So in all, it was a rather pleasant day's outing - and it was only a 20-something minute train journey south from Wimbledon, so it wasn't very far for us to travel but was outside London nonetheless, being in Surrey. I know I didn't research properly what there was to see and do at Brooklands aside from the Concorde, so was pleasantly surprised at what we encountered - I don't think I fully explained to Sasha what to expect from the Concorde side of things, but she was happy enough to come along on the trip and remarked as soon as we hopped off Concorde "I want to fly on one now!", fully aware that Concorde no longer graces the skies. In fact, what we experienced is likely to be the closest we'll ever get to flying in a Concorde - there are people around who seem intent on trying to get an Air France example back in the air (British Airways, who retain ownership of their Concorde's, refuse to entertain the idea) but we shall see if that ever happens. Mind you, as much as I would have liked to have flown in one for real, I doubt I could have afforded a ticket aboard one in a regular flight - the one-way price between London and New York appears to have been in the realm of £4500 as of 2003 - apparently that's £6,600 in today's money, or let me put that another way - $13,200. Mind you, a quick search says that to fly First Class on a British Airways Jumbo Jet the same distance is a little over £7,000, and £5,300 for Business - £7,000 for a 7.5hr flight, vs £6,600 for a 3 hour flight. Every so often there were cheaper charter flights where you didn't actually go anywhere, but got to fly in Concorde and it would take you up to Mach 2 before returning you back to the airport where you started - they might have been in a closer realm of possibility but still would have been very pricey. For an aircraft that only had 20 examples built, and even then 4 of them were prototypes, it sure made an impact worldwide and was never bettered by anything else. It was a technological marvel - it still is, it pioneered concepts which have since become commonplace in regular modern-day passenger planes, and pioneered things no other plane has needed since because no passenger plane has ever gone as fast to need to build on that technology. Although Concorde never turned a profit for Air France, it certainly did for British Airways and when you look at the economics of the aircraft, you can't help but think there's credence to the suggestion that the pin was pulled on Concorde because Airbus didn't want to support the maintenance on what in essence is an "orphan" aircraft type, and British Airways realised it was more profitable to shove Concorde's clientèle onto existing plane services rather than upkeep a special aircraft for them (with Air France happy to finally drop the aircraft without losing face). Either way, to have been over here in the UK and to have seen Concorde either flying in the skies en route to Heathrow each day or seeing it while waiting for another flight at Heathrow, would have been quite something...
My interests are often wide and varied, but can often be transport related. Sometimes these interests combine a tad, and lead to outings such as the one last Saturday where Sasha and I took a half day trip out into Surrey to the Brooklands Museum. What's the Brookland's Museum? well, a Museum obviously - but a museum of what? A number of things as it turns out - Brooklands was once a famous Motor Racing circuit, with a large banked track made of concrete tiles. Many famous early racing cars raced here, but being a hub of motoring technology and innovation the big grounds in the centre of the circuit meant that the burgeoning British Aviation scene had its roots there as well. So in the first decades of the 20th Century, race cars would zoom around at high speeds around the race track while flimsy bi-planes would slowly lumber into the air. Does that sound a bit familiar? It might do if you've ever watched "Those Magnificent Men and their Flying Machines", as the main airfield in that movie is based on Brooklands. That was something which piqued my interest to visit, but there was something else - Brooklands had a Concorde. I've seen Concordes before, even been in one. But that was an Air France example, and perhaps not surprisingly there's a few of the British Airways Concordes floating around the UK. What particularly drew my interest was the Concorde at Brooklands wasn't just merely displayed, it was part of an experience - you could pay an extra £5 and go inside it, and be taken for a simulated "flight". The flight experience is actually rather well done - you are asked to assemble by a British Airways branded bus, and our "stewardess" met us and asked to see our tickets for the 2.55pm "Flight to New York". Once on the bus, the stewardess gave us a brief history of Brooklands, and also Concorde - I didn't realise it before we came but Brooklands had been home to Vickers Armstrong Aircraft, which became a part of British Aerospace and who co-built the Concorde with the French Aerospatiale. As a consequence, some substantial parts of every Concorde were built at Brooklands. We were then taken on a quick tour underneath the Concorde, where our stewardess explained some of the special features of Concorde's design before it was time to board the plane through the rear door. By the way, although she never said as much I had a strong suspicion from the way she spoke about Concorde (and kept referring to the aircraft as "she") that our stewardess had actually been such aboard Concorde when it was flying. Unless you were crew or a cargo handler, you would never have boarded Concorde through the rear door but as part of the experience, you entered the rear of Concorde into the cabin area which had been turned into a museum gallery of sorts about the Concorde fleet in general, and the specific Concorde plane we were in. Part of the inner wall paneling had been removed showing the metal wall of the aircraft - surprisingly thin, but then most planes are probably like that! The Concorde we were in, G-BBDG or "Delta Golf" was one of the first production Concorde planes (following the Prototypes) and proved Concorde was airworthy and safe to authorities before being relegated to a standby role and eventually a source of spare parts for the BA Concorde fleet. There were models of what Concorde would have looked like in other airline's colours had the 1970's fuel crisis and concerns over the environmental impact of Sonic Booms not scuppered those sales - had other airlines still bought Concorde, Delta Golf would have likely ended up flying for someone like Pan Am. One little tidbit of information which we found funny was that having agreed to build the aircraft as a joint venture and agreed upon the name, it took the British and the French 5 years to agree on whether to use the UK or French spelling of Concord/Concorde, before the British finally ceded to the French spelling. Somewhat ironic, considering Concord/Concorde literally means "agreement"! After a video played about Concorde and its history, we were then led through to the forward part of the cabin where the cabin interior had been recreated using the early 90's style grey seating (the British Concordes had 3 types of seat during its lifetime - an as-built orangy-coloured fabric seat, a