Posts about: "LHR-JFK Route" [Posts: 32 Pages: 2]

Thanks Dude and Bellerphon for such graphic descriptions of JFK 31L take off. Nearest I came to experiencing anything like that was landing at Kai Tak in the 80's!
Out of interest Bellerphon was there a supersonic acceleration point for JFK departures or as you were soon over the ocean, was it a case of it happened when it happened?
Regards
Nick
P.S Thanks Christiaan for your Concorde book thread. I am hoping that Santa brings me the Haynes manual!

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

OK, here is a photo that I took at Fairford in November 1976. I'd just had my very first Concorde flight on a brand new G-BOAD, and took this flight deck photo in the hangar later that afternoon (the doors are open hence the late afternoon Cotswold sky. The point of this rather poor (sorry guys, I was young for goodness sake) photo is to look at just how subtly different the 1976 flight deck WAS.



The first thing I know EXWOK and BELLEROPHON will (maybe) notice is that originally OAD had a 'normal colour' electroluminescent light plate on the visor indication panel. (If I remember rightly (it was a million years ago chaps) when this one 'stopped lighting' we could not get a replacement and had to rob 202 (G-BBDG) at Filton; this one being the same black development aircraft colour that OAD has to this day.
The OTHER first thing that you may notice is the Triple Temperature Indicator on the captains dash panel. (The first officer had his in in similar position). These got moved around (twice in the end) when TCAS was installed in the mid-90's. It was amazing just how much equipment got moved around over the years, in order to 'shoe-horn in' various bits of extra equimpent.
The cabin altimeter here fitted just above the #1 INS CDU also got moved (to the centre consul) when the FAA 'Branniff' modifications were embodied later in the 70's. It's spot got occupied by a standy altimeter mandated by the FAA but this was removed after Branniff ceased flying Concorde; the cabin altimeter returning to it's former home. The REALLY observant will notice that there is neither an Autoland Ca3/Cat2 identifier on the AFCS panel (glued on by BA at LHR) or the famous and precision built 'Reheat Capabilty Indicator' flip down plate fitted to the centre dash panel a few years later by BA.
Also not shown here, as they were buyer furnished equipment also fitted at on delivery LHR, are the two ADEUs (Automatic Data Entry Units, or INS Card readers). These were located immediatel aft of the CDU's and were used for bulk waypoint loading ('bulk' being 9, the most that the poor old Delco INU memory could handle). These were removed in the mid 90's when the Navigation Database was fitted to Concorde INUs, and bulk loading then was achieved by simply tapping in a 2 digit code. (Hardly the elegence of FMS, but still very elegent in comparison with the ADEU's, and worked superbly). A little note about these ADEU things; You inserted this rather large optically read paper data card into the thing and the motor would suck the unsuspecting card in. As often as not the ADEU would chew the card up and spit the remnants out, without reading any data, or not even bother spitting out the remnants at all. Removing these things FINALLY when the INUs were modified was absolute joy!!
ps. When G-BOAG (then G-BFKW) was delivered in 1980 it had neither any of the Branniff mods or ADEUs fitted. (Also the INS was not wired for DME updating). This meant that obviously she could not fly IAD-DFW with Branniff but also she could not do LHR-BAH either, because of the lack ADEUs. (You could not manually insert waypoints quick enough over the 'Med', or so the guys told me. So for the first few years good old FKW/OAG just used to plod between LHR and JFK. And plod she did, superbly. She never did get the ADEUs (not necessary thank goodness when the INUs got modified) but we wired in DME updating and so she could navigate around with the best of them.
My gosh I do prattle on, sorry guys.
Best regards

Dude

PS Welcome back Landlady, hope you've recovered from your fall XXXX

Please please please let me be a SLFConcordeBore - 1 post, then I\x92ll shut up.

2 items that I had on my \x93Do before I die\x94 list were \x93Sail into New York on QE2\x94 (sadly, didn\x92t happen, now obviously won\x92t), and \x93Fly on Concorde\x94.

Part of the enthusiasm for Concorde came from a friend in the Middle East, who worked for Airwork, who did contract maintenance for your air force. He was based in Saudi Arabia IIRC, working on Lightnings. As an expat in Saudi (good pay + no tax = high disposable), when he had some leave available at one point he took Concorde from Bahrein - London - Bahrein. Loved every moment.

He told the lovely story of his first day back after his hols, when a Lightning pilot came in in his G-suit, saying \x93I\x92ve just done Mach 2\x94 (you know where this is going...) to which Slim was able to reply \x93I did that yesterday - and I was drinking champagne at the time\x94. What an astonishing aeroplane Concorde was.

