat in the very rearmost seat/window on the port side would be a simple flight in a very expensive and noisy A/c, after the Captn read out the mind numbing facts and figures of everything from tyres temps to air flow speed through the engine baffles we settled down to take off, when the engines were first spooled up they sounded like a bag of nuts and bolts being ground to dust but with the onsett of temp they went quiet and business like, most of the Pax were (surprise, surprise) males with about 6 Femmes in the total of 100 Pax, all the birthday people were given their own special bottle of Champers and we were off down the runway at EGCC, the A/c left the ground very quickly and climbed so fast that grimey old Manchester took about 2 minutes to disappear behind us, the acceleration upon t/o could only be decribed as totally mind blowing, it was very difficult to reach out forward with my hands to touch the seat back in front of me, we went so high I seem to think about 65k ft that the sky above us was a deep sapphire blue almost black, after suitable instruction from the pointed end I could see the curveture of the planet that we live on.
I could write for ages explaining various things about this superb aircraft but I am sure my views and memorys would bore many, so I will say only this, I hope before I die to be able to fly in such an aircraft again, just to show me what mankind can do when they put their minds to the task, even with the help of the Froggies, sadly Concord will stop flying, its a cost thing actioned on by the Oz boss of BA, but I would rather see finance pumped into the Avro Vulcan, Now that is a Aircraft to behold, and hear!!
