Concorde: The flight I’d been waiting for since childhood

In 2002, I flew Concorde once, and only once.

It was the return leg from London back to New York, after my friend Felix’s wedding. I’d recently moved to America and was still learning how distance really works between continents. The world felt strangely smaller after 9/11, but at the same time heavier. Flying had lost some of its theatre and gained a quieter kind of anxiety. The dotcom bubble had burst, the economy was on uncertain footing, an Air France Concorde had crashed a couple of years earlier, and everywhere you looked there were rumours that Concorde’s days were numbered. There were only five left in service, It felt like now or never.

By then I had built up an absurd number of air miles from travelling constantly for work with Photosound. I’d always imagined using them sensibly, for something practical and justifiable. But when it became clear Concorde might soon vanish, the logic quietly reversed. If I wasn’t going to spend them on this, what exactly had I been saving them for?

Boarding something already becoming history

Heathrow’s Concorde lounge felt like stepping sideways out of the airport. It was quieter, smaller, more deliberate. The conversations were subdued and there was an unspoken sense that everyone in the room knew we were part of something already slipping into memory.

Boarding didn’t feel ceremonial so much as curiously intimate. And then you stepped inside and immediately grasped how little Concorde cared about scale. Two seats either side all the way down, no economy, no hierarchy, just the smell of leather and a narrow fuselage with the same seating arrangements all the way backwards..

There were only about eight of us on that Monday morning flight. The cabin felt oddly private, closer to someone’s study than an airliner. When we took off it was loud, forceful, and almost vertical, the runway dissolving beneath us as the acceleration pressed you into your seat and London slid away behind the windows.

The first part of the journey was at regular speed, and by coincidence the flight path took us roughly over Patchway, just north of Bristol, where Concorde had been built and tested. It’s where my grandad had once worked on the aircraft during its early development. We went supersonic somewhere over the Severn Estuary, and from that moment the atmosphere shifted. The cabin grew warm and faintly unreal. The sky darkened slightly at the edges of the windows. Everything seemed sharper – not just the speed, but the feeling inside the plane. It didn’t feel like travelling. It felt like being launched with intent.

Three and a half hours after takeoff we were descending into New York.

After we landed, the captain let me step into the cockpit. I stood there awkwardly, careful not to touch anything, quietly astonished by where I was. The sharply angled windscreen, the dense cluster of dials. I’ve crossed the Atlantic more times than I can count, but no other flight before or since has stayed with me in quite the same way.

A life spent watching the sky

I’ve always had a complicated affection for planes, not in a technical or obsessive sense, but because they’ve been a constant presence in my life. They’ve never felt exotic, just foundational and a kind of background rhythm.

It runs in the family. My granddad had served in the RAF and worked on Concorde in the seventies. My father followed him into the RAF too, though in communications rather than mechanics. Aircraft were always in the background.

My first flight was when I was about nine months old, from England to Cyprus. I don’t remember it, but I do remember screaming on a subsequent one due to the noise, the motion. Soon after I was given a book called How Machines Work, which I now read with my son. It’s frayed and taped together, but the wonder inside it is still perfectly intact. Its sketches and isometric views no doubt adding a formative layer for a love of design.

In the early eighties we lived on a British airbase in Germany. The geography of my childhood included hangars, perimeter fencing, and the low thunder of engines that never quite stopped. After school play meant looking through the fences to rows of Phantom and Lightning fighters, and Bloodhound missiles standing to attention under vast grey skies.

Then there were the airshows. Sitting in cockpits. Climbing ladders into aircraft that felt impossibly large. The Red Arrows cutting white signatures into the blue. Even now I still instinctively look up when something crosses overhead.

By the time I reached boarding school, flying had become routine. Home, for a while, meant Norway, which also meant airports were part of term time rather than holidays. I spent too many holidays with a boarding card in hand, learning the quiet independence of being an unaccompanied minor. I got used to watching landscapes change from windows. Flying stopped feeling special and quietly became infrastructure, just how you got back to yourself. Somewhere in those journeys, I also learned how to process big feelings.

Flying has never really been about destinations for me. It’s always been about that pause from normal life, the moment when you hand over your bag, walk through a one-way door, and step outside the version of yourself tied to emails and errands. Airports are strange, democratic spaces where everyone is suspended in the same mild uncertainty, waiting for something to flicker into meaning.

Concorde intensified all of that rather than simply shortening the journey. The Atlantic stopped being a boundary and became more of a suggestion. London and New York folded towards one another like pages in the same book. Speed changed scale. Scale reshaped perspective. When I arrived, I felt physically present in one place but still emotionally tethered to the other.

I’ve crossed the ocean countless times before and since, but nothing else has resonated quite like that one flight. Concorde felt like a future that existed briefly and then vanished, quietly and without fuss. It was exhilarating, faintly surreal, and completely human in its ambition.

When distance becomes something you can read

And yet, for all that, my favourite way to travel is still by train.

Give me a window seat on a French TGV and I’m perfectly content. I love how a country reveals itself gradually from a carriage window. How fields become towns and towns recede again without ceremony. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching life unfold while remaining perfectly still.

Flying compresses the world. Trains let you read it. You arrive not just somewhere else, but having actually absorbed the distance that carried you there.

And perhaps that’s the thread running through all this. Whether in the air or on rails, I’ve always been drawn to that suspended stretch between departures and arrivals. The space where nothing is expected of you. Where you are not quite who you were and not yet who you’re about to become.

That space between places is still my favourite destination.