DeeKnow’s Grotto

I'm certainly no aviation buff. I'd struggle to tell a Cessna rom a Beechcraft. I've never actually taken the controls of a plane (apart from a Microsoft powered one), but I've flown in plenty of them and always been thrilled by the experience.

The roar of the Jet engines, intense vibration, acceleration, bumping, weaving along the tarmac before miraculously lurching into the sky and flying...really flying, and finally hurtling through the ether at hundreds of miles an hour. We know we're not meant to be up there, we know we're cheating all the gravity nature can throw at us, and that's the thrill really. That's what's exciting about it.

Of course the Concorde did all of these things, only it did them in a much noiser, faster, more powerfull, more extravagent, and much more expensive fashion.

I spent a few years in London like most kiwis do, and lived close enough to both Gatwick and Heathrow to see and hear plenty of planes come and go in the skies above. You kinda got used to the sound of the Jets, like you do the noise of traffic in the street near your house, you learned to ignore them.

But like everyone else, I NEVER mistook or ignored the sound of the Concorde arching flamboyantly across the sky, and despite its obnoxiously loud sound and its hideous trail of pollution, it was actually quite enchanting. Rather than shake a fist at it and complain, you found yourself standing there like a school kid, smiling stupidly and pointing it out as if noone else had noticed it, as it charged through the heavens above.

In an article on space.com today there's a comment from a passenger on one of the final New York to Paris flights who mentions they had a tear in their eye when they landed in Paris, and its easy to see why.

Retirement of the Concorde is like losing some rich eccentric distant member of the family, you may not have been close to them, you probably hardly ever (if ever) saw them, but you admired their antics from afar, you wished you could be with them but somehow you knew you never would.

And you miss them when they're gone.

10:46:46 PM