What it was really like to fly on Concorde

Earlier this year, a Norwegian Air Boeing 787 Dreamliner hitched a ride on a powerful jet stream and flew from New York to London in a record-setting five hours and 13 minutes, landing almost an hour ahead of schedule.

Record-setting, perhaps, but for a subsonic airliner.

In 1976 -- over 40 years ago -- elite passengers were crossing the Atlantic in under three and a half hours, flying at twice the speed of sound in the Anglo-French Concorde.

Only 20 of the sleek, delta-winged SSTs were built, and just 14 were delivered to two airlines -- seven each to Air France and British Airways.

With superlative service and cuisine, exclusive airport lounges and stratospherically high airfares, Concorde passengers flew far above other flights, and cruised faster than fighter jets to their destinations.

Concorde's last commercial flight departed 15 years ago, on October 24, 2003.

But what was it really like to rub shoulders with the rich and famous on a Concorde flight? CNN Travel asked some former passengers what it was like to fly on one.

Cozy quarters

"The flight attendants loved being on it; the passengers loved being on it," says CNN's Richard Quest, who flew Concorde five times. "You were aware of being part of a very small group of people that were privileged enough to be on Concorde.

Concorde was extremely small, only about 100 seats. It had more like office chairs, bucket seats, and very small windows. It was noisy, extremely noisy, but I challenge anybody not to have a smile from ear to ear when they got on it."
The actual layout of the plane was in two sections. There was a front section, then a middle lavatory, and then a rear section," explains Quest.

The two sections were identical -- not like one was First Class and one was Business. But there was always a status symbol to being in the front section.