GOING SUPERSONIC !
Flying on Concorde was fast and fabulous. Now supersonic travel is coming back. Here's how it feels to go trans-Atlantic faster than a bullet from a gun.
I know it was awful of me. Unforgivable even, but I just had to do it. I was in South Beach Miami at a show biz party. Ellie Goulding was the cabaret. The venue was Gianni Versace’s old house. There may have been champagne involved. With the Florida festival swinging, from the corner of my eye I spotted Karlolina Kurkova, and she was surrounded by men.
Every male in the room wanted to speak to the noughties Czech supermodel and Victoria’s Secret Angel, but I reckoned I had a clear, streamlined advantage with my sonic boom of an opening line. “Karolina,” I said, hand outstretched. “Remember me?We met on Concorde.” She had no recollection of me course. But she did remember the flight. It was her one and only Concorde experience and no one, not even a high flying super model would ever forget their supersonic debut.
The year was 2000; a glorious pre-911, pre-crash time, hedonism in the air, money free-flowing, Kelis’s “Caught Out There” on the radio. Going to the Cannes film festival, on a privately chartered, give-me-gin-and-tonic Concorde, flying from London to Nice, via New York, just for a party and some super yacht dancing, seemed like a reasonable way to spend a May weekend.
Who else was on board? Just me and around 20 or so lingerie mannequins - Tyra Banks, Heidi Klum, Karolina Kurkova et al. Yes, Sir David Frost might have used Concorde as an arrive-before-you leave, London to NYC commuter in his 1980s transatlantic heyday (Frost was said to have travelled on Concorde on average 20 times a year for 20 years) and Phil Collins may have flown at sonic boom velocity so he could play twice in one day - at both the British and US legs of Live Aid back in 1985 (Ballsing up the cymbal-crash intro to Led Zep’s “Rock N Roll” set opener in Philly in the process). Me? I insisted on flying with supermodels only.
How fast? And how high? And what was it like? In the mid section of the aircraft, over the triangulated “delta” wings , in amongst the girls and the champagne, all soundtracked by the sonic boom of pre 9/11 noughties naughtiness? Not too shabby, I can tell you.
Some time after take off, when I’d recovered from the primeval roar of the Rolls-Royce Olympus engines and the push back from the “reheat” - Concorde flew at around 11 miles high, cruising at 1,354 miles per hour, faster than a rifle bullet and twice the speed of sound - I finally managed to avert my gaze from the long-legged, eye candy passengers that sat in every other seat of the 100-capacity, Connolly leather-upholstered, mega-thrusting Pringles cylinder, each wearing matching, pink satin ANGEL bomber jackets and toting video cameras at each other and tending to their pets. (Yes, French model Aurelie Aurélie Claudel actually brought her sausage dog on board with her, in a Gucci bag, naturally).
Discovering that the loo was too small and low ceilinged in which to successfully pee standing up I became, instead, transfixed by a view of the afterburners on the aircraft’s turbojet engines which I could see from the tiny porthole windows and the (primitive) over head screen that showed us just how fast we were going (very). There was nothing much to do except sit and wonder. So, Piper Hieseieck flute in hand, I decided that I was going to savour every single fabulous minute of the all too brief journey.
Oh, and filch everything that wasn’t screwed down. A flight on Concorde, as any fellow supersonica will tell you, brought out the kleptomaniac in even the most law abiding billionaire. I pinched Concorde branded cutlery, crockery and notepaper, slipped the antimacassar into my hand luggage and treasured the two chunky, silver Concorde luggage tags like they were gold dust. (Still have one. Someone at Stansted baggage handling filched the other one). There was no inflight entertainment - the information screen showing speed and counting down minutes ‘til landing at a dizzying rate was better than any Sandra Bullock chick flick - so I played Boggle with Ingrid Seynhaeve, instead. We cruised at Mach 2 -- around 1,350 mph, at a height of 60,000 feet - Concorde flew five miles above and 800 mph faster than the plodding subsonic 747s flying across the pond back in 2000. The cabin crew reckoned that in the time it took to fill up a glass of champagne from a bottle, Concorde would travel about 26 miles.
As we smashed the sound barrier, Aurélie Claudel’s dachshund suddenly wriggled free from its owner’s Gucci bag, jumped off the seat and ran down the narrow bunk head…being chased by a French supermodel and a pair of flight attendants. You really don’t get this sort of thing on a Ryan Air flight to Magaluf do you?
But this fast and gorgeous cargo of Stephanie Seymour, Karen Mulder, Daniela Pestova et al, the mile-high canine jinks and jet setting fabulosity would not be repeated. That same year, an Air France Concorde crashed shortly after takeoff from Charles de Gaulle, Paris killing all 109 people on board and four on the ground. Three years later Concorde was taken out of service for good. Sadly and very quickly, Transatlantic travel got a whole lot slower, a lot less fun and glamorous too.
Or maybe…could the thrust and afterburn experience get cleared for take off once again? Right now, in a hangar in North Carolina USA, a team of designers, stylists and engineers from Spain, France and Italy are putting the final touches to a fleet of Boom Supersonic “Overture” aircraft, capable of flying 65 to 88 people at 1.7 times the speed of sound. The project heralds the possible return of three-hour transatlantic flights between London and New York.
Production of the Overture jet is already underway and testing begins in 2026. United Airlines, who signed a deal to purchase 15 Boom Overture aircraft, with an option to buy 35 more, has scheduled its first commercial supersonic flights for 2029…or 2030 American Airlines have also committed to buying 20 Boom Overtures while Japan Airlines made a commitment to take 20 of Boom’s planes as far back as 2017. California based Exosonic is designing an aircraft around “sonic boom shaping technology” muting the unpopular and antisocial window-rattling sonic boom, so that it will be “no louder than a car door closing down the street.” Renders of the Exosonic look a lot like a modernised Concorde but with an even longer nose. Spike Aerospace and Virgin Galactic are developing smaller, supersonic private jets which will cut the journey time from, say, London to Ibiza, down to an hour.
There were only ever 20 Concorde jets ever made. And just 14 of those were in commercial service. Within ten years the skies could be home to at least 50 or so new, quieter, faster, safer time-warping globe shrinking passenger jets. So, gimme gin and tonic, I’m feeling supersonic again.