After nearly two decades of hanging out on the Intrepid aircraft carrier in the Hudson River, the Concorde supersonic jet is once again on the move. Sadly, it didn’t ignite its four Rolls-Royce Olympus engines. Instead, it took a leisurely boat ride to Brooklyn where it is scheduled to get a bit of a facelift that’ll take a few months, according to the Associated Press.
A statement from the Intrepid Museum says that’ll be back soon enough, as it’s slated to return in the Spring of 2024 after its time at the Brooklyn Navy Yard where it’ll be stripped down, sanded, and repainted. However, in order to start that process, AP said it took flight – sort of. Workers craned it onto the barge. I don’t know, I count it. From the pictures, it seems that it was only mounted in two places at the rear of the plane, and the front end was cradled with a big yellow strap. Either engineers are really smart, or they’re braver than me.
Once it was loaded on the barge, it made its way down the Hudson, around the bottom of Manhattan, past the Statue of Liberty and then up the East River to Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was quite a spectacle.
“We are stewards of some of the most important artifacts of the 20th and 21st centuries, and with that comes the responsibility to preserve, protect and perpetuate these icons for generations to come,” Susan Marenoff-Zausner, president of the Intrepid Museum, told AP.
She continued to say that the restoration will allow the museum to present “this awe-inspiring technological marvel” and continue to tell the stories behind it for years to come.
As you probably know, Concorde was made famous for being really fucking fast and luxurious. To this day it holds the record for the fastest transatlantic crossing by a passenger aircraft at just 2 hours, 52 minutes, and 59 seconds from Heathrow in London to JFK in New York City. Its four turbojet engines with afterburners provided enough thrust to push the Concorde all the way to Mach 2.04. Absolutely awesome.
Unfortunately for the aviation world, the plane was retired in 2003 after it was decided they were no longer financially viable, which I suppose is fair in retrospect. I just don’t like the decision because they are so goddamn cool.