Posts about: "Filton" [Posts: 81 Page: 4 of 5]¶

OAF was indeed a true BA aircraft, it title was bought for \xa31000 and 10,000FF, but significant sums ( million+) were then spent to deliver it to the BA spec. BA did fund and purchase it as their 6th Concorde, albeit at a greatly reduced price.

OAG sort of fell into BA's use. They had "bought" it for under \xa3100,000k, with a must sell back clause , before OAF was delivered to give their services resilience while OAC whet back to Filton for repair. During its use it suffered contamination of its hyd systems, so was grounded, before this was repaired the Concrde programme all but shut down and BA held onto the aircraft fully registering it as OAG, initially it had been G-BFKW.

OAG flew for a short while but was eventually grounded, as I understand it mainly for spares recovery, but as it was a million miles aware spec with from the other BA ( cabin was even different) it was a easy choice to make.

When BA acquired all the spares and full access to G-BBDG a decision was made to bring OAG as close to BA spec as possible and be the first to have a new interior on the fleet. OAG was then then launch Concorde in the land our livery and a lot OAF was a standard BA machine, except that being younger it (like OAG) didn't have the 'crown area' mods done the air to air shots from this time are of it in 1985.


Crown area mods...were these not mandated and embodied fleet wide at the 12,000 major?

As others have done before, I'd like to add my thanks to the many contributors who continue to make this such an engrossing thread

As I look to my left, on the wall is a framed, fading, roughly A2 photo of three of these fabulous aircraft, outside the hangar at Filton in the mid-seventies - presented to my grandfather, who worked there on Concorde production. When I was about ten years old, I was lucky enough to be taken by him on a tour of the works, and can remember being allowed to have a good look around the inside of the aeroplane.

The photo that hangs next to it was taken a few years ago by my bestest flying buddy, Alex, as we thermalled out together over the Brecon Beacons, sitting in bucket seats, suspended, by looms of kevlar, from large, sailcloth kites...

Not too difficult to see where my own inspiration for flying came from

Wow!!! What a wonderfully interesting, gripping, riveting thread. It took me about one week to read it entirely and that was quite fantastic; so thanks a lot to all the main contributors (I'm sure everybody knows who I'm talking about) .
Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to take a ride on the beauty but I really felt in awe of her as soon I as I sarted to look at her more closely. This plane is a lot more than just a plane; to my eyes, it is simply one of (if not THE) the biggest achievment of mankind so far and something that inspires wonderment and sadness at the same time, a huge step forward in aviation history that sadly ended up in a huge step backward. I had a look at the video of the final concorde going out of Filton in 1979 posted earlier in this thread ( BBC - Bristol - The story of the final Concorde ) and keep in mind the faces of the 2 guys looking at the production line starting to be demolished... Heartbreaking!

Of course, I have many questions to ask to the experts here so let's just start with a serie of questions regarding the birth of the beast:
The 1962 treaty talks about an equal share of work and expenditure between Fr and UK... That sounds very political and not very realistic! A more pragmatic way would have been to take the best each country had to offer. But, in the end, was the share really fair for everybody? Did this treaty lead to some redundancies in terms of R&D or manpower and to an increase of the total cost of the project?
Also, was there really a technical need to build 6 a/c before the entry in service?
I ould really appreciate if one the living concorde bible in this thread give me an answer and, BTW, keep this thread alive.

Thanks again CliveL

A few pages earlier on this thread some of you have posted some of their favourite photos of Concorde. Here are very sad, chocking and rare photos:

This is 211 (F-BVFD) after "Air France's special treatment" (shame on them). The photos were taken in 1994. More photos of this can be seen here: Maripa : Documentation photographique.

