Concorde question

[M2dude]

My Own Personal Love Afair

My long (eternal?) love affair with Concorde probably started, like with so many other people (at least those ancient enough to remember) on March 2nd 1969. I was at home at my mum's house on leave from the RAF, (I really was a funny hairy little 'erk') when the live TV coverage, in glorious black and white, showed the first prototype 001 taking to the air in Toulouse. Raymond Baxter's classic commentary understatement of 'she flies, Concorde flies', combined with the sight of this sleek white aircraft, trailing a cloud of thick black exhaust smoke, taking to the air for the first time. (The prototype aircraft in my view looked a little ungainly compared to the pre-production and production babies, and the -22R engines fitted to the original aircraft was a real coal burner). And as far as TV went, it was quite a year; While on night shift at RAF Lyneham I got to watch the live feed of the first Apollo moon landing too.
The next stage in my love affair was in 1970, when this same hairy little 'erk' heard this roar in the sky over Swindon while shopping and saw the British prototype 002 with its accompanying Canberra chase plane flying very low, straight over the top of Debenhams; my jaw dropped as I stared at this amazing (but rather loud) spectacle unfolding right in front of my eyes.
The die was cast I guess for me in 1972. I was on the ramp at RAF Lyneham, chatting to a visiting USAF C-141 crew. "do ya ever get 'the Concorde' flyin' anywhere near hear ?" asked one of the pilots. I was about to tell him that sometimes on occasion we get a brief glimpse, when the pre-production aircraft 101 flew straight over the top of us. Now these USAF guys just stood there in awe, their eyes popping out like organ stops, and I just figured that this amazingly on cue spectacle just had to be a sign. When I left the RAF two years later I joined BAC at Filton and Fairford engaged on the production and flight testing side of Concorde, leaving there for BA at the end of July 1977. (The story goes that I was delivered to BA a week after G-BOAE as part of a surplus, auxiliary spares package ).
So that's my personal Concorde love affair, it started in 1969 and continues to this day, forty one years later. GOD I AM OLD!!

Dude

[landlady]

One of my other first flight memories was looking out of one of the windows in the rear cabin as we approached LHR on the return sector, and seeing nothing but low cloud. Being a supernumerary I was occupying a passenger seat.


I remarked to one of the passengers how low the cloud was, considering by now we were all strapped in and fairly close to the ground.


The passenger, obviously a regular, looked at me and said,
"That’s the wing."


What a fool I felt!! I was so used to looking out of the window at the rear on a normal jet and seeing the ground, I had completely forgotten that these were delta wings and so nothing to be seen but an expanse of white as you looked directly below. Doh!


I am happy to report that quite a few passengers have made this mistake, (it wasn’t just me, and no, I’m not blonde!). It sounds stupid but the mind plays strange tricks when it sees something it doesn’t expect to see!


I loved M2dude’s recollection of when he fell in love with Concorde. It happened to me around 1972 when I saw her in the sky, (believe it or not, over Blackpool!), for the first time. She looked beautiful, elegant, and serene and I knew then that not only did I want to fly for a living, but I wanted fly on Concorde. Later that year I was flying for Freddie Laker. So I suppose you could say that seeing her in the sky that day changed my life.


And no M2dude, you are not old. We have lived through, and had hands on experience of something that no other generation will have in the foreseeable future, so I’m pleased to be the age I am for it was being in the right place at the right time which gave me my chance.


Warm regards,

LL x

[Old Ag]

Being from the far side of the pond, my opportunities to see Concorde have been few. But I was privileged to be at Oshkosh in 1985 when Concorde made the first of many appearances at the EAA airshow. After the 1000 mile trip in the back of a 172RG, my world view of aviation was not the most positive. However, Concorde, with the late Captain John Cook at the controls changed all that in an instant.

I remember his approach to Rwy 36 and how quiet the 100,000 or so crowd became. He landed then surprised the crowd will a full reheat touch and go, followed by the always spectacular and precise low level display.

The Concorde stayed parked there for the week with a several hour queue to get a look inside. As I recall they did at least one charter.

I happened to be near the end of the runway during a takeoff and Concorde flew right over me. I have an up-close and personal photo of nothing but the underside of the wing with the undercarriage retracting.

It would be nice if she was still in the air, but at least I get to regularly visit the Air France Concorde on display at IAD.

-Old Ag

[HalloweenJack]

i have managed to borrow the dvd`s for the BA concorde by ITVV (300 minutes worth) - and can totally recommend them if you want to see how the workforce `up front` do ther job within concorde - Captain Dave Rowlands , First Officer Les Brodey and FLight EngineerRoger Bricknell.

guided tour of concorde , and i did like the segments on just how much temperature effected performance - and the section (i think 20 minutes worth) explaining just how important the fuel system played in the flight `56.5 going aft` i do understand now

[ChristiaanJ]

My "Concorde Story" really started around April 1968.

I'd only just finished my aeronautical enginering studies and had already been sending CVs all over the place... when I received a letter from the French firm (SFENA) that was building the French half of the Concorde automatic flight control system, to meet them for an interview : they needed a "flight test support engineer" to take care of their equipment in the UK (Fairford and Filton).

