The record shows a precise date for the start of the supersonic airliner era: 2 March 1969. Just three weeks after Boeing’s 747 prototype, the City of Everett, flew for the first time at Seattle, the Anglo-French Concorde prototype, Aircraft 001, registration F-WTSS, took off from runway 33 at Toulouse-Blagnac in France for a maiden flight the BBC called “faultless” and that lasted 27 minutes.
Andre Turcat flew the prototype, with Henri Perrier, Michel Retif and Jacques Guinard alongside on the flight deck. The test reached 10,000ft (3,000m), though the speed stayed below 300mph (480kph); the production aircraft was meant to cruise at 1,300mph (2,080kph). Throughout the 27 minutes the “droop nose” and the landing gear stayed down. Strong winds had put the flight in doubt for much of the day, and two earlier attempts had been abandoned to poor weather. When the wheels lifted, the reporters and cameramen watching broke into spontaneous applause, largely drowned out by the roar of the four Olympus 593 engines built by Rolls-Royce’s Bristol division together with France’s Snecma. The aircraft came back down in under half an hour, slowed by a braking parachute and reverse thrust, and Turcat came up the steps giving a thumbs up with each hand.
On his return to the airport, Turcat kept his verdict short: “Finally the big bird flies, and I can say now that it flies pretty well.” Brian Trubshaw, the first British test pilot on the program, was direct in reply: “I was terribly impressed by the way the whole flight was conducted. It was most professional and I would like to congratulate Andre on the way he handled this performance.”
The machine at the center of it was an outlier that still has no successor. Concorde 001 ran 51.80 meters from nose to tail, with a swept delta wing spanning 23.80 meters (78 feet, 1 inch), and the type remains the only commercial airliner to cruise supersonic, cleared for Mach 2.04 at up to 60,000 feet (18.288 meters) with a range of 3,900 nautical miles. Power came from four Rolls-Royce/SNECMA Olympus 593 turbojets with afterburners, each rated at 37,080 pounds of thrust for takeoff on a five-minute limit, the afterburners providing about 20% of total thrust at liftoff. The program built two prototypes, two pre-production aircraft and sixteen production airliners.
The pilot’s own record runs wider than one morning. Turcat served in the Free French Air Force during World War II, directed the French test pilot school EPNER in the early 1950s, and flew the Nord 1500 Griffon to Mach 2.19, earning the Harmon Trophy for 1958 at the hands of Richard M. Nixon. He shared the 1970 Harmon Trophy with Trubshaw for the Concorde flight test program, retired from Aerospatiale on 31 March 1976 after 740 flight hours in Concorde, and never flew an airplane again. He later served as deputy mayor of Toulouse and in the European Parliament, and died at home in Aix-en-Provence on 3 January 2016, aged 94.
The strategic context was less triumphant than the flight. According to cabinet papers released under Britain’s 30 year rule, officials warned of a disaster for the UK, with costs of 900m, even as the British government had already sunk 155m into the project. Concorde’s first supersonic flight came on 1 October 1969, Trubshaw flew the British-built prototype on a 22 minute hop from Filton to RAF Fairford on 9 April that year, and the first commercial services opened on 21 January 1976, British Airways flying London Heathrow to Bahrain and Air France Paris to Rio. The economics never closed: entering service as the fuel crisis peaked, burning heavily and limited by small tanks, it could not reach the trans-Pacific market. The crash outside Paris on 25 July 2000, which killed 113 people, ended the argument; after 17m spent on safety improvements the aircraft flew again from November 2001, and retirement was announced by British Airways and Air France in April 2003. The final commercial flight came on 23 October 2003.
Concorde 001 itself flew 397 flights in testing, 812 hours 19 minutes in the air, with 254 hours 49 minutes of that beyond the sound barrier, and it is displayed today at the Musee de l’Air et de l’Espace at Le Bourget outside Paris. The record shows both halves of the story: an airliner that did what no other has done since, and a balance sheet that grounded it.
