Given that this is the 50th anniversary of the first Concorde flight, I thought it would be appropriate to share some photos from its last landing in Bristol, in November 2011.
A work colleague lived backing on to Filton airfield, and they were all given free tickets to see the landing from the airfield itself – he very kindly offered me one on the ground that I took photos.
Before it came in to land, it did a flypast of the airfield, and the shot below is all I have of that – I took that one photo and the camera battery ran out. Now remember that this was back in the days of film, when camera batteries lasted for at least a year, so it was quite an unexpected event.
Panic hit – have I taken a day off work, used a friend’s ticket and ended up with just 1 photo, and that not even of the landing? Fortunately I can be relatively organised on occasion, and I did actually have spare batteries with me, so I was able to make a quick change, but it was a nervous moment!
While we waited for Concorde to come back, we had a short display from a Spitfire – I have a bit of a thing for the sound of Rolls-Royce Merlin engines!
And then we came to the main event, it really was quite something to be so close to an iconic aircraft coming into land for the last time.
And finally, we have a few photos that I took at the original Concorde museum in 2010 – we’re planning on visiting the new one at some point this year.
