Top 50+ years on, the story of Concorde still has the power to surprise

Onlookers wave off the last ever Concorde passenger flight departing JFK International Airport on Oct 24 2003 - Mario Tama/Getty Images

If you had been staring at the skies over London or Paris 50 years ago today, you might have seen something special. Jan 21 1976 was a red-letter date in aviation history, witnessing the first commercial flights of one of the greatest aircraft ever built.

Over the next 27 years, Concorde would come to be an unmistakable, supersonic presence in the firmament, whizzing passengers between Britain (or France) and New York in little more than three hours.

But while this Anglo-French superstar’s many highs – and its one terrible low – have been well documented, there are footnotes to its story that still have the capacity to surprise...

1. There was a diplomatic spat over the name

Concorde was jointly developed by the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC) and its French counterpart Sud Aviation – to the extent that its name was a synonym for cooperation. But this does not mean that the project went ahead without disagreements.

Initial briefings in 1963 used the French spelling – Concorde – even though the name had been suggested at BAC’s plant in Filton (in Gloucestershire). This was changed to the anglicised “Concord” by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, amid tensions with Charles de Gaulle, the French president, who had vetoed British entry into the European Economic Community a few months earlier.

Concorde being rolled out at Filton Factory – the choice of name caused a minor diplomatic spat - Keystone-France

In 1967, it was back to “Concorde”, to a roar of outrage from the UK media. Tony Benn, the Minister for Technology, declared, tongue perhaps in cheek, that the extra “e” stood for “Excellence, England, Europe and Entente (Cordiale)”.

2. The destinations of its inaugural flights were unusual

Concorde’s legend is forever tied to its sprints to New York, but when it carried its first passengers 50 years ago, it was not bound for the Big Apple. The US Congress had banned the plane from landing on American soil, nominally on noise grounds (although also, tacitly, because Boeing was attempting to develop its own supersonic airliner) – so this dashing debutante’s first dance steps went in less obvious directions.

British Airways and Air France timed their inaugural flights for the same day – the BA Concorde departed from Heathrow for the island nation of Bahrain, in the Middle East, and its Gallic counterpart took off from Paris-Roissy for Rio de Janeiro via a stop in the Senegalese capital Dakar. Air France would operate this twice-weekly service to Brazil’s most feted city until 1982.

3. It used to fly to Venezuela

That statement sounds preposterous in 2026, but there was a seven-year period, just after Concorde’s launch, when this most graceful of jets did indeed fly to Venezuela.

During that early spell of American obstruction (the US would partially lift the ban on the plane entering its airspace in May 1976), Air France focused its supersonic attention on South America, with Caracas joining Rio on its route map. The Venezuela of the late 1970s was a different place to the troubled state of the 2020s – stable, prosperous and oil-rich, with its lengthy Caribbean coastline providing a sunny backdrop to Concorde’s arrival.

An Air France Concorde carrying then-president François Mitterand on the runway in Caracas during a 1989 visit - Eric Vandeville/2011 Gamma-Rapho

Air France first flew the airliner to Caracas on April 10 1976, and would continue to do so, twice a week, until 1983 – when a collapse in oil prices and the devaluation of the national currency (the bolivar) precipitated the country’s long spiral into dysfunction.

4. The first British pilot to fly Concorde had quite the history

The jet’s test flights had commenced in the spring of 1969, with the first glimpse of a British Concorde occurring in the skies over Filton on April 9 1969. In the captain’s seat that day was Brian Trubshaw, a Liverpool-born airman whose CV was already long on detail.

Signing up for the RAF in 1942, aged 18, he had been thrust into the firestorm of the Second World War, joining Bomber Command two years later, and flying Lancaster Bombers over Germany. When peace came, he found himself in royal service – transferring to the King’s Flight, and lending his skills to George VI. Retiring from the RAF in 1950, he then embarked on a 30-year second career as a test pilot.

Pilot Brian Trubshaw (left) in the cockpit of the British Concorde prior to it’s maiden flight - Hulton Deutsch/Corbis Historical

He was the first Briton at the helm of a Concorde – five weeks after André Turcat, a French aviator with a similarly strong track record, had taken charge of Concorde’s maiden test flight on March 2.

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5. In 1973, it flew close to the sun

Turcat was also in charge of the strangest entry in Concorde’s log – an attempt to trace a solar eclipse across Saharan Africa, on June 30 1973. The idea had been pitched directly to the pilot by Pierre Léna, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory, in May 1972 – and remarkably, achieved all the necessary permissions, including the clearing of airspace, in the 13 months available.

