Concorde is an instant hit with celebrities. Mick Jagger, Sting, and Princess Diana are all frequent flyers – for the fast travel and the high-class atmosphere. Concorde itself becomes a pop star, with its own (horrible) feature film. But on the ground, politics and protests force it to alter its course.
I never flew on Concorde in its glitzy and glamorous heyday of the eighties and nineties.
But based on what I've learned for the series, I have a pretty good idea of what it was like.
Oh, this is well nice.
So everyone's sipping champagne, and it's served with these really delicious canapes.
Oh, good lord.
They're serving the food on rural Dalton, China.
I have a choice between prime grilled fillet of Angus beef or this amazing looking lobster dish.
And the wine, it's all grand cru, super high end stuff.
Now, looking around, there's a fashion model over there.
There's a couple of british lords and some footballers.
Oh God, there's Joan Collins, and they're sting.
I'm gonna go sit next to him.
Here's the crazy thing.
We left Heathrow at 1030 this morning.
Morning.
And we're gonna arrive in New York at 09:30 a.m.
so not only are we flying at twice the speed of sound, we're going back in time, rising.
It's always exciting flying supersonic, and it's always exciting to get to New York before you've left.
On this episode of making an impossible airplane, the untold story of Concorde, the plane itself becomes a mainstream celebrity, the sexiest airplane in the sky.
But behind the scenes, engineers work frantically to iterate and improve the plane to keep it running safely under intense flying conditions.