Posts about: "Marilake Display" [Posts: 11 Page: 1 of 1]¶

You're right, M2dude, I should really have written that there were no \xb5Ps on board when she first went into service (1976), and that they only slowly filtered in afterwards.

Another example on the BA aircraft, of course, in full view of the pax, were the "Marilake" cabin displays that showed Mach, altitude, speed, etc. that replaced the earlier Mach-only displays, and where everybody just HAD to have their picture taken once at Mach 2. Each of the four displays (two up front, two at the back) had a micro-processor.

Not sure when those were first fitted.... it was during one of the cabin re-do's and livery changes.

Re Mach 2 ....

In the earliest days of the project, Concord(e) was described as a Mach 2.2 airliner.

Once the RR58 alloy arrived, and the first thermal fatigue tests were underway, Mach 2.2 appeared as somewhat optimistic, and to assure an acceptable airframe life, the Mmo (maximum operating Mach number) to be certified was brought down to Mach 2.04.

Interesting question just asked by somebody on another forum....
Why Mach 2.04 ? Why not Mach 2.10, or Mach 1.96 ?
With thermal fatigue still being a field that was only starting to be explored, was that a fully technical choice.... or was there a commercial aspect ?

Mach 1.96 would again have meant a few more hours life for the airframes, and would not really have made a significant difference in the flight duration.
But think of the huge difference between "more than twice the speed of sound" and "not quite as fast as twice the speed of sound".....
Mach 1.96 would simply not have "sold"......

I have no answer to the question who finally decided on '2.04', and I don't think many of the people that wrote the "TSS spec" are still with us, so we'll probably never know.


And along the very same lines, another snippet.....

In 1985, during a major cabin upgrade, BA installed the "Marilake" displays, that showed Mach, altitude, groundspeed, etc. in place of the simple Mach-only displays that Air France kept until the end.
Nice display, complete with microprocessors.... you must have seen photos.

Of course everybody wanted their photo taken next to the display saying "Mach 2".
So these display were subtly programmed to read "Mach 2.00" as soon as the Mach number was above 1.98, and they stayed there....even if the aircraft went to Mach 2.03 or beyond.
A tiny bit of cheating... but commercially it made a lot of sense, of course.

Like the earlier BA cabin displays, the Air France displays only showed the Mach number, and they were little more than "rescaled" digital voltmeters that directly displayed the 0-12V Mach signal from the Air Data Computer. They tended to flicker a bit from 2.00 to 2.01 to 2.02 and back, but at least they didn't "cheat". And I still proudly have a photo of myself with a "Concorde grin", at Mach 2.03 !

Fascinating thread!

I think (along with the other PAX that day) that I can claim to have been faster on Concorde than anyone else.

Despite many trips, I only flew on BOAB once (sad I know) and there was obviously a malfunction of some sort as the speed (on the Marilake display), instead of stopping in the normal range of 1260-1320 mph continued steadily climbing to 1990 mph.

This was the second "fault" as we had previously begun the flight from JFK with a low speed RTO due to one of the computers disagreeing with the other 2 on takeoff. Despite the slow speed we still had to wait 10 mins for the brakes to cool.

I have it all on Video! (The RTO and the Speed anomaly)

Nice one....
That would have been about Mach 3 !!!!!!
(Without taking head or tail wind into account.)

As per a previous post of mine, I've uploaded a takeoff and landing from JFK - LHR, including the very minor blip on roll from JFK and the 1990mph on the Marilake.


YouTube - uvs040403 002 3

Wasn't "Blue Wave" some kind of extremely gimmicky scheme of cabin lighting, going all "blue" when passing Mach1?
And, mentioning Marilake, are you talking about the cruddy Marilake proposal to replace the cabin displays with something, again much more gimmicky, and much less legible?
I think the proposal is still on their website.

CJ

The Marilake proposal is on their site Marilake Aero Systems under cabin displays.

Uurrgh.

Blue Wave
Although Marketing (bless 'em) and the usual 'Emperors New Clothes' brigade thought that this was wonderful, most of 'us' in the fleet thought that this was really quite a naff idea and would end up being a total annoyance to most regular Concorde passengers. The idea was that at Mach 1 a battery of blue lights would wash a single pulse from the rear to the front of the cabin. At Mach 2 you would get a double whammy blue light show to help ruin your concentration.

Marilake
I remember these 'improvements' to be embodied in 'project rocket' (as you say, pretty unreadable) but it would be interesting to look at the history of this thing. When it was first fitted in the mid to late 80s it proved itself to be total junk: Instead of using an off the shelf microprocessor design, Marilake Instruments decided to use a custom processor running from dedicated TTL/CMOS chips, it used a clumsy parallel instead of serial databus between the displays (stacks of extra wiring) ran red hot all the time (the toasty display units were surrounded by coats in the wardrobes to boot and also used a master/slave layout, where it the master (fwd right hand) display developed a fault you lost the whole shooting match. Just to put the cherry on the parfait, flight data had to be entered via a laughingly called 'hand held controller' that was fitted against the side of the C/B panel behind the captains seat. (This thing was so big that the supernumerary seat had to have restriction fitted to its fwd travel, to prevent the seat or occupier colliding with this monster). Now this thing, which was in reality a quite large LCD portable commercial computer terminal (it even ran BASIC!!), had to be initialised before every flight, and the crew had to input Baud Rates as well as all sorts of other bilge before the system would hopefully initialise. As often as not the system would lock up, and I'm quite sure that if this thing had not been tethered via a power and data cable, many a pilot or E/O would have tossed the thing out of the DV window!!. Reliability became so awful that eventually the whole system was disabled for about a year while Marilake were forced/coerced/threatened into a total system redesign. The final product, which ran nice and cool abandoned nearly all of the original hardware (no more master/slave arrangement either), utilised an ARINC 429 type databus and came equipped with new plasma displays which FINALLY worked rather well. The crap commercial computer terminal was replaced by a really neat data entry panel that was fitted on the left hand centre consul that worked pretty good from day 1. FINALLY the darned system worked.

Best Regards
Dude

You have to admit, that everyone did want her/his photo next to the Marilake displaying Mach 2.00.
Maybe the marketers should have done something about the protective screen of the displays.... I hate to think how many "once in a lifetime" photos were ruined by the reflection of a flash blanking out the display.
I still have my photo at M2.03, but that was the simplistic Mach cabin display in a French Concorde.... .

> "no more master/slave arrangement" ... are you sure? I'll have to pull out what I have in the way of documentation....
> "ARINC 429 type databus"... again I'll have to check, but I thought it was still the old RS-422 bus. I can't remember any ARINC 429 on Concorde.... but you were there much longer than me.

I was slightly involved in an effort to bring a Marilake back to life, but we were baffled by the various comm protocols.

The French Mach cabin displays were simple kludges, but they worked, and we've just got one back to life again....

CJ

To be fair, I was talking about the 'bluewave' concept; I didn't think the Marilakes were out of place at all.

Same here.... it was the BlueWave concept that sounded naff... and the Marilakes to me always looked good (the original ones, not the 'Project Rocket' proposal....). So much better than the old-fashioned Mach cabin displays, either BA or AF.

CJ