Concorde's Test Flight Aborted

TV reporter Kay Avila reports from RAF St Mawgan where Concorde 202 Delta Golf has been forced to make an unscheduled landing after take-off from Filton Airport near Bristol due to heavy fog over the Bristol Channel. Concorde's test pilot Captain Brian Trubshaw and co-pilot Peter Baker discuss this second model of Concorde and its test flight. The British-French turbojet-powered supersonic passenger jet airliner is one of the most recognisable planes in the world.

The jet has a speed of one thousand three hundred and fifty miles an hour and cut transatlantic long haul flights to New York to just three and a half hours instead of seven or eight. A committee set up by Arnold Hall and Morien Morgan was to study the possibility of supersonic flight in the 1950s and the first Concorde entered into service in 1976. Twenty Concorde aircraft were built but because of spiralling costs and a fatal accident in Paris in 2000 in which one hundred passengers, nine crew and four hotel guests were killed when a tyre exploded and the aircraft crashed into a hotel, the planes were retired in 2003. British Airways own seven Concordes and Air France have five.