Building Concorde: From Drawing Board to Mach 2

Concorde remains one of the most iconic and most beautiful aircraft ever to take to the skies and as a result many aspects of its development and its operational career have been covered frequently both in books and magazine articles.

However, this book provides genuinely new perspectives on the Concorde program as it explores how this great aircraft came into being, concentrating both on the design and development aspects of the airliner and on the political background to this exercise in Anglo-French collaboration.

Early chapters look at the various supersonic transport proposals mooted both in Britain and France before Concorde. The following sections examine areas relating to the practical difficulties of supersonic flight such as supersonic booms. The narrative then moves on to how the British and French work was merged into a single program.

Later portions of the book describe the flight test program leading up to service entry in 1976 and the text is complimented by an extensive range of photographs and drawings, a great many of which are previously unpublished.

Tony Buttler was born in England. He joined High Duty Alloys in 1974 as a metallurgist and for nearly 20 years was involved in the testing of aluminum and titanium airframe and engine components for all of the world's major aircraft. It was during this period that his great interest in aviation began to blossom. After leaving HDA, Buttler earned his Masters Degree in Archives and Library Studies at Loughborough University, and became a freelance aviation historian specializing in the design and development of military aircraft.

Jean-Christophe Carbonel was born in 1959 and wrote his first modelling article in 1977. Since then, he has pursued a writing career specializing in model kit history and in the history of aviation projects, prototypes, and early experimenters. Jean-Christophe has more recently specialized in French designs of all eras. Writing for various magazines on both sides of the Channel, the recent volumes of French Secret Projects were his first solo books for a British publisher.