Posts about: "Brooklands" [Posts: 32 Pages: 2]

M2dude,

Nice set of photos of "The Thing" here :
MEPU at MAE at le Bourget .
This one is at the Air and Space Museum at Le Bourget, near Paris. My guess is that is was a spare, since the manufacturing date is 1973. 'SA flew in January '73 and 'SB in December '73.
IIRC, Delta Golf arrived at Brooklands with the MEPU still in place; I might have a photo.

As to the installation, we're obviously thinking along the same lines....

However, there were already several conduits through tank 11, such as hydraulics for the tail wheel, various electrics, and the 'backbone' fuel manifolds, that ended at the fuel jettison port in the tailcone.
A couple of fairly substantial air ducts would only have displaced a few hundred kgs of fuel at the most, out of the more than 10,000 kgs in tank 11.

And yes, of course, the whole point of the APU would be to have independent ground start and ground airco available, so clearly an APU would have been bigger and heavier than the MEPU (which was only just over 80 lbs), plus the problem of the air intake and bigger exhaust.
I'd have to get the drawings out to see how easy or difficult it would have been to fit one in the available space.

Since the tailcone was BAC, and both 214 and 216 were built at Filton, I wonder if anybody there still remembers?

From the thousands of hours of windtunnel tests, test flying with aircraft like the Mirage IV, HP 115, BAC221, etc. etc. they already had a pretty close idea of how the aircraft was going to fly.
IIRC, Andr\xe9 Turcat remarked after the first flight of 001 it flew pretty well like the simulator, or if anything somewhat better!

There were two development simulators, one at Toulouse and one at Filton, that were used by the test pilots and by the engineers. These were "tweaked" whenever more data became availble before the first flights, and then updated with flight test data.
For airline crew training , two new simulators were built in the early seventies, again one in Toulouse (later moved to CDG) and one in Filton.
In the best Concorde style, they were designed and built by two different firms....

I don't believe anything of the development simulators has survived.
As you will know, the "cab" of the British Airways Filton simulator was salvaged and taken to Brooklands, where it's now slowly being brought back to life.
The Air France simulator at CDG, minus motion system and video display, was taken back to Toulouse, where it's slowly being restored, to go on display in the planned Museum at Toulouse.

CJ

Notfred
Love the lightning story, hadn't heard that one before.
That would have been production series test aircraft G-BBDG, A/C 202 before a purpose built hangar (more shed really) was built to house her, with fin and U/C removed. This aircraft has now been beautifully restored at Brooklands museum.
You are quite correct about the pushback, not having an APU (THAT story again ) meant that a one engine in each nacelle pair had to be started on the gate, and the other in each nacelle started after push. Having a symetrical pair started enabled all 3 hydraulic systems, and hence most of the critical systems to be checked puring pushback.
Brake temperatures always had to be monitored; they really could get very hot. If a wheel was still too warm after T/O, then the gear would be left down just a little longer to aid cooling. (Each brake also had an electric cooling fan).
Idle thrust was always a problem in that it was too high; there was a 'lo idle' setting, but depending on the temperature of the day the difference was not that big. You could not just reduce idle some more because of a malady known as rotating stall. This can plague any engine, but the Olympus 593 was particularly susceptible. At very low idle speeds, pockets of air 'rotate' around the first few compressor stages and can completely alter the airflows through the engine. It is important that the engine is always accelerated quickly through this zone on start-up, because serious damage can occur if the engine runs for any period of time in the rotating stall region. If the engine DOES operate in this zone, then the combustion process can even occur in the last few stages of the HP compressor, causing extreme damage. This damage, although malignant, can result in blade failure and the subsequent damage to the combustion chamber and turbine areas. This can occur within a few flights of the event, so just cranking down the idle was never an option.

That's post #1 that started this thread.
The subject was dealt with in some depth, and in the course of the discussion is was described how the two preproduction and the first two production aircraft were equipped with an MEPU (monopropellant emergency power generator).

I've only just found this photo again... it's the MEPU of Delta Golf (202 - G-BBDG).
The photo was taken after 'DG was moved to the Brooklands museum, but before the tail cone was put back into place.





CJ

Perfectly pointless question, I'm afraid, dazdaz1....

Concorde is a rare, and maybe unique, case.... Out of the eighteen surviving airframes... eighteen are now in museums.