Turcat took off from Las Palmas on Gran Canaria with 11 other crew and scientists (including Léna) on board, and followed the path of the eclipse across Mauritania, Mali, Nigeria and Niger, landing at (what is now) N’Djamena in Chad.

The Concorde F-WTSS experienced totality for an unprecedented (and still unsurpassed) 74 minutes, and while the experiments conducted proved to be of disappointing academic value, the stunt was sufficiently appealing for it to be reprised – using three Concordes, filled with paying passengers – for the eclipse which crossed the UK on August 11 1999.

6. It was only a qualified success

In many senses, Concorde was a mighty achievement. Its record time for an Atlantic crossing – two hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds, from New York to London, as set by British Airways Concorde G-BOAD on February 7 1996 – was a truly remarkable feat.

But in other ways, Concorde did not make the most of its supersonic superiority. Prior to its commercial launch in 1976, predictions that there would be 350 iterations of the aircraft in operation by 1980 did not seem far-fetched. Yet while more than 100 orders were placed – from carriers as varied as Pan Am, American Airlines, Lufthansa, Air India and Iran Air – a combination of factors ensured the boom never materialised.

The advent of the Boeing 747 – slower, but with far greater passenger capacity – in January 1970 was one, the 1973 Oil Crisis and its expensive effect on the cost of aviation fuel was another. In the end, only 20 Concordes (10 each for BA and Air France) would ever be produced.

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7. The crashed Concorde had already (sort of) flirted with disaster

The loss of Air France Flight 4590 – which crashed just after take-off in Paris on July 25 2000 – was the darkest hour in Concorde’s otherwise illustrious history. But, eerily, the plane in question had already played the role of a stricken airliner – on the big screen.

The loss of Air France Flight 4590 – which killed all 109 onboard and four on the ground – was Concorde’s darkest hour - Bernard Bisson/Sygma

The Airport series of disaster films stretched to four blockbusters in the 1970s, with the final instalment, The Concorde… Airport 79, being released into cinemas in the August of that year. Largely derided, it roped in a genuine Concorde, F-BTSC – the very aircraft that would succumb to runway debris and a ruptured fuel tank 21 years later – to lend a fig leaf of credibility to a daft plot involving a rogue arms dealer and a plan to shoot down a commercial jet with a surface-to-air missile. The film has a critical rating of 20 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.

8. A second Concorde was also ‘lost’

Eighteen of the 20 retired Concordes are on display at museums and airports around the world (seven of them are here in the UK). The second vanished member of the fleet was also an Air France aircraft – but, unlike F-BTSC, F-BVFD did not suffer a fatal ending. Instead, it was a victim of mishandling and neglect whose torturous demise began on November 28 1977, with a landing in Dakar so heavy that it crushed the tail-wheel and damaged the rear fuselage.

It flew on for five years, but when a routine inspection in May 1982 revealed significant structural issues, it was grounded – and would never rise again. Over the next 12 years, it was cannibalised for spare parts, before its corroded shell – left to the mercy of the elements at Charles de Gaulle Airport – was finally scrapped in 1994.

9. It had a nemesis you rarely see

One of the 18 Concorde retirement homes has a claim to fame: the Technik Museum Sinnsheim, just outside Stuttgart, is the only place on the planet where you can see a Concorde (Air France F-BVFB) on show next to its ill-fated Cold War rival.

Cold War rivals the Tupolev TU-144 (L) and Concorde (R) can be viewed side by side at the Technik Museum Sinnsheim in Germany - Didier Messens

The Tupolev Tu-144 was the USSR’s attempt to beat the West to supersonic flight. While the plane succeeded in this headline aim, taking off for its first test flight on December 31 1968, poor reliability – and a disastrous crash at the Paris Air Show on June 3 1973 – meant its commercial career amounted to just seven months and 102 flights. Only 16 Tu-144s were ever manufactured. Only one is found outside Russia.

10. Its pilots enjoyed a clear view of the competition

Concorde’s supersonic velocity – it could reach a speed of Mach 2.02 (1,330mph) – meant it required a more elevated flight path than its slower competitors – it generally cruised at an altitude of 56,000ft (17,000m).

‘The aeroplane was an absolute delight to fly,’ said former Concorde pilot John Hutchinson - NNehring/iStock Unreleased

The astonishing views at this height were described by former British Airways captain John Hutchinson in the 2003 documentary The World’s Greatest Airliner: “The only thing that tells you that you are moving is that, occasionally, when you are flying over the subsonic aeroplanes, you can spot all these 747s about 20,000ft below you – almost appearing to go backwards,” he mused. “I mean, you’re going 800 miles an hour faster than they are.”

“The aeroplane was an absolute delight to fly,” he continued. “It handled beautifully.”

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