I did Concorde flight test support for the Elliott/SFENA AFCS at Fairford and Filton from 1969 until 1974.
These last few years I've been sticking my nose back into Concorde documentation, systems etc., among other things to help out with the restoration of the flight sims at Brooklands and Toulouse.
Ex FSO GRIFFO,
The
vast majority of the Concorde panel instruments have remained unchanged from the original production fit in the early/mid seventies until the final flights in 2003. True in particular for the 'iconic' ones, like the ADI, HSI, ASI, Machmeter, VSI, engine instruments, and suchlike.
Most go back even further: the cockpit of the first preprod (Concorde 01) aircraft which flew end 1971, already looks very familiar compared to a production aircraft.
There were changes and updates, but they concerned relatively minor items.
The main one was the TCAS (the only 'glass' instrument) which became obligatory somewhere in the nineties, and led to a few instruments being shuffled about.
IIRC the clocks were updated at some point from semi-analogue to fully numerical displays.
The weather radar was updated at BA to preserve commonality with the rest of the BA fleet.
You really needed to be an insider to notice the differences over the years.
dixi188,
The SFENA ADI and HSI (the two "big 'uns") on the A300B are to all extent and purposes identical to the ones on Concorde. You had to look at the identification plate on the back to know which one you had in your hands.
Originally Posted by MacBoero
So for Concorde although the computing part of the avionics was massively upgraded at some point....
Negative!
In particular the AFCS (autopilots, autostab, autotrim, artifical feel etc.) computers that were in place at the end of service in 2003 were the same as those installed in 1976. And everything was fully analogue.
About the only digital "stuff" on Concorde was the core of the INS, and the AICS (air intake control system).
The latter was an amazing piece of work. It was designed in a hurry by the BAC Guided Weapons division around 1972 or so, before any aircraft-qualified microprocessors even existed. Imagine a few boards full of TTL logic chips for a CPU,
forty-two 512-
bit PROMs for program memory and look-up tables, a minute amount of RAM, and a huge ADC and only slightly smaller DAC.
There were eight of them on board, and it was the top scorer for unscheduled removals.
Never upgraded... it would have been far too expensive for a fleet of only 16 aircraft.
When at some point it became totally impossible to source ADCs for repairs, the ADC/DAC board had to be redesigned to accept a different model, requalified and recertified. In all, including the manufacture of a new set of spares, the bill came to over £2 million, and that was only for a single board.
I've had the rare chance of flying on one of the last flights before retirement, and seeing, during a very brief cockpit visit, that everything I had helped develop thirty years earlier was still doing its job, unchanged....!
Christian
PS: Oh and...
MacBoero, Concorde was fly-by-wire as well (there was a mechanical back-up, but it was almost never used in anger). But at that time we still called it "electrical signalling". And since you worked on the A320, did you know the first tests with a side-stick were done on.... yes, a Concorde!