But all of them are now exactly that, museum exhibits, and none of them are even remotely likely to ever become airworthy again.

And even some of the magnificient flight simulators that are around today (like the flight sim at Brooklands, or the current PC flight simulators, such as SSTSim or the new FlightLabs one) do not allow anyone to become "current" again on Concorde.

CJ

I've been wondering about that too.... just looking for an easy way to do a "copy and save" of an entire thread.
Any ideas?
It would need some editing afterwards, to bring the various sub-subjects together.

Quite true... it was a pleasant surprise during the major overhauls. People like M2dude can no doubt tell you far more about that.

It would probably have been a major factor in extending the service life, if other things hadn't put an end to that in 2003.

Even if the moisture did not literally "boil off", most of it evaporated, with structural temperatures up to 100\xb0C in many places, as against the -40\xb0C and less in some subsonic aircraft.

The forward or the back one?
Neither look very fascinating.
For the back one just imagine a short stretch of cabin without any seats or fittings or windows. On Delta-Golf at Brooklands and Alpha-Echo at Barbados, they're now used as a sort of small "entry hall" for the visitors.

CJ

Sorry, no. I don't feel offended.... I suppose I've just seen too much of that particular "conspiracy theory"....

Think back a moment to the 2003 context.

Due to the economic and political situation at the time (to put it simply), Air France was already flying their Concordes nearly empty, and wanted out.
BA wasn't doing marvelously either.
Airbus (being a company, not a charity) explained that in that case BA would have to carry the full cost of the maintenance.... which WAS already going up as a consequence of maintaining a 35-year old antique flying.
So BA decided to end the service as well, even if in the end at least they went out with a bang, not a whimper.

In those last months, people like Rod Eddington and others DID have a very serious look at keeping one or two aircraft flying in a "heritage role", and there was even a look at a joint venture with the "Alliance" project.

So yes, all of the alternatives WERE explored, but, AT THE TIME, none of these were found to be viable.

So, British Airways, Air France and Airbus all drew their conclusions, which made sense AT THE TIME, and closed down the Concorde operation.
And, instead of scrapping the aircraft, every single one of them went to museums.

The two airframes that "had an angle grinder taken to them" were Alpha-Alpha and Delta-Golf.

For a start, neither would have flown ever again, anyway...

Alpha-Alpha was never modified to post-2000 standard and would have slowly rotted away at LHR. Taking her to East Fortune was a great initiative, IMHO.

Delta-Golf was an ancient certication airframe, and cannibalised for years and years for spares, and destined for scrapping.
Instead, she's now at Brooklands, and rebuilt as one of the most interesting Concorde exhibits.

As to the "angle grinder", you really have to know where to look to find the traces......
And yes, I've seen both of them.

CJ

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).





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.

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

CRON
I can only speak here from the Concorde ground engineering school that I attended over a total of 13 weeks at Filton in 1980 and 1981; the pilot/flight engineer questions there were I'm sure FAR nastier (and also more operationally specific); we did get to share simulator time though, which was really useful. Like the aircrews, we stayed up in a hotel in Bristol during the week. (I personally had only left BAC, as it was then, for BA at Heathrow in late July 1977, so I was returning to familiar pastures). The exam format would be several dozen multi-choice questions per week/phase; a typical question would go something like:

The Inner Elevon Light, plus 'PFC' red Master Warning is triggered by:
a) The Green Flying ControlComparator
b) The Blue Flying Control Comparator
c) Either Comparator
The correct answer is (b).

Another flying controls question I can remember is:

Outer Elevon Neutralisation is triggered at:
a)Vmo + 10 KTS
b)Vmo + 15 KTS
c)Vmo + 25 KTS
The correct answer here is (c).

