I heard the "That was the difficult part!" story was Edwards to an airline exec when they were still trying to sell the bird. Very true observation by Edwards whoever it was said to.
I've spoken to many Concorde flight crew over the years and surprisingly few have experienced an engine surge. One that did said it was quite dramatic; a really mighty bang about twice second. The other engine of the pair would then surge in sympathy as the intakes were adjacent, so then you had two engines doing that. On the flight deck they'd pull all 4 to flight idle to get them to settle down, which made the other two pop-surge. Then slowly advance power on all 4 back to full to recover to M2 cruise.
One captain told me how he'd gone back into the cabin after it had happened to him and all the pax except two were quite unperturbed, enjoying the hospitality with a 'these things happen and it's obviously no big deal as all's well now' attitude. The two exceptions were Gordon Brown and Ed Balls, who were ashen-faced and uncommunicative!
Why doesn't that surprise me?
