Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon McAulter. It's Wednesday the 21st of January.

And I'm sitting on board a delayed Ryanair flight from Leeds Bradford to Dublin. But I'm thinking about

Concord because today marks 50 years since the very

first supersonic passenger airliner took off with passengers on board. This was British

Airways from London Heathrow to Bahrain at the same time Air France took off to go to Rio by way of Dakar in West Africa.

Concord had a career lasting 27 years and since 2003 it's been impossible for anybody who isn't a military pilot to fly at supersonic speeds.

I've been hearing from Blake Scholl.

He is the founder and chief executive of Boom Supersonic, the Denver-based company that believes its overture jet will be flying people

between London and New York before the end of the decade. For my final talk with Blake,

I asked him what the passenger experience would be like. Do I just board like a normal aircraft?

Does it take off like a normal aircraft?

Do I look out the window and see things as I would do in a normal aircraft?

It's going to be remarkably uneventful, but the small difference is.

Somewhere of Concord will take off a land with a nose relatively high.

The acceleration, you'll feel it for a little bit longer as we climb out and accelerate, but

mostly it won't be very noticeable.

One thing that is different is when you fly supersonic, you fly higher, up to 60,000 feet,

almost twice what you fly on today's airplanes.

And that means when you look out the window, we're going to have some big, beautiful windows.

The sky is going to be a deeper blue, and we'll be able to figure out if the flat earthers are right.

Because if the earth is actually curved, we'll be able to tell. So that will be in store for passengers.

When you go through the sound barrier, it's not actually noticeable. If anything in the ride gets a

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