A collection of mementoes from the first commercial flight of Concorde has been donated to an aviation museum by a passenger who was on the flight.
Anthony Hopkins was on the British Airways flight from London to Bahrain on January 21, 1976, which took off at the same time as an Air France Concorde aircraft flew from Paris to Rio de Janeiro. At the time of the flight he was a businessman living in Sale, Cheshire.
Mr Hopkins saved dozens of items from his journey, including tickets showing the BAH airport code, luggage tags, promotional material and even the on-board safety card. He also kept the in-flight menu, which was signed by almost everyone on board, including the British broadcaster Peter Sissons.
It showed that passengers enjoyed a three-course lunch preceded by caviar and lobster canapes.
Later, during a holiday in Scotland, he took his personal archive with him while visiting the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune Airfield in East Lothian, where the British Airways G-BOAA aircraft has been housed since April 2004. Mr Hopkins has now donated his personal archive to the museum.
He showed it to Ian Brown, assistant curator of aviation at the museum, who said they would be happy to receive the donation, which he described as “absolutely unique”.
“There were only 100 people on that first flight as passengers, so having this material from one of the people on that flight, which was the Concorde that we have here at the museum, is just amazing. There is so much detail in there,” he said.
“There’s a menu, newspaper cuttings, a whole lot of context with his boarding pass and these luggage tags – it really brings it to life.
“It’s not just the aeroplane – which, as beautiful as Concorde is, an aeroplane is a lump of metal – it’s people’s stories, it’s about Mr Hopkins and his experience of the flight, and that personalises it. Being able to tell personal stories about individual people is always what we would prefer to do.”
National Museums Scotland shared the news of the donation on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the inaugural BA flight in January 1976. British Airways announced that it was retiring its fleet of Concordes in April 2003.
G-BOAA, now known as “Scotland’s Concorde”, arrived at the National Museum of Flight on April 19, 2004, and has since been visited by more than 1.5 million people.
Mr Brown said: “Concorde is renowned as an extraordinary feat of engineering and a symbol of luxury, even 50 years on. It is rare that personal archives such as this survive and make their way into museum collections, but they provide an invaluable insight into what it must have been like to be a passenger on one of the most significant flights in aviation history.
“We are grateful to Mr Hopkins for enabling us to reunite his collection with Golf-Bravo Oscar Alpha Alpha at the National Museum of Flight.”
The Concorde fleet was grounded in 2000 after an Air France Concorde crashed shortly after take-off from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, claiming 100 lives, including nine crew and four people on the ground. Concorde returned in 2001 after a revamp, but two years later British Airways announced that it was retiring its fleet of the supersonic aircraft.
The National Museum of Flight explores the history of aviation from the First World War to the present day, with aircraft on display including a Red Arrows Hawk and Supermarine Spitfire.
