Last week we were invited* to Manchester Runway Visitor Park on one of their family fun days. Every Sunday through the holidays they have held family fun days where fair ground rides are free to go on.
The Runway Visitor Park is home to five aircrafts, including the Concorde G-BOAC, Nimrod, DC-10, Trident and Avro RJX.
You can book onto tours of the Nimrod and Concorde as well as flight academies for children between 3-12 years old. These allow children to board the crafts and learn about different roles of the airport. Unfortunately these were all booked up but I’m hoping to book one of these for the October holidays when they are back on. We did, however manage to book onto the Classic Corncorde Tour.
The Classic Corncorde Tour gave us chance to go into the Concorde Hangar. We got to board Concorde and sit in the luxurious leather seats and learn about some of the aircraft’s famous passengers. The tour was really interesting and we each went down to sit in the pilots seat and got to discover the unique features that made Concorde so special.
Did you know that people would travel to New York at breakfast, have their business meetings, do some shopping and fly back for bed time? That’s pretty impressive and even in 2018 we can’t do that. This did come at a cost of around £6000 though!
During the flight Concorde could stretch between 15 and 25 centimetres due to heating of the air frame. She is painted in a specially developed white paint to accommodate these changes and to counter the heat generated by supersonic flight.
The Concorde’s top cruising height was 60,000 ft, more than 11 miles above the surface of Earth and when on board you could see the curve of Earth.
Concorde could accelerate from 0-225 mph in 30 seconds and travel faster than the speed the Earth rotates.
In the park there is also a museum you can look around which is free entry, a play area and you can watch the flights coming and going from Manchester Airport on the raised viewing mounds. There is a gift shop full of memorabilia, a sandwich bar and restaurant. It is such a fab day out and must do for any plane fan x
