Concorde aims at cupid and the comet

Press, 11 February 1986, Page 16

Concorde aims at cupid and the comet

Fifty couples are taking off for a supersonic snog and champagne party on St Valentine’s Day. Don Higgs reports.

Cupid is bringing the ' supersonic airliner Con- ! corde an anniversary; boost in its tenth year of; service. t

Fifty couples will take; off on a champagne flight j on St Valentine’s Day, fori an hour and a half’s trip; over the Bristol Channel at a cost of $B5O a head. 1 Fifteen of the precious minutes will be at supersonic speed. ■ For British Airways, it is yet another nice little earner, leasing one of the airline’s seven-strong Concorde fleet. j In the last five years, the airline has chartered Concorde hundreds 6f times at considerable profit, helping recoup some of the nearly five billion dollars spent jointly on the AngloFrench project and utilising crew capacity. Hiring a Concorde isn’t that much more difficult than hiring a car — all you need is the money up

front. British Airways provides plane, crew, and the all- important smoked salmon and champagne. The cheapest deal on offer to agents is a 90 minute flight for $74,000 midweek, or $BO,OOO at week-end rates.

Of the 800,000 passengers who have flown supersonic in these ten years — Concorde’s birthday was on January 21 — 50,000 have been “trippers” out for a day at the Pyramids, a visit to Lapland to see Father Christmas, or just a jaunt round the Bay of Biscay for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The same travel firm which arranged Friday’s Cupid special has other rather more exotic supersonic trips. Most expensive is a holiday around the world in 18 days, compared with Jules Verne’s, sedate 80.

“We’ll go round the globe via Moscoe, Cairo, New Delhi, Peking, Guam, Honolulu, Mexico, and Barbados. At each stop, there will be the best of everything,” says the organiser. The cost of the holiday will be ... a cool $40,000 a head.

Dozens of other one-off trips are being planned for Concorde to supplement its regular LondonAmerica scheduled services.

There is one due for October, for example, which will land at Cape Canaveral in time for passengers to watch a space shuttle launched. Soon the plane goes chasing Halley’s Comet as Concorde scorches down on its inaugural flight to New Zealand.

The 14-day package holiday will cost nearly $20,000. The trip will take

just 16 hours flying time — ten hours less than by jumbo jet. “We are going via Singapore and when we leave there early in the morning of April 5, at 60,000 feet we’ll have the most spectacular view of

the comet,” said organiser Lesley Albert. “It will be right ahead of us and we will arrange for all the passengers to go in couples into the cockpit. It should be breathaking . . — Copyright Duo