A Day That Shook The World: Concorde's first flight

On 2 March 1969 the world’s first supersonic airliner took to the skies for the first time.

Concorde’s maiden flight went off without a hitch in Toulouse after 10 years of development by an Anglo-Francois team.

The first pilot, Andre Turcat, said: ‘The big bird flies pretty well.” Even going so far as to suggest that Concorde was “easy to fly.”

It took seven years from the initial lift-off before Concorde was put into commercial usage.

Watch original footage from the flight, alongside an interview with the pilot, in this British Pathé video, above.