A RARE collection of Concorde memorabilia is expected to sell for thousands of pounds when it goes under the hammer next month.

The lot includes flight and crew manuals, pilots’ handbooks and checklists for Concorde 01 - the supersonic British aircraft which was flown from Filton near Bristol to RAF Fairford on its maiden voyage in 1969.

Pilots Brian Trubshaw and John Cochrane took the controls of the British-built plane and made the historic 22-minute flight on April 9.

The auction will be held on April 9, exactly 50 years since the first flight roared over Wiltshire and Swindon to land at RAF Fairford.

The top lot is a Concorde test pilot's personal training note book, dating from1967-1972, a vinyl album containing 92 pages of printed schematic and diagramatic pages all with detailed hand-written training annotations, which is estimated at £1,000-1,500.

The documents include notes by assistant chief test pilot, Peter Baker, who was part of Concorde’s crew on her momentous first flight from Filton to RAF Fairford.

Expert Neil Shuttleworth from the auction house told the Adver: “It was just in a box inside someone’s loft and inside were all these interesting manuals and handbooks.

“The most influential is lot 522 in the auction. Which is 92 pages with the prototype manual with all of this noting.

“God knows what it was like being handed the keys to that thing.

“The main test pilot - his notes are in the Smithsonian Museum. That’s how important this sort of stuff is.

“Realistically for a collector to be able to get their hands on this they will have to do a fair bit of fighting for it.

“Everyone is so fond of it, because it’s such an iconic aeroplane. Nothing has really ever come close to it.”

Concorde had a cruising speed of 2,160kph, which is nealy twice the speed of sound, and could fly passengers from London to New York in 2 hours and 52 minutes.

It captured the imagination of aviation fans and the public before its last flight in 2003.The auction of all the Concorde memorabilia will be held by Special Auction Services at the Greenham Business Park, near Newbury, on Tuesday April 9.