Wish it could be Concorde every day? Hear what a leading environmental campaigner has to say
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2026
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Back by popular demand: more on supersonic flying. But Anna Hughes, director of Flight Free UK, does not believe we should return to the era of breaking the sound barrier. She recognises the achievement getting Concorde into the skies – but wants a different approach 50 years on from the first passenger flight.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Monday the 19th of January. |
| 0:10.5 | I wish it could be conquered every day. That rather sums up the reaction of a number of listeners to the series about the Supersonic Jet and its new successor, |
| 0:24.6 | possibly Boom Supersonic, that we ran during last week. And of course, all of those episodes |
| 0:31.7 | are available if you haven't heard them all. So deep, though, is the interest in the week in which British Airways |
| 0:40.4 | celebrates the 50th anniversary of the first paying passengers aboard Concord that I have decided |
| 0:48.0 | to return to the subject and get the views of one of the leading campaigners against the impact of aviation on the environment. |
| 0:58.5 | Anna Hughes, she's the director of Flight Free UK. Of course, if you are travelling on holiday within Europe, |
| 1:06.3 | taking the train or the alternatives is really easy. It's really available. If you are looking at |
| 1:11.0 | travelling across oceans, it's much more difficult. And of course, there are many reasons that we |
| 1:15.1 | might need to go to America, to New York, or wherever your business is, or people might have |
| 1:20.3 | family across overseas. And there isn't an alternative that would work. You can take the boat |
| 1:25.6 | across to America, but it's a long expensive journey. I think |
| 1:29.3 | a lot of it comes down to how we have structured our working society, because having the |
| 1:37.5 | privilege of air travel means that we can expect to be in New York the next morning for a work |
| 1:43.3 | meeting. If we hadn't had that, |
| 1:46.0 | then we would just do things a different way. We'd work out how to do a different way. And I think |
| 1:50.5 | a lot of us worked that out in the pandemic. I spoke to lots of business leaders during that time |
| 1:55.5 | who said, this actually is quite a good opportunity for us to rethink how we are doing our business because |
| 2:02.4 | we can do things virtually, for example. We can cut the number of meetings in half or the number |
| 2:07.7 | of in person meetings in half just simply by connecting online. And those kinds of business models |
| 2:13.8 | and models of working are going to be much better in terms of emissions, |
| 2:18.3 | and actually for the business as well, it's much cheaper to have a Zoom call than it is to get on a flight. |
... |
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