To compensate, here's one of my favourite:


Most of those photos were taken at Toulouse (we saw a lot from Filton in this thread but very few from France). The caption of the top left picture says it is 102 (F-WTSA) and 201 (F-WTSB) in the background. The image comes from a french website ( Concorde dans la presse de 1965 \xe0 2003 ) gathering hundreds of articles about Concorde. Very interesting but in French only.
I particulary like this last serie of photos because it shows the process of a dream turning into reality, the beginning of such a beautiful adventure and the symbol of a time where national pride and technical achievment had more importance and value than the basic investment/profitability ratio that rules the world today! And now, more than 40 years later, not only we are not able to build a SST but we are also not able to make a SST flying again.
And this leads to a new question (maybe another 64000$ one):
As we can see in those photos and as I have seen in photos from Filton, several pre-production and production airframes were built at the same time. Did the fabrication of pre-production or production a/c had to be stopped at some point to wait for in flight test results? Similar question: did the early flights revealed unforseen problems that needed to be sorted out before the program can move on?

Wow, what an amazing thread which I have only recently found.

Congratulations to all for a fascinating read

Although I never got the opportunity to fly on Concorde, I will never forget seeing her fly some charters from Filton in the late 1990's. On one occasion I was stood at the wire fence at the end of runway 27 and watched Concorde taxi directly towards me, do a 360 degree turn and line up for takeoff. Concorde was only around 100ft-150ft away from me when the throttles were opened. Luckily I was holding tightly onto the fence and got a face full of dust as the reheats kicked in! The noise, power and heat I felt from those Olympus engines was phenomenal. She looked stunning as she rotated amongst the heat haze and the slender delta climbed steeply away towards the Bristol Channel. What an aircraft!

My grandfather worked on the Olympus 593 engines at Rolls Royce in Filton, so I will always hold Concorde close to my heart. I have been onboard Foxy at Filton when she was open to the public and I have visited 002 at Yeovilton and 101 at Duxford. I live quite close to Delta Golf at Brooklands and have been onboard her about 4 times now (including a sit in the cockpit) and recently flew the fantastic Concorde simulator with Captain John Eames and First Officer Ian Smith which is a day I will treasure. Opening up the throttles for take-off on 31L at JFK and tackling the checkerboard landing at Kai Tak were experiences I will never forget.

Keep up the great postings everyone!

Dozy

Yeah, well when we put a digital computer to generate the AICS laws that was NEW man!



Again, no digital multifunction displays on offer in those days

Errrr no, I don't think so. Concorde's flight deck was done at Filton and we had no involvement in the Airbus designs in that area.


Exwok's remark is not quite right IIRC. Certainly the window size was dictated by pressurisation failure, but one couldn't maintain cabin pressure with two windows failed - the design case was to get to a breathable altitude before you killed too many passengers! Also, there is very little to see when you have a delta wing under you.

Ummm - most participants reckoned that the Concorde infrastructure showed the way not to do it, and besides the early Airbuses were developed in parallel with the later stages of Concorde development. You have a point where R&D is concerned though - several technologies developed for Concorde found their way onto the subsonic fleet, not the least being the probability approach to system certification.

Hey Clive - nice to see you!

I was thinking more "indirectly" - in general UK/Euro flight deck layouts were more in line with improving ergonomics than those on the other side of the pond for a long time. Later work may not have been done at Filton as Concorde's was, but the Airbus folk would have been foolish in the extreme not to use the fundamental principles as a basis for that work!

Hence the catch-all term "paved the way" - whereby lessons in how not to do it are as useful as those which were a positive example!

Hi all, slowly working my way through this thread, 3 days and up to page 15! Should be finished by Christmas. Hehe Absolutely fascinating reading, so good to have memories of the people who made, flew and maintained this incredible aircraft. My only reminiscence is trying to persuade my parents that they could not hear Concorde go supersonic when living in Bournemouth, OK they could and once being held at Filton, whilst she landed. Has anyone seen the BBC items reflecting 10 years since last flights. Which includes something from page 5 or 6 of this thread. The SR71 asked to wait for Concorde to proceed! I am sure these pages are far more interesting than the books, as one can ask questions, I just hope it is being saved somewhere for reference or for sale to help maintain this very informative site. Thanks to all the professionals who give their time and all the questioners for such interesting questions. http://www.pprune.org/forums/images/.../eusa_clap.gif

