As you may remember, I was one
of the owners/ directors of Goodwood Travel from 1981 to 2003 when we retired
with dignity, a bit like Concorde!
This operation was indeed one of ours, it's a long story....
The Twentieth Anniversary of Concorde's Maiden Flight was an obvious opportunity for a celebration from the start and we could not believe that neither BA nor AF had any plans to do anything about it. We quietly optioned both a BA and an AF aircraft well in advance with the plan to fly 200 guests to Toulouse and back, out on one aircraft, back on the other. This necessitated bringing the AF aircraft over from CDG the night before and sending it home the day afterwards, so we had a couple of Paris one-day tours added on each end, with our guests travelling one way to/ from Paris by Eurostar to make it all add up.
Jan (my business partner) and I flew to TLS early that year (I remember it well, I had a broken arm at the time which I sustained the previous New Year's Eve falling down the ice covered steps of the Bolshoi during our New Year tour, memorable for the fact that the Concorde hydraulics froze up while we were there and Dick Boas had to dump fuel and return to SVO when he couldn't get the undercarriage up after take off. We came home wrapped in blankets aboard a B737 to LGW... nice!) I digress.
We managed to get Aerospatiale to agree to accommodate our 200 guests at
their plant, and to let them visit "Concorde Numero Un" (201 - you can see
photos I took then at http://www.concordesst.com/201.html ). We found a superb
castle nearby for a celebratory banquet and all was set. Until, of course AF
found out what we were doing and, not to be upstaged, tried to pull the aircraft
from us. Fortunately, the AF Captain, Edouard Chemel was AF's Chief Pilot at
the time and, being a great enthusiast, not to mention entrepreneur on the "flown
covers" side, was determined to operate the flight and saved the day for
us.
Captain Tony Meadows had requested to operate the BA flight out, and at our instigation effected our first introduction to Brian Trubshaw who was delighted to accept our offer to travel as our special guest. He in fact did PR on the BA aircraft in both directions. We invited a good friend, retired Captain Brian Titchener to fly on the AF aircraft to attempt the same on board theirs, he managed it well, the first time a BA Captain had flown on an AF flight deck for PR purposes! At the same time I put Tony and Eduoard in touch with one another and between them they agreed to co-ordinate their arrivals and landings, with a "nose dipping" ceremony on the taxi in to the terminal at TLS.
The AF aircraft happily came over from CDG and night stopped at LHR as planned, BA didn't fail us (this time!) and on March 2, 1989 we had two Concordes full of excited people taking off from LHR for TLS, the 20th Anniversary to the day. The arrival at TLS went well, the two aircraft taxied in together and nodded at each other, our band played, the champagne flowed.... We soon learnt that AF/ Aerospatiale were delighted to have two Concordes there at absolutely no cost to themselves and discovered that they had invited a huge number of guests and had a massive "beano" arranged - around Concorde 201 - which had been moved into one of their hangars. To our horror, it had been sprayed a glittering blue, red & white by the local art college while the new location effectively prevented us from seeing it, let alone permitting our guests to visit it as had been agreed. On top of that the French claimed Brian Trubshaw as their own, and advised him that he was required to speak at their presentation! Since he was due to be speaking at our banquet, this was a difficult one. Brian told them that he was "working for Goodwood Travel" and only agreed to accommodate them once they agreed to provide a helicopter to get him to the castle on time! It worked and he managed both events - a great man!.
Brian also pulled strings with Aerospatiale and got them to agree that our guests could in fact be granted special permission go into the hangar at the end of their presentation and just see 201, he also managed to hijack Andre Turcat for us so that our guests had a bonus of meeting him too, he was delighted to give a short speech in English!
The banquet was a great success and finally, so was the visit to Aerospatiale. Back at the airport we discovered that we had lost a crew, since the BA crew (minus Tony Meadows who was also our guest at the banquet) had flown back to London, while the replacement crew (just too long a day for one BA crew to operate two 1hr 30m flights... I wonder how AF managed it?) were flying out on a Dan-Air scheduled flight and were, of course, delayed.
We boarded 100 on to AF which took off, Captain Chemel doing a low turning pass over the field on the way out. A video taken at the time reveals sparks coming out of one of the engines.....
Our 100 BA guests, waiting in the open by the side of Alpha Echo were on the point of rebellion when Tony suggested we board them on his responsibility, with Goodwood staff manning the emergency exits! We did. Once Dan-Air arrived, the "fresh" crew finally boarded to discover a full aircraft and a welcoming chorus of "Why are we waiting?".... and we left.
It was a great day. However the sting was in the tail when the AF aircraft tried to take off from LHR the next day and after two attempts suffered an engine failure on take off. We flew subsonic to Paris. With little or nothing on offer from AF we had to give these 100 guests a sizable refund from our own pockets for "not going supersonic". This probably represented most of the profits on the whole operation, in fact.
It was fun at the time, but I can do without the stress nowadays! Above all, apart from the superb organisation by Goodwood Travel and its dedicated staff, the eventual success of the day was due to the "can do" attitude of everyone involved with the British Concorde and Captain Chemel and his crew, such a contrast to the prevailing "official" attitude at Air France and Aerospatiale whose interest in the event extended to an opportunity to promote themselves even to the point of jeopardising the whole operation!
|