The Early Days of Heritage Concorde

 

Feeling somewhat disillusioned by the lack of engineering achievements being made in the Concorde world, Steve de Sausamarez founded Heritage Concorde in March 2010. His objective was to change the vision and appetite of other groups and organisations towards the preservation of the Concorde fleet, including British Airways themselves. As such, his priority was to assemble a team of former Concorde engineers, who in turn would be fully supported by a management team. 

 

 

In addition to having a “qualified” engineering team, Steve began to build a network of aviation businesses, museums and organisational contacts that could provide additional support for any future projects that the group would become involved with. Heritage Concorde has become very successful in this area, gaining great respect for its dedication to Concorde from this network.

 

 

Steve started building contacts with BA and also acquired shares in the company, which Heritage Concorde still hold. Owning these shares gave Steve and Heritage Concorde the right to attend the BA AGM in London, and therefore the opportunity to address the BA Board about Concorde. He also built contacts and held various meetings with Airbus in the UK and the Concorde Trust, now known as BACT.

 

 

Over the next 24 months Steve had a number of meetings with key contacts and also met with a member of the BA board at BA Engineering, Heathrow, with regard to G-BOAB during 2011; some of these meeting were held jointly with the Save Concorde Group as Steve supported their efforts for Concorde “Return to Flight”.

 

 

Heritage Concorde was making good progress engaging all interested parties in effective discussions and plans, including members of the aircraft engineering circle that had been formally against any return to flight for the aircraft. During this time Steve also helped put together two projects for the Save Concorde Group, based around Concordes at both Heathrow and Filton.

 

 

In January 2011, and as head of Heritage Concorde Tech, Steve quietly began work on our first major project at Manchester airport, known as Heritage Concorde “Project Flagship”. This project involved our engineering team carrying out various repairs and restoring power to a British Concorde. Despite what others have claimed, this was never an attempt to fly the aircraft again; our engineers needed to lower the nose to replace the windscreen, and a number of ill-informed and incorrect comments made by other parties fuelled unfounded rumours that have seen the work left uncompleted.

 

 

Steve decided to take a back seat at Heritage Concorde in 2012 and handed leadership of the group to Graham Cahill who then made the changes that saw the group grow our engineering team.  

 

Steve returned to Heritage Concorde in a small way during 2013, but finally stepped down from the group’s core team during January 2014.  Steve is no longer a part of Heritage Concorde management, although he still owns this website and the name Heritage Concorde, he gives advice and attends our meetings and engineering days when it becomes possible for him to do so as he now lives in Perth WA.

 

 

Building on the foundations laid down by Steve, the engineers are now driving forward and delivering more and more tangible engineering projects under the direction of Graham Cahill; leading the fight for the heritage of Concorde. John Dunlevy has been a major force in the achievements made to date; he really is one of the very biggest names in the Concorde engineering world.