The pass mark in these exams was 75%, with penalty marking applied for any wrong answers. I always found the worst part was the fact that the exams were on a Friday afternoon after lunch

Nick Thomas
Hi again Nick, one really for the likes of BRIT312, EXWOK etc, but there was, as was mentioned before, an emergency forward transfer switch in the roof panel above the pilots (F/O's side if I remember correctly). When placed to the emergency poition two electric and two hydraulic fuel pumps for the rear trim tank #11 would start up automatically, as well as the forward tank inlet valves being opened also.
From what you said about the 'lady' being ahead of her time, I would certainly agree with you here; in my view she was generations ahead of everything else.

nomorecatering
The BA simulator that resided at Filton has been re-located to Brooklands Museum, and has been re-activated, but without motion and I'm not sure about full visuals either. I've not seen it myself yet, but I'm told that things have progressed really well with the operation. Obviously it is no longer certified as an active simulator; I'm not sure about the situation in France, perhaps my friend ChristiaanJ can answer that one.
I seem to remember typical loads for LHR-JFK being around 93-96 tonnes, depending on the passenger load and en-route conditions. Full tanks, depending on the SG was around 96 Tonnes. High fuel temperatures in the summer were a major pain; restricting maximum onload due to the low SG.

As far as ground school notes, mine are all out on long term loan (MUST get them back). The ground school are totally priceless and I am sure that there are many complete sets lying around in atticks/bedrooms/garages/loos etc.

Dude

nomorecatering asked: M2dude answered:
The BA simulator, now at Brooklands, is a long story.
For various reasons, only the simulator 'cab' could be salvaged. It was taken to Brooklands to be used as a static exhibit of what the Concorde cockpit looked like.
It was only well after its arrival at Brooklands that people started to think about bringing it back to life.... a huge piece of work, since about all that was left was the 'cab' itself, with the instruments and controls... the computers and interface circuits, needed to make them work, were all gone.
A team of volunteers, a simulator firm and university students have now brought it back to a state where it can be 'flown'. Even if not everything works yet, ex-Concorde pilots who've 'flown' it were already full of praise.
As to the visuals, the original visual system was taken back by BA, since it was recent and the same as used on other BA simulators.
It's been replaced by a specialised video projector and a wide screen, which appears quite satisfactory, although I 've heard rumours about plans to replace it with a three-projector system.

The story of the Air France simulator, that was located at CDG, is very different.
After the end-of-service it was moved almost in its entirety to Toulouse (Airbus), minus only the visual display system and the motion platform.
A small team of volunteers (mostly Airbus engineers) are slowly bringing that one 'back to life' as well, but (contrary to Brooklands) using most of the original electronics.
The intention is to have it ready for display (and use) at the Toulouse 'A\xe9roscopia' museum, which hopefully will open within a few years.
Unfortunately, until then the sim is not accessible to the public, since it's inside one of the Airbus site buildings.
And no, of course that one isn't certified either....

One small bit of trivia... the BA and AF simulators were NOT built by the same firm. The BA one was built by, IIRC, Singer-Redifon, and the French one by LMT.
Today that's a pity, really, because the Brooklands and Toulouse teams have very little technical information they can exchange.

Oh and, yes, I've visited and sat in both of them, but so far I haven't flown either of them yet.

CJ

Agreed Nick, this has been such a superbly informative thread. Let's not spoil it. (Good news about the Brooklands sim' videos though).

Dude

A small add-on to the earlier posts about the simulators.

Brooklands sim video

Brief video, taken yesterday (Oct 9, 2010) of a landing on LHR 27L, with the new three-projector visual display.

Also a couple of photosets of the new projectors being installed on the top of the 'cab' and the three overlapping images being aligned. As the photographer (friend of mine) noted , he had to leave before the final tweaks... the borders (overlaps) are now virtually invisible.

Concorde Photos Gallery - 21st September 2010

Concorde Photos Gallery - 25th September 2010

CJ

I wonder if my piggy bank will ever stretch to a sim session down at Brooklands? I can but dream.....

Thanks for the engine nozzle comments Dude, it certainly seems that the secondary nozzles got bitten by the law of unintended consequences. All engineers are familiar with that one!

OK, I see others have already posted answers.
I've carefully avoided looking at them, but I'll might as well plug in mine now.

My personal problem is that I was involved in the very earliest days, before the aircraft went into service, and then in the last days and afterwards...
So the questions dealing with the in-service period are totally outside my field of experience... all I can do is guess, in case I saw the answers somewhere.

1) How many Concorde airframes were built?
Twenty-two.
Two static-test airframes.
- One at Toulouse, for purely static tests, and tests such as vibration and flutter.
- One at Farnborough, for the long-duration thermal fatigue tests.
(A few bits and pieces of the Farnborough test specimen have survived, and can still be seen at the Brooklands museum).
Two prototypes (001 and 002)
Two pre-production aircraft (01 and 02)
Two production aircraft used for certification, that never entered service (201 - F-WTSB and 202 - G-BBDG)
Fourteen production aircraft, seven that served with British Airways, seven that served with Air France.

