Originally Posted by
bearfoil
The Blackbird had corrugated skin, the first since the Ford Trimotor. It flew at M3, and made no attempt to conserve fuel. My point is that when "Distortion" gets to be quantifiable, some thing might be considered other than lamenting poor SFC??
I'm afraid I'm totally missing your point....
The Blackbird was a military aircraft, and flew from one flying 'gas station' to the next. It didn't ever bother to tank up properly when taking off... first job was getting to 30,000ft and "fill 'er up".
On Concorde it was only during the flight testing that the distortion became fully quantifiable (of course we had a good idea beforehand), and we then tweaked that to get those extra few percent in SFC.
What was the difference prior/post Dakar??
I've never seen the figures pre-Dakar.
Post-Dakar, CDG-JFK was supposedly "on the edge".
CJ