Concorde: The Early Years Volume 2 (1969-1976)   SFE RRP: £14.99 9971012 Certificate: E Available 23 November 2009

I remember that when I was about fourteen I belonged to the Transport Club at school. This rather strange and eclectic group of boys would spend once a week watching films which dealt with anything which moved by its own power. No having any money to rent films the club discovered that many commercial firms would produce little documentaries to promote their products.

Concorde the Early Years 1969–1976 is such a collection of films. Have documentary, half promotional material the films were produced by the long gone British Aircraft Corporation and its French collaborator, Sud Aviation France, in the Concorde project.

Because of the age of the films, print quality isn’t great with dirt evident on most prints, that said they have survived remarkably well and Concorde fans will be more interested in the information and shots of Concorde’s progress than they will the overall picture quality. All the short films are in colour with a mono audio track.

Volume Two contains an abundance of Concorde related facts, starting with She Flies (15 min, 19 sec), First Flight of Concorde 001 (12 min, 19 sec), First Flight 002 (6 min, 38 sec) and On To Mach 2 (13 min, 50 sec) all look at the test flying and final push to Mach 2. From here the films move away from the technical development of the plane and the remaining film feel more like adverts for prospective buyers, in retrospect this was a bit of a waste of time.

Concorde World Shrinker (17 min, 11 sec) sells the jet on its speed and reliability, Concorde Give up Smoking (5 min, 43 sec), makes the hard sell on the basis that the engines no longer spew black smoke from the engine exhausts, Concorde Faster than the Sun (5 min, 31 sec) is a whole lot of beauty shots of the plane in flight, Concorde Flight (5 min, 45 sec) is a virtual flight on the plane set at a time in the future when the plane was going to be in regular use, Supersonic Preview (9 min, 31 sec) and oh dear the film concentrates on how quick the plane will fly around the world, I guess this must have been made before America got pissy about not having one of their own and strangled the routes to the states. The disc finishes with Supersonic Inaugural (4 min, 44 sec) and the plane finally enters commercial use.

If that wasn’t enough the disc also has some extras in the form of the London to Sidney Air Race 1969 (3 min, 20 sec), Wind Tunnel Testing (3 min, 30 sec) and an Illustrated Interview with John Edwards the director of ‘She Flies’.

One of the things, apart from all the information overload about Concorde that I noticed was the great music, being a commercial product I have no idea who wrote and played it, but some of it reminded me of the great spy and science fiction shows of the sixties, dramatic and often brooding, it fits the films well, sometimes even making the films better than they deserved to be.

Apart from the presentation and the obvious overdose of Concorde, what comes across in these films is a confident country who felt that nothing was outside of their imagination; I wonder what happened to them?

For a Concorde fan this is pig heaven, though I’m not sure just how a general audience will feel about a collection of historical films.

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Charles Packer