In his occasional series of articles about whether bucket list destinations and experiences live up to expectations, Andrew Palmer recalls the day he broke the sound barrier — and the woman who made history doing it for a living.

There are journeys that take you somewhere, and then there are journeys that are the somewhere. Concorde was emphatically the latter. You were not flying to New York or Barbados or the Bay of Biscay; you were flying on Concorde, and that changed everything — the champagne tasted different at 60,000 feet, the smoked salmon arrived with an almost theatrical flourish, and even the caviar seemed to understand that it was performing at altitude.

My obsession began long before I ever set foot on the aircraft. As a boy, Concorde was not merely a plane; it was a statement — angular, improbable, impossibly elegant. The droop-snoot nose, the vast delta wing, the sheer audacity of the thing. By the time I was old enough to do something about that obsession, I had resolved that I would fly supersonic myself, and so I booked one of the many excursion flights that departed from Heathrow, arcing out over the Bay of Biscay and back—a round trip to nowhere in particular that was, in every sense that mattered, the point.

My parents drove me to Heathrow. They stood and watched, not quite concealing their envy, as I disappeared airside. Years later they would have their own supersonic chapters — flights to Canada and Iceland — but that day was mine. At nineteen, I was about to embrace the high life at an unprecedented speed, independent of the engines.

The anticipation began on the ground. Concorde's fuselage is narrower than you expect — considerably narrower — and there is something almost intimate about stepping aboard, as though the aircraft is taking you into its confidence. You settle into your seat knowing that what is about to happen is not routine, that the world outside is shortly going to be rearranged.

The engines built to a roar that you felt as much as heard—a physical pressure at the base of the chest—and then the reheat cut in, and the runway began to disappear beneath us with a ferocity that pressed you back into your seat with cheerful authority. Concorde required a takeoff speed of roughly 250 mph, the four Rolls-Royce/SNECMA Olympus 593 engines burning into reheat as she surged forward, consuming fuel at a rate that made conventional airliners look positively frugal. She lifted off from Heathrow, the nose angled upward, and we were away.

What followed was unlike any climb I have experienced before or since. A conventional long-haul jet will take the better part of an hour to reach its cruising altitude of 35,000 to 38,000 feet, ascending at a stately pace while the cabin crew begins their routines and the world below resolves slowly into a patchwork. Concorde was not interested in stateliness. She was at 30,000 feet before most aircraft would have finished climbing, and she did not stop there. The altimeter continued upward—40,000, 50,000, and on to her cruising altitude of around 60,000 feet—and the whole ascent was accomplished in something under twenty-five minutes from wheels-up. You were, almost before you had adjusted to the idea, in a different layer of the atmosphere entirely: in the stratosphere, where weather does not happen, where the sky above shades into something approaching the deep blue-black of space, and where the horizon does something quite unexpected.

It curves. Not dramatically, not so that you doubt your eyes, but unmistakably — the earth's edge bending away in both directions with a gentleness that is, paradoxically, overwhelming. I pressed close to the window and looked and kept looking. Below were clouds, weather, and the ordinary world. Up here, at twice the speed of sound, there was a stillness that seemed almost to contradict the Machmeter, which had by then clicked past Mach 1 and was making its way purposefully towards Mach 2: 1,350 miles per hour, give or take, some 23 miles above the surface of the planet. The champagne, at this point, seemed not merely appropriate but essential.

It was on the return leg, arcing back towards England after our turn over the Bay of Biscay, that the day produced its unexpected bonus. As we came in low over Suffolk on the approach back towards Heathrow, Concorde swept along the runway at Mildenhall — not landing, but making a flypast for the air show below, nose tilted characteristically upward, that great delta wing catching the light. From the ground, I imagine, it must have been a considerable sight: Concorde materialising at low level, filling the airfield with sound, the heat haze from those four Olympus engines shimmering behind her as she passed. From inside, looking down at the crowds gathered along the perimeter, the sensation was something else entirely — the quiet, private thrill of knowing that the spectacle they were craning their necks to witness was the very aircraft you were sitting in. They had travelled to Mildenhall for an airshow. We had simply arrived, at twice the speed of sound, as part of the programme. I suspect we had rather the better of it.