I got to fly Concorde courtesy of BA - they called one day and asked if I\x92d like to fly Concorde LHR - JFK - LHR, out one day, back the next, put up overnight at the Waldorf Astoria - all courtesy of BA. After the \x93is this a practical joke?\x94, and \x93what\x92s the catch?\x94, it transpired that they did invite people from time to time for this type of trip, and somehow my name came out of the hat.

A truly memorable trip - the acceleration, the hot windows, the fantastic service (and excellent food & wine), trip to cockpit, and the \x93Concorde grin\x94. Memorable guests on the way out were Paul & Linda McCartney, with children and minder. I seem to recall that the takeoff from JFK was even more spectacular than the one from LHR. It just seemed to jump out of the blocks and keep going.

Also notable were how much of a private club it was - the crew were welcoming passengers to New York, and saying to various passengers things like \x93I didn\x92t see you last week\x94, with the passenger replying \x91Oh no, I couldn\x92t make it last week, but I\x92ll see you again next week\x94 etc.

Thanks to everyone, ChristiaanJ, M2dude, Bellerophon, EXWOK, Brit123, landlady and stilton and all the others for a wonderful thread about a wonderful plane.

In the ITVV documentary, the SFE Roger Bricknell mentioned the selection of debow of #3 engine upon startup on the JFK to LHR leg, due to the downtime of the engine. This essentially delays the heat-up of the turbine shaft in favor of a more evenly temperature distribution.

Why wasn't the debow selected for all the other engine? (Roger explicitly mentioned to not needing to select the other engines for debow)

Forgive me, I'm probably missing something that was mentioned earlier in this great thread.

Layover: BA001 landed as BA002 was taxying out, so a there and back was impossible with those timings.

In the days of BA001,2,3&4 operations it was possible to operate BA002 JFK-LHR then BA003 LHR-JFK and this occasionally happened if there was a sudden crew shortage or other disruption.

I did it once and it was a heavy day's work.......

G-BOAG lives in Seattle now. And so you know it's Concorde with an " e". Very important.

I flew on G-BOAG, BA 2 JFK- LHR, 6 months before the program was shut down in 2003. The experience is hard to describe and only a Concorde fan would appreciate it anyway.

Nice to see this thread still active!

I wonder is there is a Concorde expert who could help me with a question please. I have booked some time in the Concorde simulator at brooklands in September and was wondering how I should best use the time I have (30 mins). What do you think would be the most interesting and enjoyable use of my time? I have read most of this thread, and gather that the JFK departures were spectacular. Is that what you think I should try?

I have spent a bit of time in other simulators (purely for fun), so what I am hoping to try in the Concorde simulator is something unique to Concorde.

I think you should try an outside loop, I'm sure Kennedy One departure, CRI climb will pale in comparison.

Time for descent may well have been a certification requirement for max FL - others will know better than I…

I don't believe the ramp schedules were designed to operate far above FL600, I vaguely recall that FL635 was the highest reached during testing but, again, others will know better. A typical LHR-JFK or JFK-LHR would get to between 570 and 590 depending on weight and OAT, LHR-BGI almost invariably ended up level at FL600 due to lower weight and much lower outside temps.

As for reverse inflight, off the top of my head the limits were; Max FL300, speed 250-380kts, max use 4 mins. It didn't make a vast difference to RoD, although it was noticeable.

Inflight rvs was limited to engs 2 and 3 but to enable sufficient air to deploy the reversers, engs 1 and 4 spooled up slightly (in fwd thrust) to help deployment. While this is going on the primary nozzles open fully (for the same reason) but after reverse position is reached, the 2 and 3 primary nozzles have to close to 15% otherwise you get a 'CON' light which means reverse has to be cancelled on that engine (this was not a rare event).

Common sense and airmanship also dictated that you had an escape plan if one or both the engines didn't get the secondary nozzles out of reverse, so you didn't want to do this if fuel was tight.

All-in-all it was far better to make sure you didn't need reverse inflight!

FraserConcordeFan

... How exactly would you get the INS into memory mode so you could input the two digit code to activate the route section...

Concorde did have a facility to input a flight plan route segment into the INS and this facility was used on most flights. To explain this very briefly , let\x92s take a typical LHR-JFK flight as an example:

\x95 Press the amber REMOTE button on each INS CDU
\x95 Load the first waypoint (#1), usually Woodley, manually into an INS
\x95 Key WAYPOINT CHANGE and enter and insert \x930 to 1\x94 on each CDU.
\x95 Select DSTRK/STS and HOLD
\x95 Key WAYPOINT CHANGE
\x95 Key the DME catalogue number (from the flight log, usually 90 on a LHR-JFK sector) and insert
\x95 Key WAYPOINT CHANGE
\x95 Key the Route Segment number (from the flight log, usually 10 on a LHR-JFK sector) and insert
\x95 Cancel HOLD

Then the usual checking routine of:

\x95 Checking the lats and longs of the loaded waypoint lats with those given on the flight log
\x95 Checking the INS distances between waypoints with those given on the flight log
\x95 Checking the lats, longs and frequencies of the DMEs against the database guide

Return the displays back to WAYPOINT, cancel REMOTE, select AUTO and check the INS alignment.

