IT ALL began with a tennis dinner. The year was 1981, and 47-year-old Captain Brian Walpole was flying high. As one of the first British Airways (BA) Concorde pilots, Mr Walpole had what he called “the best seat in the house”.
Week after week, he cruised at 60,000 feet from London to New York at twice the speed of sound. The 109 passengers and crew on board travelled 23 miles every minute — faster than the earth’s rotation, 12 miles beneath them.
After a long career RAF and then commercial career as a pilot, Mr Walpole had reached the pinnacle of his profession. He was happily married to a childhood sweetheart, with three flourishing children. His teenage daughter Shelley was a rising tennis star. In 1981, after one of her tournaments, the Walpoles attended a dinner at which they met the tennis journalist Gerald Williams, who mentioned that he was flying to New York later that week to commentate on the US Open.
Mr Walpole, who was soon to be given the additional task of steering BA’s struggling Concorde division into profit, was making the same journey on the same day. So, he proposed a deal: “Gerald, if I was to give you a free Concorde ticket to New York, would you undertake to me that every time you had a microphone in front of you commentating on tennis, that you eulogise about the wonderful flight you had out?”
Brian WalpoleBrian Walpole and fellow RAF trainees in 1953
Mr Williams was as good as his word, and followed up with an invitation to breakfast the next morning in New York, during which the journalist enquired where God featured in Mr Walpole’s many successes. Although he had been raised by a Bible-reading, churchgoing father, faith had barely featured in the pilot’s life. He was convinced that he had risen to the heights through skill and hard work.
“I can’t remember what my response was, but probably along the lines of, ‘Well, it’s how good I am at doing all this,’” Mr Walpole recalls. But that unexpected challenge niggled. After much cajoling from Mr Williams, Mr Walpole agreed to visit his church and meet the vicar. Over time, his wife joined him in church, and, as the pair read and studied and asked questions, they came to see things differently.
“I began to understand that everything I had had been given to me by God: my ability to fly aeroplanes, my wife, my children, the opportunities I had been encouraged to take, and my career path — everything had come from God,” Mr Walpole writes in his recently published memoir Captain Concorde.
“So it was, aged forty-seven, I began a new, far more incredible journey than any I had enjoyed in the ethereal skies above.”
CALLED up for National Service in the 1950s, Mr Walpole picked the RAF, and was soon learning to fly. He remembers this as an exhilarating time, and yet death and tragedy remained close at hand. Several of his friends died in crashes, including one whose jet slammed into the ground metres away from him after a bird hit the cockpit window.
Brian WalpoleFormation Aerobics with Tiger Squadron in 1955
On another occasion, while flying for the RAF’s acrobatic team — precursor to the Red Arrows — a demonstration went wrong, a parachute failed to open, and a colleague plummeted hundreds of metres to his death during an air show.
Despite it all, Mr Walpole remained unshaken, and said that he was never nervous when entering the cockpit. “I don’t know whether that was a function of complacency or confidence in oneself, but no, it didn’t impact on me.”
But he did meet an RAF chaplain, who left a lasting impression. The chaplain gave Mr Walpole a slim, pocket-sized St John’s Gospel, originally printed for the Forces during the war. At the end of the biblical text was a brief message: “What the compass and instruments are to the naval officer and the ordnance map is to the field officer, so the Bible is to us in our journey through life.”
It became his constant companion throughout his career. He would tuck it into his breast pocket before every flight, sometimes tapping it lightly as he fired off a quick prayer to a God whom he was not sure he believed in. “I used to put my hand on it and say, ‘Look after me,’ or ‘Here we go again.’ ‘Help me, Lord, with this one,’ or ‘Let me be calm, be with me Lord’ . . . it was with me, and I was conscious of getting all the safety out of flying that I could.”
A growing sense of his need of God was in marked contrast to those around him. When he began at BA, many of the more senior pilots had trained during the Second World War, and younger colleagues often grilled them for anecdotes about bombing raids on Germany. But Mr Walpole never heard these veterans of Bomber Command — a branch that suffered a 44-per-cent death rate — attribute their survival to the Lord. “And I remember that impacting on me. Why did they never say ‘Thank you, Lord,’ because I was becoming more and more appreciative. But I never, ever, ever heard a captain say ‘Oh, God spared me through 45 raids on Berlin.’”
HE TOOK over the Concorde division of BA in 1982, just as his faith was growing stronger. The division was losing money, and, with government support withdrawn, his bosses had given him just two years to get it into profit, or they would shut down the whole programme.
Fearing that, if Concorde collapsed, supersonic aviation would be set back for a generation, Mr Walpole responded immediately by seeking God’s help. “I know that I spent more and more time praying about the opportunity to save this beautiful aeroplane, and all the work that people had put into it.”
Within three years, a £16-million annual loss had been converted into a £50-million profit, and “Captain Concorde” was once again fêted. He flew the Queen to and from a Caribbean tour, and persuaded the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, to fly on Concorde for an official trip to Canada. It was there that he gained a memento that is still on the wall of his office at home: a “speeding” ticket issued to him by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for going at Mach 2 over Toronto.
Brian WalpoleQueen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in the jump seat of Concorde, with Brian Walpole
Flying over the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound came to feel quite different. He saw 250,000 square miles of the earth beneath him, and the stars above as he scratched the edge of space itself. “The more I understood, the more I realised that I, Brian Walpole, the egotist pilot, was simply a man who thought he had achieved everything in his own strength and abilities, but was finally coming face to face with the greater truth, seeing my life and the world in a whole new light.”
This perspective came into its own when his career came to an early and uncomfortable halt. In the late 1980s, he was flying home to London when one of the engines blew. He safely landed at Heathrow, but forgot to fill in his fuel log as required. BA grounded him during an investigation, but, before it could be completed, he reached mandatory retirement age.
“I appreciated as never before that I knew God was with me and loved me unconditionally,” he writes in his memoir. “Though [it was] painful, I experienced a peace that truly surpassed understanding, knowing that I could trust Him with my future away from the captain’s seat.”
Brian WalpoleBrian Walpole in 2024
A peaceful retirement was interrupted in 2000, when an Air France Concorde crashed on take-off at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, killing everyone on board. Mr Walpole still remembers the horror. “I froze, and I thought ‘Well, I hope it’s not one of ours.’” It wasn’t, but he had known the French pilot. The investigation into the Paris disaster, followed by a downturn in business aviation after 9/11, ultimately meant the end of Concorde, permanently grounded in 2003.
Mr Walpole was in no doubt that this was not the end of the story for supersonic flight, however, and points to firms in the US experimenting with a new generation of faster-than-sound commercial jets.
The first planes that he flew as an 18-year-old RAF cadet were hand-cranked Tiger Moths, with a top speed of 90mph and an engine no more powerful than a Ford Fiesta. By the end of his career, he was going more than 17 times faster, at the controls of the most futuristic plane ever built.
Now, aged 91, and despite enduring a slow recuperation from a broken hip, he has remained an active member of his local independent Evangelical church, still prays, reads his Gospel, and regularly prays — that telling his story might lead others to God. He will measure the success of the memoir, he says, by how many, after reading it, “have turned their faith up a notch”.
Captain Concorde: The true story of one man’s remarkable journey of flight and faith by Brian Walpole and Graham Lacey is published by Malcolm Down at £11.99 (Church Times Bookshop £10.79); 978-1-917455-00-8.