Concorde's commercial story was both triumphant and brief. Built jointly by British and French manufacturers, it made its first transatlantic crossing in September 1973 and entered scheduled service in January 1976 — British Airways initially flying from London to Bahrain, Air France from Paris to Rio de Janeiro. New York followed in November 1977. Only fourteen aircraft ever entered service; noise restrictions and operating costs limited the routes ruthlessly, and eventually New York became the sole regular destination for both airlines. Air France retired its fleet in May 2003, and British Airways in October the same year. The era was over.

I did not fully appreciate, as I watched the Machmeter climb, that I was in the presence of history still being made. That realisation arrived some years later, in the back of a car on the road between York station and an aircraft hangar at RAF Linton-on-Ouse.

I had invited Barbara Harmer to speak at a CBI Yorkshire and Humber dinner—a venue that felt, in retrospect, entirely fitting—and collected her from the train myself. The forty-five minutes I spent driving her to the hotel were among the most absorbing I can recall. Barbara had begun her aviation career with a commuter airline called Genair before joining British Caledonian in 1984, flying BAC 1-11s on short-haul routes and then transitioning to the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 on long haul. When British Caledonian merged with British Airways in 1987, the door to Concorde opened — if only theoretically. Of British Airways' 3,000-plus pilots at the time, fewer than sixty were women, and the annual intake onto Concorde's rigorous six-month training programme was tiny. The odds, as Barbara acknowledged, were not encouraging.

In 1992 she was selected. In March 1993, having completed her conversion course, Barbara Harmer became the first woman in the world to pilot Concorde—not as co-pilot, but as captain. She told me about it in the measured, precise way that pilots tend to discuss remarkable things: factually, without drama, as though the drama speaks entirely for itself.

It was in the car, not at the lectern, that she spoke about the Paris disaster. The Air France Flight 4590 crash of July 2000—109 people on board, four more on the ground, the whole terrible sequence caught on camera as the stricken aircraft struggled away from Charles de Gaulle trailing fire—had ended Concorde as surely as it had ended those lives. The fleet was grounded, modifications were made, a brief return to service followed, and then in 2003 came the final retirement. Barbara, like every Concorde pilot, had to retrain on conventional jets to readjust to cruising at altitudes and speeds that must have felt, after the stratosphere, almost apologetic. She spoke of it quietly, and there was in her words a sense of grief that needed no elaboration — the grief of someone who had fought hard to reach something extraordinary, had lived inside it, and had then watched it taken away. Some things, once gone, simply cannot be reconstituted.

There was a detail that emerged in the course of that forty-five-minute drive which has stayed with me. Comparing notes on routes and passengers, it transpired that Barbara had been at the controls on one of my parents' supersonic flights — those very trips to Canada and Iceland that they had eventually made after standing at Heathrow years earlier, watching me disappear through departures with imperfectly concealed envy. The world, at Mach 2 or otherwise, has a way of being considerably smaller than it appears.

Concorde is gone now, reduced in most cases to museum pieces standing in silent hangars at Heathrow, Filton, and a handful of sites on both sides of the Atlantic, the paint fading slightly, the cabins preserved in amber. There are serious people who talk seriously about supersonic flight returning — about new aircraft, new technologies, and quieter engines — and perhaps they are right. Perhaps one day the sound barrier will again be broken commercially, and a new generation will press their faces to the windows at 60,000 feet and watch the earth curve away beneath them.

But it will not be Concorde. And Concorde, in the end, was never really about speed. It was about the feeling of being alive in a moment you knew wouldn't come again.

I am reminded of this two or three times a year. Landing at Paris Charles de Gaulle—the very airport from which Flight 4590 departed on that catastrophic July morning in 2000—I find myself doing the same thing every time as we taxi slowly towards the terminal: I look out of the window for her. There she stands, the surviving Air France Concorde, preserved on the ground at the airport, witnessing both her glory and her end— that elegant delta silhouette quite unmistakable even from a distance, even through the scratched oval of an economy-class window. I look, and I feel the familiar pull of something between pride and longing — the envy, perhaps, of my former self, the nineteen-year-old who pressed his face to a rather better window and watched the earth curve away at twice the speed of sound.

The Machmeter climbs, the champagne is poured, and somewhere far below, a crowd at an airshow looks up. Lucky them. Lucky us.