My 28-year love affair

Once upon a time, in the summer of 1975, I sat in the pilot's seat of Concorde. Okay, I didn't actually fly it, but I sat in the cockpit by myself on an airstrip in Fairford, Gloucestershire - just me and the gleaming controls that resembled something from the Starship Enterprise.

As an American, I was doing some reporting on the birth of Concorde, and an obliging test pilot took me inside the aircraft and left me there for a few minutes. From my seat at the controls, I looked down on the sleek bird which, thin and rich with its elegant long nose, resembled some haughty aristocrat; I looked down from my seat at the future.

Hard to believe that Concorde is on its way out, that on 24 October the last British Airways supersonic plane will fly. Suddenly, everyone wants in. Everyone's hustling to get a seat for the last time, or the first time, people practically cashing in their pensions to get a ticket, even though the £8,200 round-trips are officially sold out.

Celebrities, hacks, ordinary people are trying to score a trip, to sit in a seat once warmed by a galaxy of stars, from Madonna to Joan Collins. Passengers rush to scoop up Concorde souvenirs. (Silverware and dishes on Concorde were always ripe for on-board scavengers and, according to Vanity Fair, Andy Warhol helped himself to all he could.) So many admirers. But how many of them have sat alone up in the cockpit?

It was practically my first assignment as a very young freelance journalist. I got a call from a British Airways press officer in New York. "Would you like to go on a Concorde flight?" he asked. This was at the height of the controversy over Concorde's alleged potential for noise "pollution". I said I was for the environment (or something equally dopey and facile), and he said, "Well, what else are you doing this summer?" (or something equally persuasive), and so I went.

We flew first to London and then from London to Gander in Newfoundland and back, me and about 98 aviation writers, all male, except, as I recall, for one cubeshaped woman in tweeds from Friends of the Earth. If I'm not mistaken, flight attendants from Gulf Air were staffing these "proving flights" as they were called. They wore funny little hats, like masons, with mini-veils down the back.

We took off and soared 10 miles up into the stratosphere, higher than any human had ever been except for the odd astronaut. As you flew higher and faster there were the tiny bumps when you passed Mach One, the speed of sound, and Mach Two, twice the speed of sound (1,350 miles per hour), and there was the applause and later, when regular services began, the champagne and caviar. Out of the window you could see the curve of the earth, a shimmering outline against a dark thin sky of a tremulous blue-black. It took three hours and 20 minutes to cross the Atlantic; it was dazzling, all right, the most glamorous piece of technology anyone could imagine.

The whole business of supersonic flight was romantic. Back then plenty of people still remembered the history of going supersonic: the first military aircraft flown by Chuck Yeager, the Bell X-I in l947, as covered in the film The Right Stuff; the tale of the de Havillands in the movie The Sound Barrier. Years were spent developing a commercial SST (supersonic transport) in the US and Europe, and the Soviet Union where the Tupolov-144 - they called it Concordski - flew and then crashed and burned at an air show in 1973.

After my first flight, I was hooked. Although there was plenty of scepticism, even the most acerbic Brits were secretly ecstatic. "We don't dare defend it on this ground," wrote the English writer Brigid Brophy, "but it's beautiful."

Most Americans, though, especially around New York, where Concorde would land, were wildly opposed to it. People talked about the noise levels with terror - it would make you deaf, it would make you crazy - the way folk in the l9th century talked about the earliest steamdriven trains. The truth was we had a massive case of xenophobia: the US had backed the wrong designs for SST. I wrote about Concorde and got hate mail from Long Island residents.

I didn't care. I had become a fervent Concordista. I visited the factories in Bristol and Toulouse. I got to know engineers and test pilots. I became wildly anglophile and bored my friends at home with tales of how the Brits had been responsible for practically every technological breakthrough of the century: television, radar, the jet engine. And Concorde (admittedly, with the French).

After commercial flights began in l976, people fell in love with Concorde. People went to airports to watch it take off and land, the long nose dipping like a gannet to water. A friend told me her grandmother, who had never been on a plane, suddenly announced she wanted a trip on Concorde. There was hype, of course; but in this case the thing itself was even more glittering. As people became more affluent in the Nineties, Concorde was the perfect mode of transportation to aspire to.

Over the years, as I boarded an ordinary British Airways flight, I would see stars glide past to the Concorde Lounge - Chris Evert, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Britney Spears, Malcolm Forbes - superior beings all. I even managed to get on it myself a few more times.

Once, on board, I realised that someone in the seat behind me was trying to chat up Diana Ross, who was in a seat across the aisle from him. Who is it, I kept thinking even as we passed Mach Two. Finally, as a flight attendant came my way, I mouthed silently: "WHO IS IT?"

She dropped a scrap of paper in my lap with the answer: Engelbert Humperdinck.

Not long ago, I came home to New York from London. When I disembarked at JFK, I saw David Frost, who's been a passionate regular from the earliest days. I went over to say hello and we talked about the sadness of Concorde's fate. He told me he'd be going back to London on Concorde because he wanted his child to experience it once before it was all over.

And it will be over. It is hard to believe that Europe can't find a way to keep Concorde flying. That it will be forgotten, mowed down in the wake of the bloated super-jumbos. That the plodding requirements of everyday corporate balance sheets matter more than the wonderful machine that has changed our perceptions of time and space. That it must be accounted for with no more imagination than a widget or a T-shirt or a Ford Fiesta. That no one at all can have found a way to keep this miraculous white bird aloft.