M2, do you know (hypothetically of course) if she was ever rolled?

Does that mean she would have been heading for the Rockaway Beach area, must have been noticed going over the top there, quiet little place that it is!

EW73

Bellerophon,
Many thanks, that goes straight into the archive!
The quote from Brian Calvert's book is from his description of the very first take-off at JFK (20 Oct. 1977, F-WTSB) with Brian Walpole and Jean Franchi at the controls.
I expect the procedure before "Turn" was pretty well the same, after all it had been practised many times already!

Nothing hypothetical about it, even if history doesn't relate on how many occasions - at least five or six, and probably several more...
Brian Walpole confirmed it in a TV documentary (extract is on YouTube), and André Turcat confirmed it during a lecture at LBG a few years ago, and again during a lecture last year (40th anniversary). He mentioned that the one thing that really annoyed him about it was that he never had an opportunity to do it himself!

CJ

Biggles78
Yes, she was rolled. One of the Aérospatiale test pilots (not sure who) had the technique down, and barrel-rolled one of the French test aircraft on a few occasions. The former BA GM Concorde, Capt Brian Walpole was able to join him on one of those occasions; the French guy rolled one way and then invited Brian to roll other way. These were perfectly co-ordinated barrel rolls of course; pulling a more or less constant +1G; not bad for an airliner :ok:. Brian would have to confirm who the French pilot was.
EW73
The whole idea of this manoeuvre was to avoid overflying the populated areas at high power. The left turn was really quite extreme (to say the least :}), and the aircraft would pass just to the north of the main Rockaway Beach area, carry out a very brief noise abatement (reduced power, no afterburner with the primary nozzle wide open to reduce the noise signature) manoeuvre, and then accelerate on dry power only, ready to intercept the east-bound track home. (I'd been over at the Rockaways on many occasions, people used to line the beach area to watch the aircraft departing, particularly the afternoon BA004 departure). The only real high power contact with the human species, was a fairly low pass over Cross Bay BVD, but I guess the drivers just got used to it. The guys 'up front 'always made the manoeuvre look simple, but it did require an extreme amount of concentration, professionalism and practice. Concorde actually became one of the best behaved neighbours that JFK ever had, in spite of the initial hype.

Dude :O

Bellerophon
I have to re-itterate what ChristiaanJ says, thank you from all of us for putting your post out here. As you rightly say, 'what fond memories':ok:

Dude :O

M2dude, Biggles78,

Re the barrel roll : the French test pilot was Jean Franchi (now no longer with us).

He already had done it several times over the Pyrnees, until one day he was spotted doing it by a journalist, who had trouble believing what he saw, and phoned Arospatiale before phoning his newspaper.

As it happened, he was put through to André Turcat himself (then Director of Flight Test), who more or less said: "Mais non, Monsieur... A Concorde doing a roll? Not possible.... you must have confused another aircraft with Concorde". The journalist must have believed him, and the story wasn't published.

Afterwards, Turcat told Franchi that, from then on, he'd better do it out of sight of curious onlookers, like over the sea...

Story confirmed by Alain Franchi, his son, and also by Turcat himself during recent lectures.

Jean went on doing his barrel rolls, such as the one with Brian Walpole (who confirms in the documentary it was indeed Jean Franchi during his flight)..

Jean also did all the low-level flying with Sierra Charlie in the "Airport 79 - Concorde" movie. Ghastly film, story-wise, but since it was made before the days of CGI, most of the air-to-air is real, filmed from a specially equipped Lear Jet.

CJ

CJ It's a good thing that D.P Davies did not hear of that roll :\

-at least at the time:}

Hello,

A question here, many excuses if asked and answered before, however, too lazy to use the search function.

I was told the concorde autopilot had a emergency decsent mode in case of decompression. Is this true?

Thanks

flyburg

...I was told the concorde autopilot had a emergency decsent mode in case of decompression. Is this true?...

No.

Not only is it not true, but the emergency descent procedure was flown manually, and not on autopilot.

