Visiting The Concorde: Grounded, But Not Forgotten

By Timothy E. Black

Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) – A year has passed since the last Concorde flight, and after 27 years of crossing the At-lantic at supersonic speeds, most of the sleek white jetliners were retired to museums. Of the nine planes flying at the end of service, three are now on display in the United States, at the Mu-seum of Flight in Seattle, the Intrepid Air-Sea-Space Museum in New York and the Uvdar-Hazy Center near Wash-ington, D.C.

My interest in Concordes began long before they became museum pieces. When British Airways and Air France announced they were ending Concorde service last year, I was fortunate enough to purchase one of a thousand tickets offered by British Airways at half the usual $6,000 one-way fare. The flight from London to New York was one I had dreamed of ever since I stood at the edge of the runway to photograph a Concorde landing in Columbus, Ohio, in 1986.

On the day I visited, a constant stream of people waited in the rain to walk through the forward section of the cabin. The leather seats have been fitted with protective Plexiglas covers. I got to see my seat, 5D, and also looked around the rest of the interior, which I hadn’t really checked out during the flight.

The museum, which opened in its present location in 1983, features about 60 modern and historical aircraft, plus exhibits on the U.S. space program and a restoration of the original Boeing factory. A new wing featuring 28 World War I and World War II aircraft opened in June.

In June, the Concorde was moved across the street from the main museum to join the first Boeing 747 prototype and the original Boeing 707 Air Force One at an outdoor air park. Event-ually, Concorde and the other large jetliners in the collection will be housed in a commercial aircraft wing.

A few weeks after the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Cen-ter opened at Dulles International Air-port on Dec. 15, 2003, I took a one-day trip to visit the Concorde there. For a photographer, nothing quite matches the view from the walkways that stretch across and above the exhibition floor, as high as 44 feet above ground level.

Air France F-BVFA was the first Concorde acquired by a U.S. museum, thanks to an agreement with the Smith-sonian dating back to 1989. The longest and heaviest airplane at the museum, it’s been angled into the huge main hangar at Udvar-Hazy, sharing the spot-light with the Enola Gay, Space Shut-tle Enterprise, and an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.

Like almost every plane at the museum, the Concorde looks ready to roll out onto the runway for takeoff. A spiral walkway and staircase rises near the nose of the Concorde, so it’s easy to take pictures from ground level to nearly straight overhead, though an extreme wide-angle lens is necessary to include the entire plane in one picture. It isn’t possible to see the interior in person, but the museum’s Web site has a link to an interactive 360-degree view of its cockpit.

British Airways Concorde G-BOAD, which holds the trans-Atlantic commercial speed record for a New York-London flight in two hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds, arrived at the Intrepid with much fanfare on Nov. 25, 2003.

The plane traveled on a barge from Kennedy International Airport _ where Concordes were once banned from landing, due to concerns about engine noise and sonic booms _ up the Hudson River to Pier 86, pursued all the way by TV news helicopters.

Tours of the plane’s interior began in June after the construction of walkways and the installation of protective Plexiglas covers like the ones in Seattle. Only 1,500 boarding passes are issued each day, with a dozen people at a time permitted to walk through the narrow passenger cabin forward to the slightly claustrophobic cockpit. Waiting until the end of the time marked on the pass allowed a more leisurely look.