BAC Concorde 002 G-BSST at YeoviltonPhotographed on 15 September 2005 in the RNAS Yeovilton museum.
This was the first UK prototype, which first flew at Filton on 9 April 1969. Its last flight (the 439th) was on 2 March 1976 from Fairford to Yeovilton, having been purchased for the nation by the London Science Museum on 26 July 1976. Total flying hours were 836 (and 9 minutes), and of those 196 were supersonic.
The early aim during the test flights with the prototypes was expand the flight envelope as quickly as possible to prove that the supersonic sums and predictions were somewhere near correct. Initial flying showed the aircraft to be very "flyable" and in the take-off and landing phase perhaps a lot better than some had predicted. There were virtually no real handling problems of significance to prevent fairly rapid expansion of the flight envelope, caution being the greatest brake on the rate of progress.
Concorde 002 G-BSST left Fairford and performed a 45,000 mile sales demonstration tour of 12 countries in the Far East and Australia in 1971.
Picture added on 24 October 2008
