Bart Bear's Blog

Dad and I have just finished building one of the biggest models we have done so far. It is also one of the most frustrating, the fit of parts was not great and small bits kept being broken off and eaten by the carpet monsters, but it turned out OK in the end. This is the BAe/Aerospatiale Concorde. The real aircraft was one of the world's two types of supersonic commercial transport aeroplanes (the Russian Tu-144 was the other one). Concorde first flew in 1969 and was withdrawn from service in 2003. It was a fantastic aircraft, a real marvel of technology. Unfortunately, it was also extremely costly to operate and British Airways and Air France were the only airlines to use them. Concorde is a huge aeroplane. Our model is 1/72 scale and as you can see, it takes up over half of our dining table. To give you an idea of the size of the aircraft I photographed the model with a model Mustang in the same scale. The insert is a photo of me sitting on a real Mustang at the Richmond ADF airshow. If you have some spare time you can calculate how big a Mustang and a Concorde are in SBU (Small Bear Unit = the height of a Bart). I would love to have flown in a Concorde, even in my usual spot in the overhead locker, but the Oldies never had the chance to do so because Concordes did not operate out of Australia.

Labels: aircraft, models