1969. First Flight of The Concorde

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On Sunday March 2nd, 1969, André Turcat, Jacques Guignard, Michel Rétif and Henri Perrier boarded Concorde 001 waiting on the runway at Toulouse-Blagnac airport. Previous attempts had been cancelled due to adverse weather conditions: fog and a southern high wind (known locally as the “vent d’autan”). But on that Sunday, everything became possible, emotions were high, this was the result of more than ten years of negotiations, industrial drawings, mock-ups, production of unique parts, and ground tests. More specifically, the journalists, commenting on the event live, were talking about an initial flight planned 2,282 days ago. Well aware of all these issues, André Turcat, the chief test pilot, joked that he was sitting at the helm of a project that had already cost more than eleven billion francs, and one hundred and seventy tons of brainpower. The ultimate goal conceptualized the dream of putting New York at three and a half hours from Paris, thereby landing before departure time. The Paris-New York flight could take off each morning at 11:15 a.m. and land at 8:41 a.m. in New York (local time), just as offices were opening, after only 3:26 hours of flight time, including 2:54 hours at supersonic speed. To do this Mach 2 had to be reached, i.e. over 2000 km/h, which literally amounted to putting the passengers in the bullet of a gun.