When we lived in Leeds, our house was about half a mile from the main runway at Leeds/Bradford Airport (LBA). In the early- to mid-90’s, the airport – perhaps a couple of times a year or so – used to host a single Concorde aircraft for a weekend of pleasure flights.
You could pay a couple of hundred pounds for a short flight of 40 minutes or so, just up to the Lakes and back or similar, so that you could say you’d flown on Concorde. Or you could pay about five hundred quid for a short supersonic hop up the North Sea, so you could say you’d been supersonic.
Of course the presence of such a spectacular aircraft drew huge crowds to the normally fairly quiet observation point at the end of Runway 14, hoping for a free airshow. On take-off, the engines would be rapidly spooled up to full power – which was loud enough – but then they would light the afterburners and you just couldn’t hear yourself think. Absolutely spectacular. The beautiful aircraft would accelerate down the runway and then lift off into a pretty steep climb; with all that power, you could do that with a Concorde. Then once she’d gone you could just hear all the car alarms in the fields (the local farmers used to open up their fields and sell parking space to the Concorde watchers) protesting at their violation by the intense shockwaves from the afterburners.
Picture: Concorde taking off on afterburner
At the end of the weekend, she’d make her final departure, and the crowds would then disperse to their shrieking cars. Now, we locals knew better. For one thing, we didn’t have shrieking cars; we’d walked to the viewpoint. For another thing, we knew that it was usually the pilots’ habit to come back for one final pass, coming in from the north-west and usually making a slow pass along the airfield in that characteristic Concorde nose-high attitude with the nose drooped for better pilot view. The aircraft would be empty, of course, with no passengers aboard.
On one occasion, however – it may have been the last time they did a Concorde weekend at LBA, in fact – they did things just a little differently. On this occasion, it was an Air France aircraft and she had departed to the south-east and the crowds had dispersed as normal. We’d waited about ten to fifteen minutes for the customary ‘surprise’ return of the aircraft. And boy, was it worth it.
She came in from over the Chevin – you could see her, coming in nose-low and very, very fast – so you could tell that something different was going on. She crossed the end of the runway at about 150 feet, doing something like 600 knots – that’s about 690mph or 0.9 Mach – 90% of the speed of sound. You could tell she was at transonic speeds because you could actually see the shockwaves on the wings; the little feathers of cloud that show that parts of the airflow over the wings is already beginning to ‘bunch up’ and form pressure fronts, the really weird transonic aerodynamics that slower aircraft simply don’t have to cope with. The noise of course was a good bit behind the aircraft but was awesome when it came. But then came the most awesome part of all.
When he’d reached about half-way along the runway, the pilot lit the ‘burners again and hauled the aircraft right into the vertical. I’m not kidding; the aircraft was going straight up. Just like a jet fighter – but this was an airliner, remember! He sustained that climb until the aircraft was no longer visible from the ground. The only thing he didn’t do was to roll it around its axis….
That has to be one of the most unbelievable things I have ever seen. I have never seen anything like that before or since. And of course I shall never see the like again. I have looked on aviation sites all over the Internet to see if I can find if anyone else has ever reported such a thing, or better yet, got any pictures; but all in vain.
But still the memory of those indescribable few seconds of sheer awe and amazement makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. What an awesome aeroplane.