It’s seldom you meet someone who has travelled from Heathrow in London to New York and back again, in the space of just seven hours, but last week we discovered that a Mullingar resident and his wife did exactly that – and they have the official certificates to prove it.
Though retired now for some years, Gerry Doran, a Castlepollard man who has lived in Mullingar for decades, is well known in the town because of his close involvement in establishing its first piped television service. But not very many know that he and his wife achieved something unique in the 1990s – after he had won the “flight of a lifetime” – what the organisers called a ‘Champagne Flight for Two on Concorde’.
It was while chatting to him about his work in decades past in the world of television, when he was describing how Mullingar was probably the first town outside Dublin to have a piped television service, that he mentioned how at one stage, while he was working as a designer/engineer for a London-based company Videotron Corporation, back in the 1990s, he and his wife had travelled from London to New York and back on a British Airways Concorde.
