Restored Concorde returns to New York's Intrepid Museum

Restored Concorde returns to New York’s Intrepid Museum

After undergoing extensive refurbishment, a Concorde aircraft floated on a barge down the Hudson River in New York. It left Pier 86, Thursday March 14 to return to the museum where it resides.

This Franco-British jet, last flew across the Atlantic in 2003, housed at the Intrepid Museum until it was removed for refurbishment in August 2023. It has now returned to the museum.

Leslie Scott, a former Concorde pilot said: ‘I’ve never seen it look so good. I mean, it is a beautiful, beautiful job that the Intrepid have managed to do. As I said, when I used to fly it, it didn’t look like that’.

The aircraft retired in 2003 – known for its supersonic speed of flying from New York to London in less than three hours.

The needle-nosed aircraft left Pier 86 on Aug. 9, 2023 for a restoration project at the Brooklyn Navy Yard that included sanding and repainting.

Concorde is the only supersonic commercial jet that ever flew. The Intrepid’s British Airways Concorde still holds the record for the fastest transatlantic crossing by a passenger aircraft — 2 hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds from Heathrow to JFK.

Tours of the Concorde resume on April 4, 2024. Visitors able to go inside the Concorde, hear about its history and peer into its sophisticated flight deck.

Although retired, few of the jets can be seen at museums. One is in Scotland.

Scotland’s Concorde, Golf-Bravo Oscar Alpha Alpha, was the first of her kind to go into service with British Airways, in 1976. 8,064 flights later, she came to rest at the National Museum of Flight in East Fortune after the Concorde fleet was decommissioned in 2003.