"No experience needed".... since everything in Concorde was new anyway....
My engineering degree, which included a fair amount of electronics, was considered enough... I could learn the rest "on the job".
What clinched the deal at the time was that I was aleady pretty well bilingual Dutch/English, and spoke enough French to get by, whereas in those days most of the French engineers in the firm had very little if any English.

So Dec. 1st, 1968, I moved to Paris, after delivering wife and new-born daughter to mother-in-law in London.
Some nine months of intensive study followed, before my move to Fairford and my first encounter with Concorde 002.

During my "indoctrination", the firm thought it would be a good idea to at least have a personal look at what I was going to work on, and also meet my 'counterparts' at Toulouse I was to be in continuous contact with.
So, sometime end January 1969, only a few weeks before the first flight of 001, I first set eyes on a real Concorde, still buzzing with final preparations.
With all our stuff being in the "pointy end", that's where we went, of course, and I spent half an hour or so in the left hand seat getting familiar with the cockpit lay-out and "our" systems..... the same seat where André Turcat would be sitting a few weeks later during the first flight.

After that came five years of Concorde at Fairford and Filton, until the development flight test support largely came to an end, and was taken over by our 'product support' department, and I returned to France.

In my case, I wouldn't yet have called it a "love affair" in those days, more an intensively satisfying job.
It was really not until afterwards, that I started to regard those "Concorde days" as the best time of my professional career, and that I started to realise she'd gotten "under my skin".

And I can call myself lucky.... I've "met" 002 again 35 years after last seeing her in the Fairford hangar.
And I've also sat again in that self-same left-hand seat on 001, more than 40 years after that first time.
And I've had the chance of flying once on Concorde, even if in the end she retired just before I did.

landlady is right. We were there, at the right time, and the right place.
I think that says it all.

CJ

[DozyWannabe]

That's why those two small planks on Concorde work so well.

That's not a very nice way to talk about BA and AF's finest!

(Sorry, couldn't resist a feed like that)

[ChristiaanJ]

Originally Posted by DozyWannabe

That's not a very nice way to talk about BA and AF's finest!
(Sorry, couldn't resist a feed like that)

LOL !

True though... they're little more than two small flat surfaces... clearly marked "NO STEP", so they're not even any use for standing on to clean the windows.

They look pretty insignificant, compared to the 'canards' of the Tu-144 or the big foreplanes on some other deltas, or the long forward wing extensions on aircraft like the F-16 and F-18, none of which have the same function.

And to be perfectly honest, I myself didn't know about their real function until after 2003, when I started delving into a lot of other technical aspects of 'our Lady'.

CJ

[ChristiaanJ]

Originally Posted by Tex37

201 (I believe) was fitted with a sidestick control on the left, was the aircraft actually flown with this and if so what were the pilots reactions to it?
Was it possibly to have been incorporated on later production aircraft?

Questions already answered earlier, but I just found this photo on another forum.



The sidestick was located where the LH weather radar display normally is.

CJ

[Chu Chu]

I just finished reading the captivating thread, and I hope you don't mind me dredging up a couple of technical points that were touched on earlier. (Very simple technical points, or they would have gone over my head entirely.)

Early on there was a discussion of sliding hydraulic seals (necessary to allow for thermal expansion of the airplane). It occurred to me that sliding hydraulic seals are nearly as rare as hydraulic cylinders. But that raises an obvious question: what kept the seals from acting like cylinders, and fully extending under pressure?

And then a very picky observation on the discussion about excess moisture evaporating vs. boiling off during flight at temperatures up to 100C. Wouldn't water boil well below 100C at FL 600?

[ChristiaanJ]

Originally Posted by Chu Chu

...what kept the (hydraulic) seals from acting like (hydraulic) cylinders, and fully extending under pressure?

I'll have to find you a picture, I suppose!
But I would say the basic answers are
- the hydraulic lines at either end of the seal would be clamped down at some point,
- a hydraulic cylinder normally consists of a cylinder and a piston, with the latter of course missing in the seal arrangement.

And then a very picky observation on the discussion about excess moisture evaporating vs. boiling off during flight at temperatures up to 100C. Wouldn't water boil well below 100C at FL 600?

You're quite right of course, but that would only be in the unpressurized part of the airframe.

The end result was of course that most if not all of the accumulated humidity either evaporated or indeed in some places literally 'boiled off', unlike subsonic aircraft.

CJ

[Chu Chu]

Let me just explain a little more so you can tell me where I'm going wrong. I've got the seal pictured as two concentric tubes with O-rings between. If the outer tube is the "cylinder," the only difference between the inner tube and a piston is that it's hollow. But assuming no flow, how would the fluid in the "cylinder" "know" it's pressing against pressurized hydraulic fluid in the inner tube and not a solid steel piston?

Of course it would be a pretty small cylinder, little bigger in diameter than they hydraulic line itself. So maybe the answer is just that the restraints on either side are enough to deal with the force generated.

