Brit Loses 43% of Body Weight After Winning Trip

Therea are a lot of Concorde stories coming to light this week, as the last commercial flight of the SST is scheduled for today (Friday). One of the most-unusual concerns a 32-year-old British bank clerk named Justin Cornell.

He now admits that he used to live on carry-out food and never exercise. Even the way he earned the Concorde flight was practically designed to add to his then-322-pound avoirdupois.

Here's how he got his ticket:

A supermarket chain named Tesco offered "Clubcard points," 100 of them, for each two boxes of particular orange-filled, chocolate-covered cookies sold. Those loyalty points could be converted into any number of cool premia, a Concorde flight among them.

Justin shops Tesco, and likes to fly. Once previously, he bought over $400 worth of shampoo, and exchanged his points for a flight to San Francisco. The Concorde flight, though, would take 45,000 points -- 900 boxes of chocolate cookies; $1200. That was cheap, Justin figured. He had to go to three stores to get enough cookies, to get enough points.

Justin, though, was worried: what if he didn't fit into the seat? What if the flight were full? As it turned out, the promotion was timed to help fill Concorde seats: the pointed birds had just resumed flying after their postcrash layoff and re-engineering, and there were plenty of empty seats.

Cornell made the flight, but it changed his life, he now says. He didn't ever want to worry that he might not fit into a seat, or that he might not be able to use the lavatory, because of his girth. He started a diet and exercise program as soon as he landed; he has laid off the junk food, and the large quantities of it -- and he's dropped 140 pounds. The Bahlsen Messino cookies? He sold them, and made money on the sale -- and donated the money to charity.

"You could almost say that the Concorde saved my life," he told the BBC.

FMI: www.britishairways.com