THE Tory party's prospective parliamentary candidate for Bolton South-east has hit back at the push to ground British Airways' Concorde fleet.

Haroon Rashid, who works for BA as a customer service executive at Heathrow Airport, has been involved in talks with Air France and the European Union over the safety of the aeroplanes.

The 29-year-old said British Airway's Concordes have an "excellent safety record spanning 30 years".

And he said attempts to force the airline to ground its fleet -- a step taken by Air France -- are ill-judged.

He said: "There are only five or six Concordes left in the world now that France have put theirs out of service.

"Supersonic planes will never be made again, so Britain has something to be proud of. Maybe it breeds envy.

"We have said that as long as people demand Concorde, the planes will fly.

"Air France had a different set of engineers to us and operated in a different way.

"Their planes were found to have faults which is why they were grounded. Our planes have been passed."

His comments came following the Concorde Crash in Paris on July 25 in which 113 people died moments after the Air France plane had taken off.

Concorde can reach 1,350 miles-per-hour -- twice the speed of sound -- and one chalked up a record flight time across the Atlantic of two hours and 52 minutes 59 secs from New York to London's Heathrow.

Mr Rashid, who hails from Yorkshire but has family ties in Bolton, has set his hopes on overturning Dr Brian Iddon's huge Labour majority in the next General Election.