The cockpit view is of a very dark blue sky. Take-off is most dramatic, you open the throttle and there is a surge of power in the small of your back.

I used to have a lot of famous people on board. I’m keen on classical music so it was wonderful to meet Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, Ashkenazi and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

Once I was flying from Bahrain to Singapore and the cabin crew told me Elvis Costello was on board. During the flight he wanted to video the sun rising over the Malacca Strait. So he came on the flight deck and started filming: “God this is absolutely ****ing amazing,” he said. “I’m at 60,000 ****ing feet, mach ****ing 2, that’s twice the ****ing speed of sound, haven’t seen anything ****ing like it in my ****ing life . . .”

After he’d finished I said: “That was an interesting commentary.” He replied: “I don’t like writing letters, you see, so when I am on a long tour I send my mother videos from the places I’ve been instead!” On another flight, an 85-year-old woman passenger said the first aeroplane she had seen was in 1908, when one of the Wright brothers landed in Savannah, Georgia. Here was a woman whose life had spanned the history of air travel, sitting beside me at twice the speed of sound.

Andy Baillie, British Airways Concorde captain since 1995

In winter we watch the sun set before take-off in London, and then, because we are going faster than the Earth spins, see the sun rising in the west over Shannon, before touching down in New York in broad daylight to see the sun set half an hour later. It’s like being in a time machine.

I’ve flown Paul McCartney a few times, and on one flight he heard that it was another passenger’s 80th birthday, so he sat by the door and sang her Happy Birthday as she got off. She was very touched.

Richard Owen, British Airways Concorde captain since 1995

I must have completed 450 flights over eight years, and it is wonderful every time. Once I left London on a cold winter morning at 9.30, and by 11am, I was sitting in the sun watching a cricket game with a friend, having already been to a hotel, showered and changed. Superb.

Caroline Hendrie