Originally Posted by
Trackdiamond
...and the design of adjacent engines must have been seen as a potential hazard during engine failures and fires or tyre blow ups.Comet and VC10 as well as their russian counterparts had similar flaws in their designs.Had the Boeing Supersonic Airliner taken off with its different engine design who knows if supersonic airliner transport might have taken a different track?
Not really. For one thing, the 2707 design was only at the mock-up stage when cancelled, so the practicalities of its engine arrangement hadn't been touched on. If you go back and read the Ted Talbot 'oil and lamp black' story, you can see for yourself that Concorde had solved problems that even US military designs were struggling with half a decade later.
As for the Concorde nacelle/engine arrangement - it didn't really have that large an impact on the F-BTSC accident - because even if the nacelles weren't grouped, the hot gases from the burning fuel would still have had a negative impact on the airflow to the adjacent engine. If I recall correctly, the investigators calculated the way the damage spread through the structure and control connections and proved that even if all four engines were still producing the correct thrust, the fire would still have caused sufficient structural damage to prevent the aircraft making Le Bourget. The nacelle structure itself was proven to be strong enough to withstand an uncontained failure of the engine when it actually happened on the line.
Apropos of nothing, the separate "podded" design was proven to be no protection against damage to adjacent engines when the inboard starboard engine of El Al 1862 took out the outboard as it fell away.