2) As far as the British constructed aircraft went, name the destinations that were served?. Regular flight numbers only, excludes charters etc.
Not a clue as to the full list.
- Bahrain, obviously.
- JFK.
- IAD (not sure if that's rated as regular, or only incidental)
- Dallas (with Braniff)
- Barbados (of course, right until the end)
- Sngapore (with Singapore Airlines, and G-BOAD in Singapore Airlines colours on one side)
- Sydney (again no idea if that rated as a regular flight or only a few tries)

3) What was the departure time for the ORIGINAL morning LHR-JFK Concorde services? (Not called the BA001 then either).
Not a clue either. Vague memory of about 10:00 am which gave you a full working day in New York.

4) Further to question 3 above, what WERE the original flight numbers for the BA001 and BA003? (The morning and evening LHR-JFK services?)..
Never flew on them, never had to deal with them.
BA174 comes to mind from the depths of my memory, in that case BA003 would have been BA176?

5) There were no less than FORTY SIX fuel pumps on Concorde. What was the breakdown for these? (Clue; don't forget the scavenge pump )
M2dude, I did AFCS, not the fuel system. I believe you, but without pulling out some diagrams I honestly have NO idea.
I expect each tank had at least two pumps, which gets me up to 26.
Then there were a few emergency pumps for the trim tanks, and I suppose each engine had additional pumps associated with it.
Still nowhere near the 46 I need to find.....

6) What airframe had the only TOTALLY unique shape?
That would have been my old friend, 01 (G-AXDN), first pre-production aircraft, now at Duxford.
It was the first Concorde with the new transparent visor, but it still had the short tail that characterised the prototypes.
It was 02 (F-WTSA), the first French pre-production aircraft, that was close to the final shape of the production aircraft.

7) This one is particularly aimed at ChristiaanJ. What was the total number of gyros on the aircraft?
Good question.... never counted them all. But I'll try a guess.
First a nice one, the SFENA Emergency Standby Artificial Horizon (made by the firm I worked for).
Ran off the Emergency Battery Bus via a small independent inverter.
And if that failed too, it would still run reliably for several minutes on its own inertia.
Next, the rate gyros used by the autostabilisation system ; these measured the angular rate of the aircraft along the three main axes, pitch, roll and yaw.
There were six, three each for the two autostab systems.
Now the rest....
Each IMU (inertial measurement unit, part of the inertial naviagation system) had three gyros.
With three INS on board, that would make nine.
Much as I try, I can't remember other ones, so I'll look forward to the final answer.
I can imagine the weather radar using an additional gyro for stabilisation, but I never went there.

8) How many wheel brakes?
Unless this is a trick question, I would say eight, for each of the main gear wheels.
The nose gear did not have any brakes - unless there were some small ones to stop the wheels rotating after retraction of the gear, but not used during landing.

9) What Mach number was automatic engine variable intake control enabled?
No idea.
Mach 1.0 or thereabouts is my personal guess only.

10) Above each bank of engine instruments were three lights, a blue, a green and an amber. What did they each signify?
I know that they each monitored the status of one of the engines, because it was too complex for the pilots to fully monitor all the parameters of all four engines in the short time between start-of-roll and V1... they had too many other things to do.
But I don't remember what each light meant, would have to look it up in the manual.

11) At what airfied were the first BA crew base training details held?
No idea.
Was it Brize Norton, or Casablanca?

12) What LHR runways did Concorde use for landing and take-off? (Trick question, not as obvious as it might seem).
No idea.
Vague memory of it being systematically the North runway for noise issues.

13) What operator had serious plans to operate Concorde from SNN to JFK in the early 1980's?
No idea.

14) What development aircraft did not exceed Mach 2 until fifteen months after her maiden flight?
I would expect the obvious answer to be 002.
Working up from first flight to Mach 2 was a slow and laborious process, and in the end it was 001 that both flew first, and also went to Mach 2 first.
I don't think any of the other aircraft took that long.

A I said, I tried to answer all questions "off the top of my head", without looking at any other sources.

CJ

Landlady ,
I know this will sadden you... but better forewarned than discovering it on the day, no?

