“It was the pinnacle of flying.”

It’s been almost 30 years since Sally Armstrong last flew on Concorde, but her face lights up as she remembers her time as stewardess on the supersonic British Airways aircraft.

“It was very glamorous,” she says with a smile.

“Michael Winner was a regular, Robin Gibb – I carried him several times. Paul McCartney was a regular, but I didn’t meet him, Spielberg I met twice, Elizabeth Taylor. I had a date with John Denver in New York.

“You’d look forward to going to work.

Even the most famous passengers would sit there and you would see them trying to act nonchalant, but as soon as we started taxiing you would see the excitement.

“David Frost described it as a unique flying club. People would know each other, we got to know the passengers.”

Sally, who now lives in Milford on Sea, began working for BA while flat-sharing with an air stewardess in Richmond. She was working as a teacher at the time, and remembers vividly coming home on the bus one rainy day to find the flat littered with the bikinis of her flatmate, who had just returned from a flight to Nairobi.

“I thought, ‘I need to have some of this’,” she laughs.

Sally applied to BA and within a year was flying 747s to Japan, Hong Kong, Australia and LA.

“You do get a bit jet-lagged after a while – the time zones were quite extreme,” she says.

“I walked down the corridors of power one morning and there was a notice saying ‘Concorde crew required’. I got all my papers together and I went for an interview and that was it.”

With a take off speed of 250mph and a cruising speed of 1350mph – more than twice the speed of sound – as well as a host of regular celebrity passengers, Concorde was seen as an incredibly prestigious way to travel.

A typical London to New York crossing would take just under three-and-half hours and, by the time the aircraft reached the speed of sound, all passengers would have a cocktail or a glass of wine in their hands.

“We had to be really quick,” remembers Sally, “34 minutes after take-off you were doing the speed of sound. That’s faster than a rifle bullet.”

Concorde took 100 passengers and had six cabin crew, who generally had three-and-a-half hours to serve a five-course lunch or dinner menu.

It was a tall order, but Sally loved it.

She generally flew from London to Washington and Miami, but also worked on charters, such as flying with the Royal Air Force at air shows, or the time the Saudi royals chartered Concorde to fly from Washington to Nice.

“The Queen Mother of Saudi Arabia had an operation in LA,” says Sally , “she flew by privat e jet to Washington , so we flew out in an empty jet to Washington. We were met by these amazing limos which took us to this wonderful hotel.

“The next morning, we went to the aircraft and prepared it, then the royals came along. We flew to Nice.

There was the Queen Mother and the three princes and princesses at the front, and 48 entourage in the back .

“We made history that time, because it was the longest flight that Concorde ever did – it was four hours.”

Sally clearly loved her seven years on Concorde, and admits she never tired of the excitement of the take-off .

“The take off speed was something like 225mph , you were airborne within 30 seconds. It was like being in a rocket . It was just amazing.

“We loved it, the passengers loved it. It was an amazing aircraft. You talk to any cabin crew who was working on that aircraft , we were just so , so sad when it finished.”

Sally left the airline in 1987, shortly before falling pregnant and starting to write her first novel.

BA withdrew Concorde in October 2003 but Sally, who went on to become an author and a yachting photographer, was keen to keep its memory alive .

With the help of a diary of her time on the aircraft , and conversations with three captains and a handful of cabin crew , she has now written a book about the Concorde lifestyle, called Vintage Champagne on the Edge of Space.

“It was like no other aircraft and I felt, for history, it had to be written,” she says."

  • Vintage Champagne on the Edge of Space, published by History Press, is available now in Bookends in Christchurch, and on Amazon .