Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and today I am absolutely thrilled to have a super sonic special involving Captain Andy Mills who flew on Concord for six years from 1997 to when Concord sadly retired in October 2003.

So my first question to you, Andy, is this sounds like everybody's dream job, was it?

Absolutely.

I mean, a bit like your introduction, to call it a job is a misnomer.

It was the absolute icing on the cake and uh it was a

wonderful aircraft to fly absolute privilege and definitely the culmination of my career definitely

the icing on the cake so how different is it from flying an ordinary aircraft because i believe that you you, before that you're on Airbus A320s, which are a perfectly good aircraft, but quite ordinary.

Yes, well, it's totally different to other aircraft in many respects.

And in fact, it's three aircraft in one. It's a subsonic airplane, a supersonic, a transonic airplane.

So it exhibits all sorts of different characteristics in the various flight regimes.

Interestingly, the A320 Airbus is a direct result, is the result of the development of the flight control systems, especially, that we developed for the A320, which revolutionized that whole genre of aircraft.

All of those systems are nascent in concord but everybody thinks or i do at

least that concord was absolutely antiquated so it was a 1960s design using 1950s engine technology

and clearly you know by the time the 21st century arrived it simply didn't

really have a place in the world partly because of its immense noise and fuel consumption.

Well sadly that's a misnomer the aircraft was actually revolutionary in almost every respect

you can think of the the basic flying control system was developed as fly-by-wire,

which is subsequently developed for the whole of the A300 series of Airbus aircraft.

Every aspect of the aircraft was very modern.

First aircraft with the braking system that it had.

First aircraft with one of the only aircraft in civil aviation

with an aircraft that shortened the undercarriage before it was retracted.

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