I recall it as being about 530 on Sundays, mainly because then I would be sitting quaffing the gin!
Probably stuck in traffic at the Hammersmith flyover.
Fulham quaffing gin. We’re you a Yuppie?
I was probably a bit of a cunt, so yeah
Where we were in Fulham, we were directly under the flight path. I was home when the final flights took place. I had something in my eye that day.
I was able to do the whole touristy Flight over the Bay of Biscay thing. We loved it.
As I remember it, they had huge trouble just finding routes and destinations that would take it in the 70s due mainly to sonic boom and engine noise concerns.
From the 50s onwards there was a LOT of very vocal protest and lobbying against aircraft testing-generated sonic booms - so much so that a lot of the early designs had to be tested overseas where they weren’t so fucking NIMBY/Luddite. Luckily Concorde had the range to do supersonic tests out to sea.
There was such a lot of new tech, too, so they were hyper-conservative about testing - last thing we needed was another Comet fiasco…
FTFY
I believe there was a lot of resistance from the 'Merkans, due to the fact they hadn’t been able to develop a similar A/C, and therefore decided to be cunts.
My uncle told me a fine anecdote about those. The Gannet was one of the first FAA aircraft to have the ridiculously Gucci feature of power operated folding wings. Due to the unique nature of carrier landings, the button that operated this feature couldn’t simply be set to only operate at 0knts (because carriers move) or 0ft (because carriers are more than 0ft above sea level). Instead, it had a conditional cut out where the aircraft had to be gear down, doing less that a certain speed and at less than a certain height for it to work. As you might imagine, due to the sudden and drastic loss of qualities you associate with a plane that would come from the wings folding in flight, this feature was never officially tested.
One day in the mid sixties, my uncle who served aboard Ark Royal overheard a Gannet crew debriefing after a long, dull ASW patrol. At the end of it, the pilot remarked “That was so dull, I tested the wing fold cut out- it works you know?”
The next noise was the navigator- the one resident in the smallest and most miserable of those cockpits, directly under where the wings would fold- punching the pilot as hard as he could in the face.
Sounds about right Stu, I lived in South Glos then and would hear it if I was out in the garden or garage of an evening. The deep hollow rumble was unmistakable and even though they weren’t supersonic over land you had to look quite a way ahead of where it sounded like it should be, to see the beautiful silver dart tearing across the sky. Wonderful thing
We lived in Cornwall in the late 70s/early 80s. Never saw it but had the double boom twice a day
The westbound flight would come past my old workplace at 10:45 or so each weekday morning. We used it as the signal to stop whatever we were doing and gather for the morning coffee break.
VB
I remember Concorde making its first Canadian appearance at the Toronto Airshow in 1979 and the frenzy it caused.
Unfortunately Air Canada backed out of buying 4 of the aircraft in 1972 due to rising fuel cost and regular London-Toronto service never did develop because of emission and noise concerns. Weekly flights as part of a luxury vacation package were all that ever materialized
Both above worth expanding.
Fabulous shot !
SUPERSONIC!!!