I was lucky enough .... and a spoilt-enough brat .... to travel on Concorde many times. My Father used to be away from home 8-10 months a year, and the best way to spend time with him was for me to travel with him. (I'll bet Mother praised Hallelujah even time our flights took off. )

I once was turned away at the "R" check-in line in LHR when I was traveling by myself, since I was a 16 year-old in jeans and a wrinkled button-down with longish curly hair. Even then I was pushy enough to look at the agent and ask her "This IS the line for Concorde, right?"

My fondest memory was in Oct 1994. It was the only time in his life that my Father and I took a vacation together....just the two of us, without his staff/security or family along. Earlier that year I had been "widowed" and a few weeks later I had a terrible car accident. I was 33 years old, and my Father had been 33 when he immigrated to the States. So, for my birthday that year, we went to London, flew R both ways, and spent time together like never before and never since.

My official claim to fame is that we were on board one time with Princess Margaret IAD-LHR. I got to use the toilet after her.....and the toilet seat was still warm!

Rather than go into details here, I'll link you to my Concorde trip report. I wish she were still flying. I visited G-BOAF in Filton on Saturday and while they do a nice job, it's sad to see her grounded when she could have kept going for so much longer.

Regarding the space issue�the seats are certainly small. I never felt cramped, though. Bear in mind, also, that it was a three-and-a-half hour flight, often less, and therefore all the space that the airlines are putting in their premium cabins wasn't needed (the whole point of all the "luxury" stuff these days is to help conceal that you're stuck in this slow-moving metal tube with more and more people for longer and longer amounts of time).

Anyway, here's the link to the trip report I wrote in September 2003. This trip was the first time I had flown across the Atlantic.

Funny thing is that there's a sign in Filton that says that "THE CONCORDE" was made there.

I don't know why Americans say this. On the other hand, it makes it sound even more exclusive. Americans think of Concorde as a luxury airliner and don't seem to understand the supersonic aspect.

But plenty of airlines do offer premium, First or Business Class on short-haul. Where would you rather sit for 3 and a half hours: 4 abreast in a Concorde, or 3 abreast on an Air Canada CRJ in Executive Class?

It's CONCORDE, baby - there's no thought to answer your question

Apart from fortunately flying five trans-atlantic services with Concorde (in the days when several of my flights had 35 passengers on board!), I also managed one of the shortest flights ever - Farnborough to Heathrow!

At the end of a long day at the Farnborough Airshow, British Airways kindly invited some of their corporate customers a "lift" back to Heathrow on Concorde. What a chic way to depart an airshow! The flight took about 35 minutes, as we went down towards the South Coast, turned back towards Dover and came in from the East, right across London to touch down on runway 27L. It was lots of fun.

My best day was a day-trip to JFK to sign a contract and shake a few hands. Up early, on the 10:00 a.m flight, into JFK where BA gave us a meeting room, signed the agreement, spent a very quick 30 minutes with my parents who had come in from the shires to say hello, jumped on the afternoon flight back and landed around 10:00p.m., having been to New York and back in a day. I still have a copy of my ticket (10 March 1994) with a total cost including tax of �5044.30 GBP!

I wish she were still flying...I miss watching her soar over London - it was always such a great sight!

But Concorde was the equivalent of a long-haul flight. You're not making a fair comparison. Three or four hours on a CRJ from YVR to SLC is not even remotely comparable to three hours twenty minutes on Concorde from LHR to JFK.

That's also why people aren't making a fair comparison when they compare a Concorde seat to VS's Upper Class, or BA's Club World or FIRST. There's no need for those fancy fold-flat beds on Concorde when it's such a short (time-wise) flight. As I have said, I think people who have not flown on Concorde tend not to appreciate how big a deal the SUPERSONIC part of it is. Even saying "Mach 2" doesn't help. If you show them a machmeter photo where the ground speed display reads over 1,000 mph, that seems to help a bit more.


EDIT: BTW, chorned, I am sure you have seen my same username on the SST forum often enough. I'm the same person. Doesn't that suggest to you what my answer to your query would be??!!!!!

Why not? You do cover longer distance, yes...

Would you rather fly from Washington to Dallas on Concorde or 727?