Remember, with only nine waypoints available in the INS, this procedure would have to be repeated in flight, sometimes more than once. Takes much longer to write about than it did to do!


tomahawk pa38

... I'm just curious about what eastbound routings were into Heathrow...

The usual Eastbound routing on a JFK-LHR flight would be via track SN to 15\xb0W then on SL3 to BARIX to MATIM to PITEM to NIGIT and then OCK.


... and where the decel point was....

Let me just check we are talking about the same thing! The Decel Point was the point at the end of the cruise/climb, where we first throttled back and started to decelerate from M2.00 and then descend from, say, around FL 560.

The decel point was calculated in order that we would be just under M1.00 at the designated Speed Control Point , and so the Decel Point was obviously further back than the Speed Control Point.

The usual route was up the Bristol Channel, a bit to the South of our outbound route, crossing the Devon coast just to the North of Barnstaple, routing to a waypoint called MATIM, which is around 51\xb0N 004\xb0W.

In winter, on a JFK-LHR flight via SL3, the Speed Control Point was 110nm before MATIM , and we were required to be subsonic at this point. Typically, we would be just under M1.00, and around FL410, when we crossed the speed control point, having started down from FL 560 around 105nm earlier.

The decel point was of no real relevance to those living on and around the coast of Devon and Somerset, but the Speed Control Point was. The position and time at which we decelerated through M1.00 and became subsonic were always recorded on the flight log, along with the altitude and spot wind, in case of any future claims of boom damage due to a misjudged decel.

Best Regards to all

Bellerophon

Dedicated to the memory of Andr\xe9 \xc9douard Turcat (1921 -2016)

98 Pages - have read them all. Absolutely unique given the tailspin that a lot of threads (not just on this site) find themselves in - this thread is a credit to those who have made it so captivating.

I lived in the UK for 10 years and was lucky enough to (well my wife did) win a return for 2 to NY on Concorde. Courtesy of the Evening Standard. This was June 1997. We sat in 3A/B and as an avid aviation follower (my dad flew in the RNZAF) spent way longer than my welcome in the cockpit when it was our turn. Purely because unlike a lot of other people who pointed and wowed - I spoke to the F/E and the skipper (Mike Bannister) about the flying aspect and marvelled at the engineering and the systems.

My dad broke the sound barrier in 1963 in an F-105 in Thailand somewhere whilst on manoeuvres with the USAF and as a wee chap always remember the mach meter at 1.06. So I asked Capt Bannister if he would take a picture of this for me from the same aspect - and he did. I proudly showed my dad.

So on the way back from NY on boarding I asked the Chief Purser if there was any chance of sitting in the cockpit for landing - a fairly stern no was the answer. No problem - 3 hours of caviar, mango, fillet steak and Krug ensued.

Then lo and behold - about 25 minutes from landing, the purser found me and said (verbatim) - "are you the young chap whose dad broke the sound barrier? Capt Bannister would like to know if you would like to sit on the jump seat for landing." I levitated to the cockpit.

Was strapped in, given headphones - told not to talk unless spoken to (nicely of course). Mike Bannister did say to me that I was one of the few people (of 100) to actually pay any interest to the flight systems aspect - which was why he asked if I was keen to join them for landing.

Oh the good old days!!

At the time we lived in Brockham and as a bonus it transpired that Bill Clinton and Air Force One was in the circuit and as it was explained to me - there was an exclusion zone whilst Air Force 1 was on finals? So we had to do 2 laps of the Ockham circuit. Which as fate would have it was almost directly over my house.

In all a surreal experience - just over 24 hours LHR - JFK - LHR return - didn't sleep a wink.

So not really a contribution to the thread - but a memory of a whirlwind, never to be repeated 24 hours. I think I was unbelievably lucky.

About the only thing I recall about Concorde (by way of a question) that I can't recall seeing here was when Concorde visited Auckland in the late 70's? Was the damage to either the rudder or a stabiliser? Surely at Mach 2.0 the vibrations/difference in control would be marked? From memory the flight crew was interviewed and I'm sure they said they didn't notice anything? Comments?

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