On This Day: Concorde takes off on its maiden flight

MARCH 2, 1969: The first Concorde prototype made its historic maiden flight on this day in 1969.

The world’s first supersonic passenger jet, piloted by Andre Turcat, departed from and returned to the Aerospatiale factory in Toulouse.

British Pathé shows Concorde 001 drooping its iconic nose to make bird-like takeoff and then soaring high into the sky before landing in an equally graceful manner.

Five weeks later, the British-built version of the Anglo-French design made its test flight from a factory in Filton, Bristol to nearby RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire.

Concorde 002, which was manufactured by the British Aircraft Corporation in a joint deal with the French government, was flown by English pilot Brian Trubshaw.

Both prototypes were publicly displayed for the first time at the June 1969 Paris Air Show before Concorde 001 became the first passenger jet to break the sound barrier.

Yet, despite the tremendous technological advance they represented by cutting transatlantic flight times in half, Concorde initially struggled to sell.

The £23million planes – worth £140million today - were only bought by Britain and France’s national carriers and did not make their first commercial flights until 1976.

Other airliners feared they would be unable to turn a profit with such an expensive jet that could only hold 100 passengers while the global economy was struggling.

Its routes were also restricted to over the Atlantic because countries refused to allow Concorde to cross their land at supersonic speed because of the sonic boom noise.

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It also had a supersonic rival in the form of Soviet Tupolev Tu-144, which became the first passenger plane to fly at twice the speed of sound – or 1,800mph - in 1970.

The jet, which was dubbed Concordski, was developed using stolen plans for the Anglo-French Concorde, hence the nickname.

Its reputation, as well as Concorde’s, was marred by a Tu-144 crash at the 1973 Paris Air Show, when all six crew and eight people in the village of Goussainville died.

Concordski commercial service was ended after just 55 flights when a supposedly improved version, the Tu-144D, crashed in a test flight in May 1978.

And Western airliners, fearing similar safety problems with the Concorde, were further put off buying them.

The 1970 arrival of the popular Boeing 747, which carry a record 490 passengers and helped drive down fares massively, also did not help Concorde’s sales pitch.

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Conversely, the American makers feared their Jumbo Jet would soon become obsolete thanks to supersonic flight.

Yet Boeing, which built the 747 with a hump so it could easily be converted into a cargo plane, had only expected to sell 400 – but by 2014 had sold 1,482.

Nevertheless, Concorde, which sold only 14, eventually made money for its operators with regular flights from Paris and London to New York in under three hours.

Other routes were scrapped as British Airways and Air France figured out that this journey was the only way to make money from top businessmen and the super-rich.

Yet its fate, like the Tu-144’s, was sealed by fears over safety following its only crash in 2000, when 109 people died after take-off at Charles de Gaulle airport.

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Concorde, whose name reflects agreement between Britain and France, was eventually retired in 2003 amid a massive public fairwell.

There are no current plans to reintroduce supersonic flight.