A British Airways Concorde is scheduled to land at Shannon Airport today after a 70-minute test flight.
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British Airways Concorde Alpha Foxtrot
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The flight will be the second at supersonic speed since the aircraft were grounded after last year's crash near Paris.
The "Alpha Foxtrot" flight includes half an hour at Mach two - twice the speed of sound, a BA statement said today.
"This enables the crew to complete a supersonic flight cycle including all the checks and procedures," British Airways said, adding that flight crew training at Shannon would include up to 35 take-offs and landings.
"Shannon is being used for this training as it has the required runway length and capacity and has been used before for the same purpose," BA said.
BA plans to resume commercial Concorde flights in September just over a year after one of Air France's supersonic passenger planes crashed outside Paris, an Anglo-French Concorde working group said last month. BA would only confirm these plans are for "late summer".
Concorde aircraft were grounded a year ago after flight AFR 4590 plunged into a hotel in the town of Gonesse near Paris shortly after take-off from Charles de Gaulle airport, killing 109 people on board and four people on the ground.
Since the grounding, engineers have been busy on such tasks as designing tougher tyres and strengthening fuel tank casings.