Hi Christian,I was a development engineer at Filton working on the AICU at first but ending up in charge of avionics test.
So as far as your AICU is concerned - I have handled all the boards extensively.
I first worked on the "A" model - the first manufactured box, followed by "A bar" (logically, not "A").
These did not have the doghouse connector on the front, and in order to see what was going on in the program, we made a strobe unit hard wired to the digital boards, this was followed by the connector on the front and an AICU test box.
When first switched on the whole unit rattled at high speed as all the relays chattered.
I spent several days adding decoupling capacitors on all the boards.
The birds nest chassis wiring was chosen to prevent cross- talk.
This was at the start of 1972, but I can still remember a lot of it.
Someone mentioned a prom change at Casablanca, I carried out a prom change there just before the C of A flight.
I am a volunteer at the Bristol Aero Collection, and we have just received a drawing cupboard with the AICS drawings.
We are at the moment documenting archives. One of the volunteers is Ted Talbot who I used to work with, and has been mentioned in posts.
Feel free to ask questions, I may remember the answers!

Hi Christian,I was a development engineer at Filton working on the AICU at first but ending up in charge of avionics test.
So as far as your AICU is concerned - I have handled all the boards extensively.
I first worked on the "A" model - the first manufactured box, followed by "A bar" (logically, not "A").
These did not have the doghouse connector on the front, and in order to see what was going on in the program, we made a strobe unit hard wired to the digital boards, this was followed by the connector on the front and an AICU test box.
When first switched on the whole unit rattled at high speed as all the relays chattered.
I spent several days adding decoupling capacitors on all the boards.
The birds nest chassis wiring was chosen to prevent cross- talk.
This was at the start of 1972, but I can still remember a lot of it.
Someone mentioned a prom change at Casablanca, I carried out a prom change there just before the C of A flight.
I am a volunteer at the Bristol Aero Collection, and we have just received a drawing cupboard with the AICS drawings.
We are at the moment documenting archives. One of the volunteers is Ted Talbot who I used to work with, and has been mentioned in posts.
Feel free to ask questions, I may remember the answers!

Ruddman -

No autobrakes.

(And - with my pedant's hat on - no 'manual' brakes either. Pedal brakes, yes. I know that the 'manual brakes' has become an accepted term, but the nonsense of it just bugs me….)

Stopping distances were good; from a higher Vapp we stopped rather shorter than a 'classic' 747. Filton was tightish, Bournemouth was worse….

First gen carbon brakes did not like being 'feathered' so we used them pretty firmly on every landing. At Filton, Bournemouth, E Midlands etc. you'd put the pedals to the floor after nose wheel touchdown. Allegedly no more wear doing this than feathering them along a long runway.

Reverse was pretty effective - more so than a modern bypass engine. We idled the outboards at 100kts and the inboards at 75kts so they weren't in play for the whole landing (reverse is most effective at higher speeds anyway).

It was a good 'stopper'. Thankfully.

I'm not really sure why I stopped coming here, it is one of, if not the most interesting thread on any of the forums I visit - by miles. However, I got back into it a few days ago and realised I was over a hundred pages behind. I have been slowly catching up, but I'm still nearly fifty pages behind.

My first question is; what has become of the Brabazon Hangar/ BAe Filton/ G-BOAF situation? Wikipedia just say its all been sold - the airfield at least - but not what the dispositions of all those valuable items, particularly Alpha Foxtrot.

Second, just to show I really am reading myself back up to date, I noticed something ChristaanJ said that has some resonance with me.

Wow! Yes I have CJ! I only know one other person who has - fascinating book and I know exactly what you mean. Thee are several other books in the same vein; 21st Century Jet - about the conception and birth of the Boeing 777 and Wide Body , the equally fascinating story of the beloved and iconic Boeing 747.

