Celebrating Concorde and saying goodbye to an old friend!

With the passage of May 31st the Air France Concorde was officially retired from commercial scheduled service, but we would have one more chance to see her on June 3, 2003 when Air France flew over some VIPs.

Enjoy the pictures ...

AB-C-032 Air France F-BVFB June 3, 2003
The last shot I got to take of an Air France Concorde was this departure of the VIP flight.
With the Air France Concorde retired our focus shifted to catching the British Airways Concorde.

For those of who view these pages and are not photographers you might not know that we usually take a series of photos of a plane in action and select the best one, or sometimes two, from the series to submit to sites like Airliners.Net. But we have many other shots in our personal collections. The next series of photos shows all the shots I took of G-BOAG one morning as she departed JFK for Heathrow.

From the above series I only selected one photo to submit to Airliners.Net.

AB-C-032 British Airways G-BOAG June 28, 2003

There were some problems photographing Concorde at JFK. When the Air France Concorde was flying the problem was that their arrival and departure flights were minutes apart. This made it virtually impossible to take photos of both because JFK most often uses different runways for arrivals and departures and, unfortunately, we couldn't be in both places at the same time. The British Airways Concorde flights offered another challenge. The departure was scheduled for 9:00 a.m. and the arrival at 5:30 p.m. That meant to get both you had to hang around the airport all day. Mind you that wasn't bad, but some days it was impossible. You just got the one and had to let the other one go. It was also about this time that I developed my "underbelly" shot fetish. I wanted to get shots from directly under the aircraft and I succeeded for both the arrival and departure flights.

AB-C-033 British Airways G-BOAE June 28, 2003

AB-C-034 British Airways G-BOAE July 5, 2003

AB-C-035 British Airways G-BOAE July 12, 2003

AB-C-036 British Airways G-BOAE July 12, 2003

AB-C-037 British Airways G-BOAE July 12, 2003

AB-C-038 British Airways G-BOAF July 14, 2003

AB-C-039 British Airways G-BOAD July 29, 2003

British Airways G-BOAD July 29, 2003

AB-C-040 British Airways G-BOAD August 17, 2003

AB-C-041 British Airways G-BOAE August 24, 2003

AB-C-042 British Airways G-BOAE August 24, 2003

The weather in the New York area pretty much
was miserable most of the year. It seemed that
when the weather was nice I was out of town on
business or couldn't make it to the airport. August
was terrible with constant haze and rain, but it finally
began to clear toward the end of the month and
the weather the beginning of September was
spectacular. That coinciding with the Newark Show
and some friends coming in from out of town made
for a good time. We certainly enjoyed September!

AB-C-043 British Airways G-BOAC September 7, 2003

AB-C-044 British Airways G-BOAC September 7, 2003

AB-C-045 British Airways G-BOAD September 7, 2003

AB-C-046 British Airways G-BOAD September 7, 2003

AB-C-047 British Airways G-BOAD September 8, 2003

AB-C-048 British Airways G-BOAE September 20, 2003

AB-C-049 British Airways G-BOAE September 20, 2003

Before we knew it October had arrived and
the final month of British Airways Concorde operations
were here. There would only be a few more
opportunities to capture this rare and exciting
aircraft in photos. With the exception of a few
ferry flights to museums here in the United States
October 24th would be the last commercial flight
of a supersonic Concorde ever. So the pressure
increased to get those final pictures.

Continue to the next page for photos taken the final month and a few from the ferry flights in November ...

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