Originally Posted by
Cron
My question concerns lighting. Not many decent pictures showing landing lights etc being used in anger.
Concorde appears to have a much reduced frontal area for the housing of such lighting.
Quite right!
Nevertheless there were
three separate sets of landing/taxi lights there.
Quoting from the manual:
Two main landing lamps, one mounted in each wing root leading
edge, have retractable/extensible mountings and when not in
use are retracted in the lamp housing.
Two land/taxi lamps, similar to the main landing lamps, are attached to the
nose landing gear bay doors. The land/taxi lamps extend to
an intermediate position for landing, upon which they
automatically extend to the full position for taxiing, thus
changing the beam angle to compensate for the attitude change.
Two taxi/turn-off lamps, one mounted on each side of the
forward fuselage, provide ground illumination to identify
runway turn-off points.
These are the 'main' lights in the wing leading edge (600W each).
These are the lights in the nosewheel doors ("only" 450W each).
There is also the question of lenses having to withstand supersonic flow.
All three of the sets of lights had a cover to blend them in smoothly with the structure, much like the cabin windows.
The heat was less of a problem, actually.
The lights themselves were high-power sealed-beam units, the main units were 6
00W each, and the ones in the nosewheel doors were
450W ... nothing like your car headlights.
As a matter of fact, on the ground you were not suppossed to turn them on any more than 5 minutes in any 10 minutes.... they got a lot hotter when switched on, than they did in supersonic flight.
And also the angle of attack on landing (hope I have the right terminology there) seemingly pointing any lighting into the sky.
Good point!
What happened was that the main landing lamps in the wing roots were angled such, that they pointed straight ahead at the right angle to "hit" the runway during the landing itself.
Once the aircraft touched down, the land/taxi lights in the nose gear door extended further and lit a wider expanse of the runway ahead (see the earlier quote from the manual).
And then the third set of lights in the nose helped you to find the turn-off to the taxiway.
One nice little detail.... on F-BTSD, the Concorde at the French Le Bourget museum, those lights still work, and on G-BBDG, the Concorde at the Brooklands museum that was saved from the scrapheap, they brought those lights back to life, too.
CJ