Of course, then there are the people who spent much longer than four hours on a Concorde, with just a brief stretch of legs (or do you stay onboard during tanking?) somewhere remote like Santa Maria, Dakar or Bahrein. London-Singapore is 9 hours in total. Which do you prefer - 9 hours in a 4 abreast Concorde, or 13...14 hours in a 4 abreast B777-300ER First Class?
True, Kingfisher First or United p. s. are not quite flat beds. But many shorthaul passengers do feel the need for more elbowroom than what is offered in the Coach, even on short hops.

Is it 747? Is it 787? I look forward to flying on Dreamliner??

Because any subsonic will generally take more or less the same amount of time to cover that distance, regardless of the size or the seating arrangement. Sure, there are differences, but not enough to make it an issue. I've flown the American Eagle shuttle between DCA and LGA on an Embraer (1-2 arrangement) and it takes the same amount of time as the US Air shuttle with the 3-3 arrangement. (I prefer to take neither and to use the Acela so as to eliminate the need to get from the airport into Midtown, but on weekends in particular the Acela schedule doesn't always work.) Concorde, on the other hand, took me from LHR to JFK (3,458 miles) in three hours 21 minutes, and no other aircraft available to me could have done that. There's the difference. If I really, truly care about the seating on a short-haul flight, I can usually (not always, but usually) find a variety of options that take about the same amount of time. (The DCA to MLB route can only be done nonstop on a Delta CRJ, for example, whereas DCA to BOS or EWR has several options ranging from Embraers on up.) But there was only one way to make that supersonic trip.

Just for the sake of comparison, I flew in Upper Class on VS from LHR to IAD this past Sunday. The seat was very comfortable and the flight took 7 hours 10 minutes, roughly. We left the ground at LHR at around 18:00 and landed at IAD at around 20:10 or so; I got home at around 21:30 after clearing immigration and retrieving my car. Had that been Concorde, the flight would have landed at around 17:00 (fully three hours 10 minutes earlier local time) and I would have been home substantially earlier. You can pooh-pooh the time issue all you want, but some of us would rather have that benefit.

Washington to Dallas doesn't realize the same benefit because Concorde had to fly subsonically on that route. That's the major weakness of SST designs to date. Nobody has ever contended that Concorde, or any other SST, should replace ALL subsonic routes. There are places where it would make absolutely no sense, such as that DCA to LGA shuttle route (too short a flight for it to make a difference)....or consider the Loganair flight from Westray to Papa Westray. You appear to be making the assumption that I'm saying that Concorde is always better, and that wasn't the point at all. As for that route from LHR to Singapore, I'd still rather take Concorde and save the five hours. Time is valuable.

????????

I don't understand this post.

Why no articles in front of "Concorde" but in front of "787" or "Dreamliner"?

"BA owns half of Concorde." "1/20th of Concorde crashed in Paris." Are those statements gramatically correct?

I got to fly that beautiful bird thanks to Flyertalk.

Who else but us crazy folks here would have thought of, much less even heard of buying subscriptions to a magazine to get points in a hotel program to then send them to a far off airline (Qantas is far off for me) to get tickets on a different airline's Concorde?

Cost all in: US$1,320 out in F back on Concorde.

Flying her was spectacular, as everyone says, not for the comfort...for the speed! To arrive in NY "before" I left London was awesome. Taking off like a rocket wasn't too far off the top of the cool meter either.


[also goes to show how long I was a lurker before registering here! ]

The second one, no; the first one would be gramatically correct but factually incorrect.

Anyway, Brits don't say "the hospital" or "the university" either. "My grandfather fell ill and was taken to hospital." "My brother will attend university this fall." I'm not sure what the origin of the difference in British and American usage is, but it's just how it is.

The reason the second one is wrong is that "Concorde" is not a collective noun referring to all 20 aircraft. There are times when "a Concorde" or "the Concorde" can be correct. For example, one might say, "A Concorde and a Soviet Tu-144 may be seen on the roof of a museum in Sinsheim." It would be equally correct to say "Concorde and a Soviet Tu-144," but I'd probably use the "a" in the interest of parallelism in sentence structure. Anyway, in the case of the Paris crash, one (complete) Concorde crashed. It wasn't a fraction of a whole.

This has been discussed on this forum in the past; I'll let someone else find the appropriate links.

Okay, so would it be correct to say "I prefer Dreamliner." and "Dreamliner and Concorde may be seen..."?