The day 25,000 people turned out to see Concorde

"The interest from the local public was off the scale – we had 25,000 people turn up at the airport."

Former travel company boss Stephen Bath vividly remembers the day Concorde flew from Bournemouth Airport.

It was 1996 and the airport's runway had recently been extended – to just about the length required for the iconic supersonic plane to be able to take off.

He has been reminiscing about the day, and how it came about, on the 50th anniversary of Concorde's first commercial flight in 1976.

He said his father Peter Bath, who founded the family businesses Palmair and Bath Travel, invited him for a chat over a whisky.

His father, Stephen recalls, asked him if he realised that the airport could now accommodate a Concorde and told him to call British Airways to see if he could "fix it up".

"I did a quick calculation of the numbers - it was about £100,000 to just have a Concorde fly into Bournemouth and then fly off around the [Bay of Biscay and back to Heathrow]," said Stephen.

"We wanted to do it for the fun of it and to make the Bournemouth Airport runway extension spectacular.

"We did that first one for nothing."

He said he remembered the airport in Hurn being "mobbed" by eager spectators.

"We really didn't expect the interest – it was a gamble," he said.

He said that over the next four-and-a-half years Concorde flew a total of 44 flights with 4,400 passengers from Bournemouth to Paris, Pisa, Nice, Lanzarote, Tenerife and Venice.

"We never had an empty seat – it was the most successful thing that we ever did," he added.

In 1998, he got permission to fly Concorde from Salisbury in Wiltshire.

"Salisbury hasn't got an airport - it's got a very top-secret military base which is experimental – but it does have a very long runway, as long as Heathrow," said Stephen.

He explained that Concorde needed 95 tonnes of fuel to reach New York and "that was simply too much weight to get off the ground from Bournemouth's shorter runway."

"They very kindly gave permission but their runway had no terminal and no toilets, so we checked everybody into a pub at Amesbury."

Stephen described Concorde as the "most beautiful, spectacular aircraft that has ever been built".

"To have it come through our little airport was a great moment and the highlight of my life," he added.

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