Among the first batch of British Airways' captains to convert to Concorde, Brian Calvert flew the first British Airways' revenue flight on 21 January 1976 between London Heathrow and Bahrain, commanded by Capt Norman Todd, with flight engineer John Lidiard. He wrote the book Flying Concorde, and retired from BA in 1982.
I was seconded to the Concorde programme in around 1966, as one of a small group of BOAC pilots led by Capt Jimmy Andrew that was tasked with working with the manufacturers to prepare Concorde for introduction to service.
By chance, I was the co-pilot of the VC10 that flew the BOAC board members to Toulouse for the roll-out ceremony in December 1967, so I got to see the new aircraft first hand. We were seated in a grandstand in front of the hangar, with a French military band tootling in the background.
The doors opened to rapturous applause, revealing quite the most beautiful aircraft I'd ever seen. A mechanic then walked across to the tug that was attached to the nose gear. He stepped in, adjusted his gloves, and towed the aircraft out, causing the needle nose to swing right over the crowd.
Prior to the aircraft's entry into service, we were part of a small committee of airlines which included representatives from Air France and, for a time, Pan Am, that worked with the manufacturers. While there were many challenges to tackle to ready Concorde for passenger services, it quickly became evident that noise would be the hardest to overcome - both from the engines and the sonic boom.
The USA - specifically New York - was going to be Concorde's premier market and they made life hard for us in every way - not just about the noise. They told us that we had to operate Concorde exactly like a subsonic jet, and we would have to hold at less than 200kt to stay within specific zones. We wanted to hold at 250kt, and I spent a day flying holding patterns over the VOR at Land's End to prove that we could keep the aircraft within the required zone.
With clearance for US services still not received as we prepared for the first service, Bahrain was chosen for various reasons - mostly because it was acceptable to the ruler of the Gulf kingdom. As I drove to work on the big day, I could feel the adrenalin running - we were about to make history and everything had to go right. During the taxi, we linked via ATC to Pierre Chanoine, captain of the inaugural Air France Concorde flight from Paris to Rio (via Dhakar), to co-ordinate simultaneous departures.
Brakes were released at 12.40 GMT. We took off to the west and turned left to begin the first sector of the flight - the 1h subsonic, overland leg to Venice. This was flown at Mach 0.95 at 29,000ft - still much faster than other traffic. Then we lit the afterburners and climbed and accelerated down the Adriatic to Mach 2/55,000ft. Even though we'd briefed all the ATC centres in the days running up to the flight about how to deal with Concorde, some controllers struggled to keep up - for instance when reporting our height as FL530 they thought we surely meant FL350!
We had to navigate an accurate sweeping supersonic turn through Syria to ensure that the boom's ground track avoided large conurbations. We then continued across the Saudi desert to Bahrain, touching down at 15.17GMT - 3h 37min after leaving Heathrow. On the flightdeck we felt we had done nothing extraordinary, but we'd made history nonetheless.
Source: Flight International