If you look at what Concord did, it was a way of being able to leave London at 7 o'clock in the evening,

arrive in New York at 10 to 6, so after you'd basically be travelling through time to arrive in

New York before the flight had actually left London in local time, adjusting for the time difference.

Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Friday the 25th of July.

That was the voice of the senior aviation figure Jonathan Hinkle's recalling Concord.

The reason we're talking about this today is that it is the 25th anniversary of the first and only crash of the supersonic jet. You perhaps will recall

that on the 25th of July in the year 2000, an Air France chartered Concord departing for New York

tragically crashed shortly after takeoff from Paris-Charz de Gaulle Airport.

109 people on board and four on the ground died in that tragedy.

I've been talking to Jonathan about that terrible day and more widely about the prospects for

supersonic travel.

I was working for an airline in Gatwick at the time and wandered into our airline operations room in the afternoon of that day,

just to routinely see how things were going on for the day to be told by our ops team that

they'd been a terrible accident involving Concord outside Paris.

And it was not totally clear at that point just how awful the events had been. Clearly it was traumatic,

tragic and a real shock to the system. I had flown my one and only trip on Concord myself with the British Airways the year before,

which was a memory that I'll always keep very fondly and the fact that another trip had ended in tragedy,

such a short time later, outside Paris was a shock to everybody in the airline industry,

but also one that I felt keenly myself.

I can remember it very clearly.

The aircraft was then grounded for about 16 months, while modifications were made to stop

the possibility of a repeat of such a tragedy.

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