[ChristiaanJ]

Chu Chu,

You're quite right, actually, especially assuming no flow.



"how would the fluid in the "cylinder" "know" it's pressing against pressurized hydraulic fluid in the inner tube and not a solid steel piston?"

The fluid wouldn't "know".. It would be pressing against pressurized hydraulic fluid further down the line.... but at the end, it would finally be pressing against the piston of a hydraulic cylinder of some kind at the end, like the 'cap' in my first scribble.
If nothing was restrained "downstream", indeed everything would be "blown apart".
Of course, that hydraulic cylinder (my 'cap') would be affixed to the structure, so it wouldn't move.

The problem is more like my second scribble.... with a bend in the pipe, and only the final 'cap' fixed, the pipe would continuously flex under pressure.... not a good idea at all, especially when the pressure in the pipe varies, because the 'cap' is not a real 'cap' but something like a PFCU (power flight control unit), with continously varying demand.

So yes, the hydraulic lines are restrained in all the right places, for the hydraulic expansion seals to work correctly without setting up stresses in the lines themselves (except for the pressure acting outwards, of course).

Hope this makes sense to you?

CJ

[Chu Chu]

Very clear, Christiaan. Thank you.

[M2dude]

Nice sketches CJ. However the majority of the EXPANSION JOINTS (That's what they were called) were on long linear runs of hydraulic pipes, where the problems of thermal expansion were of course greatest. The expansion joints were one of the biggest leakage problems we ever had; once a seal went things got VERY wet, and the joint had to be replaced. (4000 PSIG can move a lot of fluid).

Dude

[Nick Thomas]

Autopilot

I was wondering if it was possible to hand fly Concorde when she was supersonic? Therefore would the failure of one or both autopilots mean that you would have to divert to the nearest airport? Also how long after takeoff would it normally be before engaging the autopilot?
Thanks again
Nick

[M2dude]

Concorde Trivia

I thought it might be nice to throw in a few trivia questions here to lighten things up. Most readers of this thread should be able to answer fairly easily; if necessary by checking back on some of the previous posts in the thread. (All questions relate to the BA fleet). Or there is always Uncle Google :
1) How many fuel tanks werer there on Concorde?
2) How many seats were there?
3) At what approximate altitude and KNOTS EAS was Mach 2 achieved?
4) Only one BA Concorde had three different registrations, what was it?
5) What was the maximum permitted altitude in passenger service?
6) How many wheels on the aircraft
7) How many flying control modes were there?
8) How many positions of nose droop were there?
9) What was the first microprocessor application on the aircraft?
10) How many main electrical sources were there?

Answers tomorrow

Dude

[Nick Thomas]

Hi M2dude
In the spirit that you asked them; does the answer to Q2 include crew seats, jump seats and even loo seats?
Nick

[M2dude]

NICK THOMAS
It was perfectly safe to hand fly the aircraft even at Mach 2. There was at least one legendary captain who always believed in hand flying. The controls were not overly sensitive as the outer and middle elevons were partly stalled out due to shockwave formation at Mach 2. (The load law of the Artificial Feel Computers actually decreased above transonic speeds).
And Nick.... No clues
Dude

[ChristiaanJ]

Originally Posted by Nick Thomas

I was wondering if it was possible to hand fly Concorde when she was supersonic?

I should let the pilots on this thread answer, really,
But I would say yes, just tedious, and needing the PF to pay far more attention minute-to-minute to all the various basic flight parameters, and fly them, rather than just monitor the autopilot doing the job.

Therefore would the failure of one or both autopilots mean that you would have to divert to the nearest airport?

Basically, no.
The autopilots were quite reliable, and what's more, they were essentially independent, so the probability of both failing during the same flight was pretty remote.
If one dropped out in flight for whatever reason, you'd engage no. 2 and continue.

The only situation where losing both autopilots within a minute or so of each other would be critical, would be during a Cat.III autoland, and just before that you'd run an autotest of both computers. The probablity of then losing both almost at the same time during those last few minutes was in the order of 10E-09 or less, and indeed never happened.

Also how long after takeoff would it normally be before engaging the autopilot?

Can one of our pilot friends oblige?

CJ

PS I should add, that normally only one of the two autopilots was engaged, with the other powered but inactive, and IIRC, with AP1 active, AP2 would refuse to engage until you disengaged AP1.

Only in LAND mode could both APs be engaged at the same time, with normally no.1 flying and no.2 as a "hot" standby.
The system was referred to as "fail active", in that no.2 would already be synchronised to what no.1 was doing, and would take over totally automatically, without a hiccup (except an "oh merde" from the pilots, probably).

Quoting from memory.

[Brit312]

It was perfectly safe to hand fly the aircraft even at Mach 2. There was at least one legendary captain who always believed in hand flying. The controls were not overly sensitive as the outer and middle elevons

The Captain I believe you are thinking of, not only hand flew the aircraft for the entire sector, but also ate his meal, and talked to the passenger who visited the flightdeck whilst he was flying it

He was not unique,and many would hand fly it during climb/accel and for the descent but most pilots would engage the Autopliot especially for supersonic cruise