December 11, 1982: Eddie Kyle, the former Hartlepool and Darlington assistant football manager, took a second mortgage on his home to charter Concorde for £51,000 (£17,000 per flying hour) to launch his travel agency.
Mr Kyle, a regular in the Backtrack column and behind the BBC Radio Tees microphone, just about recouped his outlay by selling tickets for a once-in-a-lifetime supersonic flight to the Arctic Circle – but more than 20,000 people turned up to watch. Perhaps because it opened in a blaze of glory, the travel agency still has branches in Barnard Castle and Yarm.
August 23, 1986: The airport chartered Concorde for £35,000 as the star attraction for its airshow, and again flights to the Arctic were offered. Twenty Concordes were built, and this was the second visit to Teesside of G-BOAF, as it also featured in Mr Kyle’s extraordinary stunt. It is the plane which took the last Concorde flight on November 26, 2003, from Heathrow to Bristol where it is now centrepiece in an aerospace museum.
The airport tried to bring Concorde back for subsequent airshows, but couldn’t make it pay.
April 30, 1995: A commercial operator brought Concorde to Teesside for “once-in-a-lifetime” flights (the third time within a couple of decades that such flights had been on offer). For £200, 100 passengers got to fly subsonic at 35,000ft in the general direction of Denmark; for £529, 100 passengers got a 100-minute supersonic flight at 1,354mph at 60,000ft towards Denmark and back.
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