When they set up the Barbados 'Concorde Experience' on G-BOAE, they decided it would work far better if people could move one way, from the back to the front, rather than continuously getting in each others way.
Now, the two little service doors in the rear galley are not really suited as entrances for the public.
You should know!
Hence the decision was made to remove the rear galley (which they undoubtely kept in storage somewhere, if not actually on display) and to have people enter through the rear baggage hold door, through the baggage hold, and from there into the rear cabin.
(Much the same was done on Delta Golf, the Concorde now at the Brooklands, Weybridge museum.)

So, the only galley tops will be those in the forward galley. Snif....

CJ

Thanks, Bellerophon !

That just went into my 'archive'.

Maybe it should be printed out, plastified, and used as a briefing sheet for the Brooklands simulator, where the JFK 31L take-off is still one of the favourites !

CJ

You mean you actually were on one of the Concorde landings at Kai Tak?
You'll have everybody here green with envy....
Even if it was on a "blunty" it was still spectacular.
And I think Kai Tak is already in the Brooklands sim database.... so you can now come and fly it yourself....

I'll let Bellerophon answer.... but there once was a low-weight take-off from Cardiff straight out to sea, without any restrictions, that IIRC still holds the record for the shortest time to Mach 1 and Mach 2 from brake release....

No thanks needed... I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did !

CJ

Oops, I've done it again, forgetting that other people are also reading this thread, who wouldn't have a clue what we are talking about...

OK all.
On the 'blunties' and most other aircraft (subsonic or supersonic) there is a fuselage, and there is a wing.
The wing is connected to the fuselage by only a few very big bolts, linking a few very big forgings.

Concorde is different, right? Right.

Fuselage and inner wing are the same structure, and there were no "big bolts" that allowed you to separate fuselage and inner wing once the aircraft was built.

The only separate "bits" were the outer wings, the parts just outside the engine nacelles.

So 'rib 12' was the rib where the inner wing ended, and where the outer wing (built by Dassault, rather than Aerospatiale, actually) was attached.

Rib 12 actually was two halves, the one at the outboard side of the inner wing, and the one on the inboard side of the outer wing.
Both machined numerically from single 'blanks'...

And no, these two halves were NOT just bolted together with a few massive bolts. They were bolted together with hundreds of bolts in all. I did say Concorde was different, no?

Words now fail me, and I'll have to find or scribble some drawings ASAP.

In brief, so far.. each half of rib 12 had MANY machined "bath tub shaped" slots allowing to insert a bolt between the two halves, and bolt the outer wings to the inner wings.

And simplistically, the 'bath tub covers' were just small sheet panels held in place with fasteners fitted inside the 'bath tub' slots.

I should know.... I still have the scars of helping, one day, to refit a batch of them on Delta Golf at Brooklands

CJ

The 'tubes' (there are two, side by side) are the fairings for the ADF (automatic direction finder) aerials. And IIRC, the magnetic compass sensors ('flux-valves') are under there as well.

Oh, and.. Landroger, the blank window you mentioned is that of the forward wardrobe.

I'd heard about that 'glitch'... Having seen the amplitude of the VSI 'twitch' on video, I can well imagine that if port and starboard weren't totally synchronous, you would get a ADS warning.
Did that knock out the A/P and A/S as well?

BTW, the VSI 'twitch' is now implemented on the Brooklands simulator, but not the OAF 'glitch'....

CJ

I worked on the project for eighteen months in production design control at Brooklands. We were to facilitate certification by the CAA and BEA (Fr).
We built the enlarged tail cone tank and the "droop Snoop" and fwd. fuselage.
I recall that one of the biggest design problems was the toilet up the front.
There simply wasn't the space.
Sir George Edwards fired most of us prior to to the first revenue flight of G-BOAC out of Heathrow.
I got a job at BP in Meadhurst and enjoyed listening and watching this beautiful aircraft get airbourne for New York from the roof of the research establishment that day.
I only played a small part but by God it was fun.
I am looking at my office wall in Fremantle, Western Australia at a photograph of G-BOAC after getting airbourne on its maiden flight. It is signed by my work golleges at Brooklands.
Somewhere in a trunk I have a copy (blueprint) of prototype 01 notated in both English and French. (I cannot recall how I came by it).
This is the best thread I have read ever. What a machine !!
The spin parachute and emergency escape hatch are interesting