The flight speed record that remains unbroken 50 years on

On 1 September 1974, two men made the fastest ever journey between New York and London. The astonishing trip - at three times the speed of sound - set a record that still stands 50 years later.

- David Barnett

Even the mighty Concorde, which set the record for the fastest commercial transatlantic flight in 1996, straggled in almost an hour behind.

The US air force Lockheed Blackbird SR-71 jet had a crew of two-pilot James Sullivan and reconnaissance systems operator Noel Widdifield who completed the journey between the two cities in one hour, 54 minutes and 56 seconds before landing at the Farnborough air show in Hampshire.

Widdifield, now 83, splits his time between Virginia and Florida in the US. "In a way, this was a standard flight for us," he said. "There was nothing different about it or the way we flew the plane. But we had been told in July 1974 that we would attempt the world record for flying between New York and London, which had previously been set by Royal Navy pilots. There was a lot of media interest."

It wasn't just bragging rights at stake. America was undergoing something of an international public relations crisis -just three weeks earlier, the disgraced president Richard Nixon had resigned after the Watergate scandal and Gerald Ford had been sworn in to the White House. There was still a hangover from their disastrous involvement in the Vietnam war. The country needed something to celebrate.