Regards

Bellerophon

Ok, thanks for clearing that up.

Greetings

flyburg
The Concorde autopilot had more modes than you could shake a stick at, but as Bellerophon quite rightly states, there was none for emergency descent. There were none less than SEVENTEEN autopilot modes (although only sixteen could be directly selected. I remember at entry into service, Flight International did a Concorde 'test drive', and the reviewer stated the only mode missing from the AFCS was 'Home James'. But of course now, in this FMS age, a lot of the modes would be replaced by VNav/LNav. (VOR/LOC mode was even designed to capture a radial at Mach 2, where VOR course set error was modulated as a function of Mach number. What the designer was thinking of here is anyone's guess :}).
As far decompression goes, the only event that I can ever recall is when on it's first pre-delivery test flight out of Fairford, aircraft G-BOAC lost cabin pressure when the nose was lowered to 5 deg's. Some wally at British Aerospace had omitted to fit a fwd pressure panel, and during the high altitude/high speed portion of the test flight, the droop nose seal was able to hold the pressure. (Max diff was 10.7 PSI !!).Fortunately this event happened fairly 'low down', but even so the flight deck was said to be awash with maps, sid/stars, Playboys etc, as the air rushed out through the rudder pedal area. (For some reason this panel was never fitted with a warning microswitch; a duplicate check was carried out after any 'heavy' maintenance, to make sure that the panel was safely fitted).

Dude :O

M@dude

On pressurization, did a pilot wear a O2 mask when above FL 410? In the FAA, this is a requirement, but I understood, either the CAA rules didn't require this or testing proved that depressurization was so unlikely that the requirement was removed.

GF

I've wondered about that too....
I was part of flight test support at Fairford ('69 to '74) for the AFCS.
A LOT of time was spent (dare I say wasted) on exploring the full range of speed and capture angles for the VOR mode, and 'tweaking' the control loop parameters. With time constants in the tens of seconds, and each capture test taking minutes, I hate to think how many hours of test flying that took up in the end.
It was only later that I discovered almost nobody ever used VOR mode (not only not on Concorde, but elsewhere too) because of its inherent lack of precision!
Pilots would use TRK/HDG mode, display VOR on the HSI, and then made slight adjustments to the track or heading setting to stay on the desired VOR radial.
LOC of course was a different story.

And a small 'joke' on the same subject... because of all those big time constants in the lateral autopilot computer, it took about eight HOURS to test ONE computer on the ATEC (automatic test). Turned out the automatic test program slavishly followed the manual test specification, with each function tested separately and sequentially. I was given the job of doing something about it.... by doing a lot of the tests in parallel, I managed to bring the testing time down to one hour.

CJ

PS We (Elliott/SFENA) designed the electronics, but the original functional design spec was of course Sud/BAC, not us. And yes, me too, I never quite understood what they were thinking about...

galaxy flyer

...On pressurization, did a pilot wear a O2 mask when above FL 410?...

No.


...the CAA rules didn't require this...

Correct, and neither, so I understand, did the French authorities.

For those British registered aircraft currently certificated to operate above FL410, the CAA still doesn't.


Regards

Bellerophon

galaxy flyer,
If you can ever get your hands on a copy of "The Concorde Story" by Christopher Orlebar, there is a nice photo of a Concorde pilot with an oxygen mask (page 111 in my copy).

I quote:
"The flight deck crew are equipped with 'quick don' oxygen masks capable of supplying 100% oxygen under pressure. The donning of oxygen masks and the emergency descent is practised regularly in the flight simulator".

They look quite impressive too, nothing like the little cups on a plastic tube they show you during the safety briefing in a typical airliner....

Sorry, I don't have a flatbed scanner to show the photo (I'm sure Christopher wouldn't mind).

CJ

These masks were great; they really were 'quick don' masks and could be very easily put on one handed. (But of course the passenger masks WERE pretty much the same litttle cups on a plastic tube, that Christiaan describes.

Dude :O