Practical After admiring the Concorde on the roof of the Sinsheim Museum, we really wanted one of our own, but had to settle for the next best alternative – the LEGO® Concorde.
This set has been out for a while now, but it’s still available and is one of the best aviation sets LEGO has ever made. Both detailed and with some thoughtful moving parts, the Concorde rivals the Space Shuttle Discovery in terms of detail and fun to build.
The set is massive, with 2,083 pieces. LEGO says it’s 105cm long and 43cm wide at its widest point – the trailing edge of the iconic delta wing. It’s also delightfully free of the sticker overload that’s typical of more recent builds, including the Artemis SLS set, where even the base on which the finished product stands has a printed element.
That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of tricky elements to the build, though. If you remove part of the fuselage, you can see part of the passenger cabin. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t minifigure scale – we can’t imagine how big the set would be. However, LEGO could have perhaps included a few nanofigures. There’s also no cockpit to look into.
The fuselage contains Technic components that allow the landing gear to be lowered or folded in by rotating the aircraft’s tail. The flight control surfaces can also be moved, as can the supersonic aircraft’s famous drooping nose.
This is probably the most controversial part of the build and an area where something clearly needed to be changed to avoid creating too many special parts. Keep the nose straight as if you were flying and the model looks great. Drop the nose and… it just looks weird. The cockpit window is a special part from LEGO but tilting it down to create the tilt exposes a bit too much of the model’s internal workings.
The LEGO Concorde slope – click to enlarge
This is somewhat unfortunate in a model that is otherwise so detailed, but it is also forgivable given the complexity required to solve the problem.
Another annoying feature is the paintwork, which is very close to that of the test versions of the aircraft. There are retrofit kits that can be used to give the model a British Airways or Air France look, but it’s a shame that these weren’t included in the kit to give the builders a choice.
These are all relatively minor criticisms of an otherwise excellent model that isn’t even overly expensive compared to some LEGO sets. However, at £169.99, it’s not cheap.
But compared to the cost of building, operating and flying the original, it’s a bargain. ®
