When I was a kid, my grandmother used to take me to the airport to watch planes and to airshows. A consequence of this was that I got pretty good at identifying aircraft. This was before September 11th, 2001, so airports were much more accessible than they are today. It’s funny, I spent a lot of time in airports, but I never actually rode in a plane of any kind until I’d graduated high school. Anyway, of all the planes that I’d seen, the one that I dreamed of was Concorde.

Unfortunately, it seems seeing the Concorde at the Udvar-Hazy Center is the closest I will come to experiencing the grace and beauty of supersonic travel. The other day, I stumbled upon a these clips from the BBC show Holiday Air which aired in 1989. The show was shot in the cockpit of Concorde and shows the incredible teamwork during a take off from Heathrow and a landing in Washington DC. One thing that hadn’t ever occurred to me is how difficult it is to taxi an aircraft when you are sitting 35 feet in front of the nose wheel. One thing that did occur to me is, sad as this is, that an airline pilot actually hand flying an approach like that is probably very rare today.

Something else that I imagine is also pretty rare–rolling Concorde. For more information, see the video of Brian Walpole discussing the flying characteristics of Concorde below.