The Majestic Concorde visited Venezuela once a week!

The decade of the 70s was the golden age of Venezuela in which it enjoyed impressive economic and urban development originated by the petroleum boom, with the best highways in all Latin America, public hospitals were better than private clinics, primary and secondary schools had excellent educational programs and free universities graduated excellent professionals every year.  

It was the time when, for the last things that the Venezuelan population was worried about was food and medicine. The time in which the Venezuelans made trips to Miami to spend the weekends in the newly delivered DC-10 of our flagship airline VIASA (In another post I will talk about it). And also the time in which Venezuela appeared as one of the main tourist and business destinations in travel agencies around the world. Each important international airline had in its destinations not only Caracas but also other cities of our country.  

Such was the prominence of Venezuela in the world that it was chosen as the second destination in the entire American continent by one of the two operators of the only supersonic passenger plane with commercial success: I refer to the incomparable Concorde at the hands of Air France.   

And what is extraordinary about Venezuela having the regular Concorde service?   

Well, the answer is to describe a little these wonderful aircraft.

The name "Concorde" arises from the union of two countries and two large companies which materialized into one of the most exceptional icons of aviation and engineering. Bristol Airplane Company (currently British Aircraft Corporation) of the United Kingdom and Sud-Aviation (Aerospatiale today) of France joined efforts to manufacture a supersonic aircraft that would shorten the transatlantic flight time by half, Paris-New York from 8 to 3:30 hours. Its regular service speed was 2.02 Mach (2,179 km/h or 1354 MPH, twice the speed of sound) and its flight ceiling was 60,000 feet (twice as much as any regular plane).

The first prototype flew for the first time in 1969, and the first commercial flight was on January 21, 1976 with the first Air France Concorde covering the Paris-Rio de Janeiro route and the first of British Airways on the London-Bahrain route, later including London-Washington, Paris-Washington, London-New York, Paris New-York and Paris-Mexico City via Washington or New York. 20 airplanes were built, including 6 non-commercial ones. 

Because of the powerful Rolls-Royce Olympus engines, necessary to break the sound barrier, the Concorde consumed no less than 20 tons of kerosene per hour. Likewise both Air France and British Airways only offered first class service on board, and this, together with the high fuel consumption, meant that the ticket costs were high, so their services were reserved only for the most exclusive and profitable destinations.

This is where Venezuela enters, that country prosperous and thriving, very close to development, of course we are talking as I mentioned of the decade of the 70s and early 80s. Venezuela was one of the five Air France destinations operated with Concorde. The first commercial flight of Concorde arrived in Caracas on April 9, 1976. It landed in Maiquetía after having covered the 7,167 km or 4453 miles of the route in 6 hours, with a stopover in the Azores Islands. Previously, there was a first Concorde special flight to Venezuela on February 12, 1976. 

From that date on it was in regular service starting with a single flight departing from Paris on Fridays at 7pm (French time) and arriving at Maiquetía at 7pm Venezuelan time that is 6 hours instead of the normal 11 for a regular jet. The plane spent the night in our country then departed for Europe on Saturday at 9am and for 1977 it extended to two weekly flights on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The cost of the ticket Caracas-Paris-Caracas was of only Bs 995.00 additional of the passage of 1st class on a regular jet plane, that is to say a Bs 11,995.00 of that time. 

During the years of operation of Concorde to Caracas, Air France covered the route alternating Concorde (direct flight) and the Boeing 747 for a total of 5 weekly flights. The latter made the route Paris-Caracas-Bogotá.

Unfortunately due to the devaluation of the Bolívar in 1983 the flights of this Majestic Time Machine were canceled and due to the increasingly precarious economic situation of the country, we could not witness the painful withdrawal of Concorde in 2003.   

I hope you have enjoyed this bit of contemporary history of what was once called the Saudi Venezuela that we all yearned for in the midst of this crisis.