You probably don't remember, but I used to be a "scanner engineer" - I finally retired in July last year - but I was involved in the very early days of what are now common place diagnostic machines. At some point in the early nineties, I realised two things. I could write a bit - not incomprehensibly at any rate - and all the people who made the early scanners, did the development work and worked on them in the field before me, were either retired or passed away. I asked the management at the time if I could have a bit of time, perhaps a half day every week, to do the research and do a 'Tracy Kidder' for the EMIScanner. No answer came the stern reply and it never got done. Now I don't think it can be, so it never will.

I would love to write 'The Soul of a New Machine' for Concorde, but A) I'm probably too old now and B) I was never part of it, so I probably can't put the passion in to it, certainly not the knowledge, that she deserves.

If anyone on here who was part of it who wants to put pen to paper (Oh come on! Who doesn't use a Word Processor - which dates me on its own!) but it doesn't seem to come out right, perhaps we ought to meet?

Few of my close friends are engineers or scientists and although they all agree that Concorde was (and is) a lovely looking thing, they simply don't understand why it is that engineers get passionate and dewy eyed about her. They cannot comprehend the difficulties of flying at Mach 1+, let alone Mach 2 for three hours in a pretty frock and thus, the ability to do so just seems 'normal'. The book is there to write; the book of the people, by the people, for the people.

As so many have already said: what a wonderful thread. Please please keep it going.

Given the high quality of expertise and experience here, please accept my apologies for any ill informed inaccuracies. I never flew in Concorde, but I did 'fly' her thanks to the late John Cook.

In the late 1970s I was in the RAF section of the school CCF with his son Richard (tragically later killed in the Mull of Kintyre accident) and John (one of the first BA Concorde pilots) arranged for a minibus load of us to go to Filton on what I wish I'd realised at the time was an exceptionally privileged visit. Passage of time blurs the memory, but it still sticks in my mind as an extraordinary day.

The first 'Concorde' we saw was the full scale marketing mock up, essentially the left side of an external Concorde attached to a hangar wall, with a full interior cabin. I still remember being surprised how small it was - the windows especially - and the mix of different seats and trims inside, presumably to show options to potential buyers.

Next stop was the simulator and - in the analogue days of the 70's - the enormous, detailed 3D model of Heathrow and what looked like the surrounding 10 miles, mounted vertically on a wall. A huge gantry on rails ran back and forth, up and down, so a camera with tiny periscope lens could take off, fly around and land as per the simulated flight, with the resulting pictures projected for the pilots in the sim. The size of the thing - and the attention to detail of the model - was incredible. Off to one side was a large rectangular shallow dish painted light blue. It's sides were raised - like a saucer - and edged with fluffed cotton wool. We were told that once the flight in the sim reached a certain height, it would 'go into cloud' (fade to white) while the camera trundled across to the blue dish. The flight would then 'emerge' from the 'cloud' and the camera went round and round in circles, giving a very plausible impression of high altitude flight until it was time to reverse the procedure and descend, back to 'Heathrow'.

Incredibly, they let us fly the sim, two at a time up front, for a few minutes each. It was simply too much to take in and was over far, far, far too soon. But I can claim a (very poor) approach to Heathrow before the instructors called us off - apparently a crash landing didn't do the camera any favours as the lens would plough into the model. I can see why they were nervous.

(Is this the sim cockpit - without the model I presume - that is now at Brooklands, by the way?)

Final stop was a gantry overlooking one of the hangers where a solitary Concorde nestled amongst (what fuzzy memory recalls as) three VC10s being converted to tankers for the RAF. The Concorde seemed tiny by comparison, but also startling in that it was still largely in green primer, access panels were open and inspection hatches missing and vulnerable areas were covered in what looked like flattened cardboard boxes for protection. Presumably this was one of the 'unsold' numbers before BA took it on (?). Nose down, it looked very sad.

We weren't. I suspect we were insufferable for weeks afterwards.

What I'd give for a time machine to revisit that afternoon...

