The Flight of the Concorde

HISTORY This Week

The HISTORY® Channel

History, Education, Society & Culture

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

March 2, 1969. French pilot André Turcat takes to the skies above Toulouse-Blagnac airport. He’s flying an odd-looking plane: long and slender with triangular wings and a bent-down nose like a bird of prey. It’s called the Concorde – a jet designed to move supersonic flight from military to civilian use. If it works, paying passengers will be able to cross continents and oceans at fantastic speeds while sipping glasses of champagne. The crowd below watches, mesmerized, as Turcat puts the plane through its paces. Concorde aces the test and now, as they say, the sky’s the limit. How did this space age technology, born of the Cold War, usher in one of the most glamorous eras of commercial flight? And what caused it to come to an end?

Special thanks to our guest, Mike Bannister, author of Concorde: The Thrilling Account of History’s Most Extraordinary Airliner. Thanks also to the folks at the Brooklands Museum.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The History Channel, original podcast.
0:04.8	History this week. March 2nd, 1969.
0:10.1	I'm Sally Helm.
0:13.7	A lot of people are afraid to fly, which isn't crazy.
0:18.8	Human beings aren't designed to fly.
0:22.1	We've had to create technology to get us into the air.
0:25.6	Gliders, parachutes, and of course, planes.
0:31.0	Even if you're afraid of planes, you at least have the comfort when you get on board
0:35.1	of knowing that someone has done this before.
0:38.1	The pilot has flown this same route, probably even the same plane.
0:42.1	Dozens, maybe hundreds of times.
0:44.2	The flight attendants do this all day long.
0:46.6	Being at 30,000 feet is nothing to them.
0:50.1	But there is a moment in the life of any airplane,
0:53.4	any technology, really, where someone has to try it for the first time.
1:00.7	On March 2nd, 1969, at the Toulouse Blanjac Airport in southern France,
1:06.1	André Touacah is that person.
1:08.9	He's going to fly a new plane called the Concorde.
1:13.2	It's been developed in a joint partnership between Britain and France.
1:17.3	And it's different from your typical passenger aircraft.
1:20.9	It's designed to go much faster.
1:24.9	In fact, the eventual goal is to break the speed of sound.
	...

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