Flight engineer reveals what it was really like to operate supersonic jet Concorde

CNN — Concorde flight engineer Warren Hazelby gets chills recalling his first supersonic flight from London to New York in 2002. Warren Hazelby On board Concorde, Hazelby quickly learned that the pilot, first officer and flight engineer worked as “a very close-knit team.” “Much more so than on some of the other aircraft,” he says. “With the Concorde, pilots couldn’t do certain things without the flight engineer, and the flight engineer couldn’t do certain things without the pilot,” says Hazelby. Lewis Whyld/Shutterstock For Hazelby, working as the flight engineer for the last ever Concorde flight in November 2003 was “very emotional.” He’d hoped to operate the controls of the supersonic jet for a lot longer – in the end, Hazelby only had a year qualified on Concorde before British Airways retired the aircraft. “It was something we had to live with.” Some of Hazelby’s younger British Airways flight engineer colleagues retrained as pilots, while some older flight engineers took early retirement.