During my 27 years as a licensed aircraft engineer on the Concorde fleet I can not recall any type of rota for flying the aircraft. Whilst in theory it would be nice to equal their flying hours it was not possible as A/C engine hours would often dictate. The engine was made up of different modules & when that module became time x then the engine was changed & went away for the module to be replaced/overhauled.

You would often face a situation where you tried to limit flying hours of an A/C so you could change an engine to coincide with a service check. Also bearing in mind the delivery dates of each A/C G-BOAC was the first due to it having the BOAC reg. followed by OAA,OAB,OAD,OAE . OAF, & OAG both arrived later.

OAC returned to Filton under warranty for a while & OAG was laid up for a long time before being recommissioned . Whilst we had 28 engines on the wing through out the fleet there were only about 8 spare engines. Don't know about Air France Engines. Like all engines they suffer from ingestion of FOD & oil leaks etc. so engines never really went to their full time x hours. As a flying spanner on several charters you always prayed for G-BOAD as it was always the most reliable of the fleet.

They all had their own characteristics. Most Captains had a favourite A/C

OAC was the first off the Filton line, and therefore the heaviest (they learned to add lightness as production progressed!). That would have had an effect on range and possibly CG for that aeroplane. It also had a wing repair (following an engine fire I believe) which added even more weight.

The reason that "birds nest wiring" was used for the backplane wiring on the AICU was indeed to prevent crosstalk.
I carried out a prom change at Cassablanca just days before the C of A flight, and used a prom blower that I carried out from Filton in my hand baggage together with boxes of proms, i remember the strange reaction by the customs man , until someone rescued me by telling him that I was taking them straight through to air side for Concorde. I programmed the proms by selecting the switches for the 8 bits of the line in the program for that particular prom, and then pressing the "blow" button that destroyed the fusible links in the input circuits of the prom. Of course all 64 lines of program in the prom that was changing had to be blown, even if only one line of program was changing. I carried out the programming on all 8 AICUs in 201, and the prom boards were laid out on a desk in the Air France office. Andre Turcat popped in to see what I was doing.

Greetings to all, I thought there might those in this thread who would be interested to know that my Grandfather, Alan Radford, who many will know from the Filton and Fairford Concorde design and development days, is still with us and continues to talk so fondly of both Concorde (His Miss Moses Lake) and of all who he worked alongside during that wonderful time. I'd be delighted to pass on contact details if anyone wished to get in touch - he recently loft his wife Peggy (another former BAC employee who was fiercely proud of Concorde and all who made her happen) so I thought it might be nice to see if there are any old faces who we might re-connect.
Thank you to you all for keeping this wonderful thread going for all these years, and for keeping the memory of such a proud time in both our nation's and my own family history alive.
Kindest regards, Tim Radford, grandson of Alan.

This may be a bit of a long shot.
I am trying to identify the function of two printed circuit boards from an Olympus 593 Engine Engine Control Unit (ECU). I worked on Concorde and its ECUs at Filton for many years in the 1970s and 80s.
When Concorde retired in 2003 I requested from British Airways and was given 2 ECU PCBs as a souvenir.
There were of course 8 ECUs on each aircraft, 2 per engine. Each ECU had about 20 different PCBs. I have sometimes wondered just what the function was of my 2 PCBs. Maybe someone knows or has the relevant ECU Overhaul Manual. I have already asked various organisations for help - Ultra Electronics the manufacturers of the ECUs, British Airways, Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust and some museums. I've had some helpful replies but no actual answers.
Marked on the PCBs ae their drawing numbers: 46546-629-0 and 46456-602-0.
I have tried to attach some photos but there seems to be some forum setting that's preventing this!
Thanks

That's an interesting challenge, but one that is very hard to solve. Have you tried asking on the Concordesst.com website and their forum? As you say, you would need to find a very specific overhaul manual and I don't know if a manual like that is even around, other than in a heritage collection somewhere.

Rolls Royce will hold a copy of the CMM for the ECU. Airbus probably do as well.

Whether either of them would release it to you, even now, I am doubtful.