August 22nd - Concorde remembered

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

The Independent

Places & Travel, Leisure, Society & Culture

3.6 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2023

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Twenty years ago, the world’s only surviving supersonic airliner was on her final lap of honour. The Concorde era ended on 24 October 2003, when British Airways retired the plane on commercial grounds. It was also arguably a flying environmental disaster, burning astonishing amounts of fuel and carrying an implausibly vast noise footprint. But at the BA heritage centre near London Heathrow, I talked to Jamie Bowden – former British Airways executive, who flew on Concorde 39 times. Will we see supersonic flight again in our lifetimes?

This podcast is free, as is my weekly newsletter. Subscribe here to have it delivered every Friday to your inbox.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and there is nothing more special and supersonic than this edition
0:08.2	because I'm here at the British Airways Heritage Centre close to Heathrow Airport and I'm standing beneath a big model of a very beautiful aircraft.
0:20.5	The Concord which on the 24th of October 2003 had its last
0:26.1	commercial flight. I'm here with somebody who knows Concord probably better than pretty much
0:32.4	anyone else on Earth. Jamie Bowden, who joined British Airways in 1978, and Jamie, since you joined them,
0:40.9	worked in a variety of capacities. If I'm not mistaken, you've got a chance to fly on Concord.
0:46.4	I did. I was lucky enough to fly on Concord almost 40 times, both taking journalists when I was
0:53.2	a BA's press spokesman and also taking
0:56.3	sports crews, that kind of thing, golf crews. People who used the aircraft as a flagship,
1:03.6	not just for BA, but for Britain at the time. So I took the England football team back from France
1:09.8	in the World Cup and yeah, I flew on Concord very many, very many times and it was a major part of my life both when I was in the terminals as a manager and also when I was a BA's press spokesman.
1:21.6	As an aircraft it was an absolute commercial failure if I'm not mistaken. There were only, I believe, 20 ever manufactured.
1:31.6	Of course, it was shared with France. It only ever flew, really, for British Airways and
1:36.3	for Air France. A few other airlines kind of rented a bit of time with it. But you compare that
1:42.8	with, well, even the Airbus A380, which is not itself a
1:46.2	great success, but they've sold more than 250. And furthermore, it was based, even though it started
1:52.6	flying in 1976, it was based on 1950s technology. So was it always an evolutionary cul-de-sac and a waste of taxpayers' money?
2:03.7	Well, I think if you go back to when Concord was first devised, if you remember the old
2:09.0	famous white heat of technology in the 60s, you know, many technological advancements were put
2:14.6	forward then in terms of aviation. Obviously, there was the Harrier, there was the Concord, there was the TCR2 aircraft.
2:21.2	And I think what would happen with Concord was at the time, the view was that speed was going to be
2:27.1	a major part of forging Britain's business future.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Independent, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Independent and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.