A few days ago Times Past looked back on the excitement in Canberra when, in 1928, Captain Charles Kingsford-Smith brought his Southern Cross to the capital. On this day in 1972, anticipation was building for another iconic aviation moment - the flypast of the supersonic Concorde.
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The next day the French-British superjet was due to fly over the city subsonically at about 2000 feet and make a couple of circuits before heading to the South Coast and out to the ocean at supersonic speed before heading to Melbourne. Canberrans had been warned the sound of the jet would not be "really alarming", a judgment based on reports from its visit to Queensland the day earlier.
As it turned out, most Canberrans would miss out, with the plane arriving earlier than planned, leaving more than 60 people to call The Canberra Times to complain while dozens of others clogged the switchboard of radio 2CA.
The reason for the Concorde's tour Down Under was talks between its manufacturer and Australian airline Qantas. The jet was hyped as potentially the "biggest step in bringing Australia closer to the rest of the world since civil aviation began". As we know, Qantas didn't take up the jet and, while an extraordinary feat of engineering, the jet never really established itself as anything more than a trans-Atlantic luxury. It ceased operations in 2003, three years after the disastrous crash in Paris.
