Posts about: "BAC221" [Posts: 4 Page: 1 of 1]¶

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

A nice touch is that both the HP115 and the BAC221 have escaped the scrapman, and are now standing next to Concorde 002 in the Fleet Air Arm museum at Yeovilton (GB).

CJ

twochai

I would say that it was. Remember that the design went through several phases before it was finalised and we did an awful lot of testing and tweaking of the detailed geometry to eliminate a gradual pitch-up and to increase the vortex lift at any given AoA, so by the time we defined the production aircraft wing we knew pretty well all there was to know about vortex development from the AoA at which it started right through to the AoA at which the vortices burst.

The BAC221 didn't contribute much to the details of this understanding as it was rather too late to help in prototype definition and the production development was all about the details of planform, camber and twist. But then the 221 wasn't intended to study vortex development; it was built to examine the handling characteristics of slender ogee wings at supersonic speeds.

CliveL

CliveL , correct me where I'm wrong.

* Most deltas develop some vortex lift, and there were several deltas flying long before Concorde, so the phenomenon was not unknown.
Shaping the wing, and in particular the leading edge, optimised the effect on Concorde.

* The ogee (slender delta) wing was original proposed by NASA (possibly still NACA at the time) as best suited for a supersonic transport. The information was in the public domain by the time the "BAC223" and "Super Caravelle" were first revealed (they later "merged" into the Concorde design).
The Tu-144 design used the same information, which is a major reason for its resemblance to Concorde, rather than espionage...
How much the full advantages of the 'vortex lift' were understood at the time, is still an open question, IIRC.
I'll have to look for the original NASA TN (Tech Note)... it may be on the web somewhere.

* I would think the Handley Page HP115 slender-delta low-speed test aircraft must have contributed some details about vortex lift.

Sorry, I can't find my own photos of the beast.
It's now in the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton (UK), together with Concorde 002 and the BAC-221.
It still has the "smoke tube" on the left wing leading edge, that was used to visualise the vortex over the wing (not yet fitted when the photo above was taken).

CJ