I’m not a francophile or fan of anything much French. But I do love technology and the Concorde fascinated me as a teen and young adult. I am also an avid watcher of Air Crash Investigation (Mayday in some countries). So when the Concorde crashed almost 26 years ago now which then led to the withdrawal of the concorde from service, it kind of set back the technological aspect of commercial aviation. Of course prevention of loss of life should be #1 priority and we saw the same thing after the two shuttle incidents. So to cut a long story short I was never going to get to fly in a Concorde and may never get to fly on a supersonic plane at all, but Toulouse had 2 Concordes in the Aeroscopia museum and that was a good compromise. Toulouse is the home of Airbus after all.
It was a longish tram ride out to the museum, but I also saw an Beluga take off from Toulouse airport, which is a sight in itself, a Beluga is an A300 with a large cylindiracl bubble like growth on its back to carry cargo. Aeroscopia itself isn’t a huge museum. Undercover it has a large variety of aircraft and not just airbus made aircraft. But you could kind of go inside a Boeing Super Guppy which was the airbus equivalent of the Beluga. They also had an A300 and a concorde you could go into. The Concorde was the testing Concorde and not actually used in passenger service. It has a lot of the original testing equipment in there and some display of the 2-2 seat layout. The interior of the Concorde isn’t huge, maybe 6’2″ from floor to ceiling, I certainly had to duck on a few doors.
The next day I was planning to go to Carcasonne, but this is where i was struck down with a virus and spent the day basically in bed sleeping and hoping to recover. I’m still feeling the effects of the virus a few days later but i’m able to function at least!