grey fabric/leather seat, and lastly a black leather seat fitted around 2000), authentic to the last detail apart from an LCD screen placed above the forward aisle door. We sat down, a video came on and proceeded to pretend that we were actually passengers on Concorde for real. Added to this was realistic sounds of the jet engines, and also vibrations where we were sitting - it felt every bit like we were taxiing to the runway, then speeding along the runway before finally the vibrations stopped but the sounds continued as if we were in the air. In-wall displays at the front of the compartment ticked over as they had in everyday service, pretending to show our height above sea level and how fast we were going - proceeding through the Sound Barrier at Mach 1 (you never hear the boom on the plane, only on the ground) and then up to full speed of Mach 2.02. The only thing that was missing was the champagne and in-flight service! Eventually it was time for us to exit via the front, getting a look into the cockpit in the process. The whole experience was extremely well done. There was more to Brooklands than just the Concorde however, and more than I realised. Since Brooklands was home to Vickers, there were other examples of passenger aircraft produced by the company on display - including a Vickers Viscount, a Vickers Vanguard (in its cargo-era configuration) and two of the large VC10 passenger jets - one which had been the private plane of the Sultan of Oman (complete with gold-covered plush fabrics, even on the toilet seat!) and another fuselage-only which had been a British Airways plane and housed a mini-museum to the type, similar in respect to what we'd just seen aboard Concorde. Although once rather common, British built passenger aircraft are almost non-existent in service now - the one exception is the BAe 146/Avro RJ, the kind of plane Ansett NZ used to fly and even then they are becoming less common. There was also a building which housed an environmental chamber to test the hardiness of aircraft components and other items, named after the engineer and inventor Barnes Wallis who worked for Vickers - and there were also examples of the bombs Barnes Wallis developed during World War 2, including the infamous "Bouncing Bomb" used against Dam's in Europe. Of course, Brooklands started life as a racing car circuit, and so there is a large motor racing element to the museum complex - part of the racing track is preserved (but not restored), and many of the original buildings associated with the motoring side of things remain and house various racing cars, mostly old but some new. In one of these buildings was one of the cars from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the movie (there were 6 in total) - in the movie it was the motorcar that became wrecked and caught fire in the ditch during a race. The real life "Chitty Bang Bang" cars of Count Zborowski (from which the movie and the cars got their inspiration) raced at Brooklands, winning a number of trophies over the years. As an aside, the main car used in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang now belongs to Sir Peter Jackson and is in New Zealand. Also at the site is the London Bus Museum, but we didn't go there. One question I had, which I couldn't find the answer to at Brooklands is why did the motor racing circuit, which clearly seemed to be the epitome of the British motor racing world get abandoned? The answer as it turns out was rather simple - during World War 1, the Brooklands site was given over to wartime aircraft production but after the war the track was refurbished and normal racing resumed. The same thing happened during World War 2, except that in order to deal with the larger planes being produced, parts of the track had to be demolished and after the war there was no appetite to fix the track back up. The site became a huge Aviation centre until the decline of the British Aviation industry in the 1980's and later large tracts of the site were sold off. Its not possible to restore the track as a complete circuit, so the Brooklands Racing Circuit will never return - but the museum is quite a neat place to visit.
So in all, it was a rather pleasant day's outing - and it was only a 20-something minute train journey south from Wimbledon, so it wasn't very far for us to travel but was outside London nonetheless, being in Surrey. I know I didn't research properly what there was to see and do at Brooklands aside from the Concorde, so was pleasantly surprised at what we encountered - I don't think I fully explained to Sasha what to expect from the Concorde side of things, but she was happy enough to come along on the trip and remarked as soon as we hopped off Concorde "I want to fly on one now!", fully aware that Concorde no longer graces the skies. In fact, what we experienced is likely to be the closest we'll ever get to flying in a Concorde - there are people around who seem intent on trying to get an Air France example back in the air (British Airways, who retain ownership of their Concorde's, refuse to entertain the idea) but we shall see if that ever happens. Mind you, as much as I would have liked to have flown in one for real, I doubt I could have afforded a ticket aboard one in a regular flight - the one-way price between London and New York appears to have been in the realm of £4500 as of 2003 - apparently that's £6,600 in today's money, or let me put that another way - $13,200. Mind you, a quick search says that to fly First Class on a British Airways Jumbo Jet the same distance is a little over £7,000, and £5,300 for Business - £7,000 for a 7.5hr flight, vs £6,600 for a 3 hour flight. Every so often there were cheaper charter flights where you didn't actually go anywhere, but got to fly in Concorde and it would take you up to Mach 2 before returning you back to the airport where you started - they might have been in a closer realm of possibility but still would have been very pricey. For an aircraft that only had 20 examples built, and even then 4 of them were prototypes, it sure made an impact worldwide and was never bettered by anything else. It was a technological marvel - it still is, it pioneered concepts which have since become commonplace in regular modern-day passenger planes, and pioneered things no other plane has needed since because no passenger plane has ever gone as fast to need to build on that technology. Although Concorde never turned a profit for Air France, it certainly did for British Airways and when you look at the economics of the aircraft, you can't help but think there's credence to the suggestion that the pin was pulled on Concorde because Airbus didn't want to support the maintenance on what in essence is an "orphan" aircraft type, and British Airways realised it was more profitable to shove Concorde's clientèle onto existing plane services rather than upkeep a special aircraft for them (with Air France happy to finally drop the aircraft without losing face). Either way, to have been over here in the UK and to have seen Concorde either flying in the skies en route to Heathrow each day or seeing it while waiting for another flight at Heathrow, would have been quite something...
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August 2019
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