Galaxy flyer
Absolutely correct the T-heads often went up past us at 60000ft, which is quite scarey when you think of the energy required to do that. Makes you as part of mankind seem somewhat insignificant.
Avoiding them as another problemas the Malacca Straits is quite narrow, well it is for Concorde trying hard not to boom the land on either side, but as I remember it there were two good points
The T-storms seemed to be normally over the land either side, but more important we would start to slow down shortly after entering the Malacca Straits and once subsonic we were in the same ball park as other aircraft , avoid them at all cost, and we could then fly over land without upsetting people
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bio161
Just one qst. Thanks to her extremely high speed Concorde was able to fly to JFK from LHR in just 3hrs and 30mins. Usually this is a normal flight from LIRF to UUDD where the flight crew, offcourse, flies as well the way back. The flight crew of concorde used to fly from LHR to JFK and then back as well or they were finishing their duty period in JFK and another crew was taking over them?
No the crews flew just the one trans Atlantic sector and then got off for a rest. Well you could not have us boys working too hard now .
In fact it was just possible for the crews to do a return trip and indeed when there were crew problems this was indeed done.
Morning flight
The Concorde report time was 1.5 before departure and a turn around at JFK would have been about 1.5 hours so when all added up it could have just been done. However any delay to either service could result in the home bound flight being late or indeed cancelled due to flight time limitations. This the company deemed to be unacceptable risk on an aircraft which was sold as saving time.
In fact as the morning flight was on approach to JFK,the morning flight back to LHR was already taking off. For the crew to now wait for the late departure back to London would put them way over FTLimitations
That did not mean the crews only did one sector a day
LHR-IAD-MIA was a days work as was the return.
On some of the charter flights it was often a multi sector day such as
Sydney--Brisbane --Guam --Beijing
I was only doing the
PR on that trip so I have not got the times but it did seem a long day's work