Concorde to visit Chch

Press, 30 March 1989, Page 7

Concorde to visit Chch

PA Wellington Christchurch will host the New Zealand touchdown on April 9, of the Concorde’s first supersonic flight round Earth, a British Airways spokesman said yesterday.

The British Airways manager for New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, Richard Cobb, said more than a dozen world speed records would be broken during the 23-day, 60,798 km journey, which begins in London on April 1.

The Concorde has been chartered for the world tour by an American Miami-based travel company which has sold all seats for the trip at prices starting from $U539,000 ($65,000). The tour will be hosted by a United States television personality, William Buckley Jun., who will produce his public broadcast service network programme “Firing Line” in Sydney and Cape Town on his way around the world. As well as supersonic travel, the tour will feature deluxe hotels, cruises in Acapulco, Tahiti

and New Zealand, beach barbecues in Mexico, Sri Lanka, and Tahiti, a safari in Africa, and a tour of vineyards in South Africa. The tour ends with a gala farewell dinner at the Savoy Hotel in London, on April 23, after which United States passengers will return to New York on a regular British Airways-scheduled Concorde service.

Britain and France started working separately towards a supersonic aircraft in 1956. They were working along such similar lines that in 1962 they decided to develop one jointly. This partnership, between British Aircraft Corporation (now British Aerospace) and Aerospatiale, led to 20 Concordes being built. Each country manufactured one prototype, one pre-production and eight production aircraft. The first flight of the French prototype aircraft 001 took place from Toulouse, France, on March 2, 1969. The British prototype 002 first flew on April 9, 1969. The two aircraft are now in air museums.