3/02/1969: Concorde Takes to the Skies

DALLAS - Today,  in 1969, the Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde, the Anglo-French turbojet-powered supersonic passenger airliner icon, first flew.

Taking advantage of a passable meteorological situation, 52 years ago, a strange-looking, futuristic aircraft lined up for take-off at the end of a particular runway at Toulouse-Blagnac Airport (TLS).

The Flight

We are taken back to March 2, 1969, to relive the maiden flight of the Concorde, the Franco-British aircraft created by Sud-Aviation and British Aircraft Corporation. It was the first-ever supersonic civil aircraft designed to carry passengers on long-haul flights. The aircraft was "prototype 001", registered as F-WTSS, out of the Sud-Aviation production line on December 11, 1967.

The now-famous Capt. André Turcat, copilot Jacque Guignard, engineer Henry Perrier, and flight engineer Michel Retif. are seated at the controls in the cockpit of F-WTSS. 

This first flight, which lasted 27 minutes, was carried out in the skies of the Garonne valley. André Turcat commented on this first flight by saying, "This is not an achievement but just the beginning of our work."

Retiring an Icon

However, as the story goes, the Concorde lived an aeronautically short life. The retirement of the Concorde was ultimately motivated, apart from concerns over its noise pollution, by the general decline in the commercial aviation industry following the September 11 attacks in 2001, as well as the end of Airbus' maintenance support for the aircraft.

The first commercial flight occurred on January 22, 1976, on the Paris-Orly (ORY)-Rio de Janeiro (GIG) leg. The type's last flight was on October 24, 2003, out of London Heathrow (LHR) to New York's JFK. Today, we celebrate the first flight of this feat of aviation imagination and ingenuity.

Featured image: Concorde prototype 001 (F-WTSS). This photograph is part of the Fonds André Cros, preserved by the city archives of Toulouse and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license by the deliberation n°27.3 of June 23rd, 2017 of the Town Council of the City of Toulouse.

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