I was lucky enough to win a "joyride" on Concorde with Hewlett Packard. We took off from London Heathrow at approx 17:30 GMT on 2nd Dec 1999. Because it was a short trip (an hour and a half out and back to Heathrow) we had half a tank of fuel and no baggage making the plane quite lite.
Take off was unreal, full throttle with reheat (afterburner). Rotation was at 250knts about half way down the runway and rate of climb was 11,000 feet per minute until leveling off and throttle back at 8,000 feet for noise abatement. The angle of climb was so high that I actually had to look back (as opposed to down) to see the lights of London. When they pulled off the power some of the cushions actually "floated" off the seats.
Flew west to Bristol and straight past south coast of Ireland. As we passed Cork they pushed full power and hit reheat on all four engines. They had warned us that they normally hit them in pairs so as not to frighten the passengers but seeing this was a pleasure trip, and the plane was lite, they decided to show off. Prior to this they had also asked the cabin crew to stow the trolleys for the transition and put on seat belts.

Being a frequent flyer and having some two seat flight time I of course thought I knew better and ignored the warning. I mean how much acceleration are you going to experience when you have 710knts indicated? Answer: The tray full of food they had given me landed in my lap.

We accelerated from 710 to 1415knts while climbing from 45,000 to 65,000. It didn't take long. While the level of acceleration did ease off, the initial kick was like a 737 on a take off roll. I looked out the windows and the distant lights of Cork city gave a little kick and then started moving backwards very fast.

The rest of the flight was relatively uneventful except for the western sunrise. When we left Heathrow it had been dark for more than an hour but as we moved rapidly west the sky became pale and then the sun rose.

The landing back at Heathrow felt normal enough although Concorde lands lands at a much higher speed than normal airliners. The striking thing is that Concorde has very powerful brakes, far stronger relative to the aircraft weight than usual (or so they told us) and it certainly stops very quickly.
A very enjoyable and totally unforgettable experience.

--IanB Dublin, Ireland