The Ultimate Fate for Heathrows Concorde

Last week I bumped in to an old acquaintance who now works on the engineering side at BA Heathrow, talking about planes in general I mentioned what was happening to G-BOAB as long ago I believe it was going to be the centre piece in T5 where it was guaranteed covered survival.

I was working on the T5 design at Heathrow, and it had started 3 years before Concorde retired, and in the spring after it’s retirement, we were aware of requests about various possible locations at T5 for it, but none were approved or sanctioned, mostly down to BAA not wishing to have any delays in the tight programme for T5 among a myriad of other reasons. It was never a ‘serious’ proposal tbh.

He said it was in a sorry state and had been towed to the hangars a while ago for possible restoration work but this was abandoned?.
The plane was returned to the beside runway position and is apparently stripped out and “filled with magazines” to weigh it down?

It was moved over to engineering a few months back for a BA families day event, nothing more than that, and was given a power wash to get rid of the grime, to make it look pretty for the day, and then towed back to it’s spot a few days later.

My understanding is that it was agreed a couple of months ago that the aircraft will become an engineering apprentice project. This is expected to ensure the airframe’s preservation, although I don’t currently know of any plans to refit an interior. The way that will work will see it taken into a hangar from time to time, but mostly be stored in the open where passengers flying in and out of Heathrow can see it.

It does have a load of magazines in the cabin to ensure there is sufficient weight that the aircraft doesn’t bounce in high winds, which could obviously damage airframe and/or undercarriage. The ‘stripping out’ of the interior occurred many years ago – I think for AB it was actually prior to the Paris crash, although I’d be prepared to be corrected on that. BA had seven airworthy Concordes pre-Paris, but not all were in use at any one time. The full modification to line the fuel tanks and so forth was only carried out to five aircraft, and AB wasn’t one of them. All the parts were made and stored for it, we just didn’t see the business need to go to the expense of fitting them at the outset. In fact AB was the trials aircraft for the new interior we fitted to the fleet. The trial fitment was removed again so that further trials could be conducted, possibly including Concorde’s first IFE fit, although for a variety of reasons (including 9/11) that project didn’t progress very far and she stayed empty.

Post-retirement, AB was never intended to be inside at T5. She was supposed to sit on the big roundabout outside, much as the 2/5 scale model had sat on the roundabout at the entrance to the Central Area tunnels for several years. I’m sure other interpretations of events are available, but my own personal view is that that placement was deliberately scuppered by BAA because it would have made too great an association between BA and the termainal – they were adamant that the building was ‘theirs’ and we were only tennants.

Scrap eventually?