What a supersonic nose for a bargain!
Fan saved classic Concorde feature from scrap heap – and now he’s selling it for £250k
PLANE spotter Paul Phillips realised there was something a bit special about the oddly shaped object he had come across in a scrapyard.
And 40 years later, he is about to reap the benefits – having put one of Concorde’s distinctive nose cones up for sale for a supersonic £250,000.
As a 13-yearold, Paul used to visit the scrapyard in Staffordshire daily to pick through the remnants of aircraft discarded there by the Ministry of Defence.
He said: ‘When I saw it, I couldn’t resist. It had just been dumped there and because it did not contain much metal, there was not a lot they could do – except smash it to bits. So I was cheeky and asked the boss if I could have it. When I got home the next day, it had been delivered for free and was sitting in the front garden.’
A few years later, on the orders of his mother, Paul waved goodbye to his part of the world’s best-known jet and entrusted it to Duxford aviation museum near Cambridge.
However, despite visiting the museum several times, Paul never saw the ‘droop snoot’ nose on display. When he asked last year where it was, he was horrified when the museum dug it out from its warehouse and revealed that its identifying Concorde registration plate had been painted over with house paint. He said: ‘I have no idea why they did that. But I decided I would restore it properly myself.’
The cone was returned to him and over the past few months he has documented the restoration on his blog, concordeblog.com. He is now advertising the cone for sale through the site. During the restoration, an art expert painstakingly peeled off the paint that had been put over the plate and, using cotton buds and acetate, Paul cleaned off the rest of the cone. Experts then helped him to find the modern equivalent of the original primer, undercoat and top coat. He spent 1,000 hours working on it.
Now the helicopter crewman has put it up for sale on his website and is hoping it will fetch £250,000. Paul, from Norwich, said: ‘Research and the data plate on the nose confirm it was from aircraft 002 – the first prototype flown in the UK. The other, 001, was flown by the French.’
Concorde, which could fly at twice the speed of sound, was grounded after passenger numbers dwindled following the crash in Paris in 2000.
In 2003, a Concorde nose cone was bought by an Eastern European collector for a reported £320,000.