A sad day for Bristol

Some pics of Concorde's last flight
Comeing back home.


First fly past -






Some WW2 action while we waited for Concorde to return from a low level fly past over Bristol

 

second fly past of Concorde before comeing in to land



landing





she then turned round along the runway and came back, giveing a bow to the crowd with her nose cone







Strangely emotional for an aeroplane

sorry for bad photo's:shame:

 

Yep I almost cried when I saw the last one at land at Manchester airport. The good news is though that it will be open for the public for the summer. Also uni students accross manchester get to work on it (though sadly not me).

 

another icon, chucked in the meatgrinder that is runaway capitalism. still it's old and a symbol so it must have it's land taken away and...oops wrong thread.

cheers


julian

 

I still can't quite believe they aren't going to keep at least one of them flying :cry: Must be just about the only model of retired plane where one still exists where there are none in flying condition.

I still hold out hope that someone will eventually come up with the money to keep one going and get Airbus to hand over the technical docs.

I just hope they don't "museumize" them to the point of no return.

Michael.

 

Nice pics Pen, thanks for that. Missed it by a day, I have to go to Filton tomorrow

 

TB, haveing to go to Filton on anyday is bad!

Micheal, i agree, hard to fathom why one isnt kept flying. A shame and injustice to aviation

 

Made it! What a nightmare. The traffic seems to be getting worse. It wasn't this bad one month ago. Can't wait until the schools and University break up.

 

yep its naff round here
I have a 2 mile bike ride from home to work, work being slap between MOD and UWE
Takes anything up to 15minutes on a bike, way to long

 

Forget the sentiments

Chaps

I spent 8 years working for the MOD in the Technical Cost dept and had access to the cost of building and running Concorde.

How it ever got built is a mystery. The losses are phenomenal and that is after taking sales on other aircraft generated by concordes prestiege into account.

The saudis bought a lot of fighter planes on the strength of Concorde but even so, the losses amount to a national mortgage.
Our grandchildren will still be paying for the bloody thing.

Just think how many more hospitals and roads we could have built with the money.

It was the ultimate white elephant.

Regards

Mick

 

we may need more hospitals, deffinately not more roads!

 

Where does all this sentiment come from? I honestly never understood it. I mean, it's a fast plane, sure, and it is rather gorgeous... But it's incredibly wasteful, noisy, and pollutes like a mutha. It's also old, which for an aeroplane is surely a bad thing, in terms of safety, reliability, maintenance costs, etc...?

I would say the best thing that could be said about it is that it actually got the Brits and the French working together for once!

Dunc

 

pennance,
no we don;t need more roads we just need to turn all those bus lanes and cycle paths back into proper roads .

as for concorde it advanced the state of the art which is always a good thing. i presume it's like the space programme where certain innovations, techniques and procedures that are now taken for granted were created especially to further the project.

there does seem to be a slightly schitzophrenic attitude towards progress these days. on one hand we want houses stuffed with technology and mobile phones irradiating our genitals. but we are not willing to put up with the supporting technology or incovienience when the work necessary to install it holds us up or intrudes into our lives. are we a civilisation of NIMBY's?

cheers


julian

 

yep, proper roads, or at least a bus system that works