Posts by user "DozyWannabe" [Posts: 29 Total up-votes: 0 Page: 2 of 2]¶

Not as far as I know - the first UK "production" Concorde intended for testing rather than line flying (G-BBDG) did end up as a donor for spares, but it wasn't a case of an aircraft without a home - it was just the way things turned out - they never intended to sell it to an airline. In fact that very airframe is the one now living at Brooklands. Several things kiboshed Concorde as a going concern in the '70s - not least of which was the protest movement in the US making US airlines shy away. Above all it was not an issue with the project itself, but the early '70s oil crisis which had the most drastic effect. In fact, while the UK government effectively wrote off the cost in the '70s, the profits BA ended up making could have made a sizeable dent in the development costs.

There was a B model on the drawing board which could very well have been capable in that arena.

CONCORDE SST : CONCORDE B

In fact, BA significantly underestimated what customers would be willing to pay for Concorde service at first - it was this realisation that enabled them to turn a profit!

Well, that was kind of the crux of the issue. Boeing had already effectively bet the company on the 747 project, and the 2707 still had technical issues on paper that the Concorde project had already solved. As far as my reading suggests, the runaway success of the 747 in fact owed a lot to the issues that ended up swamping the DC-10 and L-1011 - essentially gifting Boeing a market leading position and rescuing the company from the abyss - the 2707 was cancelled long before that became a reality though. In effect, before the success of the 747 was a done deal, Boeing couldn't stretch to doing both.

Well, the 2707 project never advanced to the point where such practicalities were considered - but it's certainly the case that part of the Concorde "B" spec was intended to do away with reheat (afterburner) entirely, and be much more fuel-efficient as a result.

Not necessarily - supersonic travel as a "premium" product was always intended to co-exist with subsonic offerings, much as it ended up doing. There's a revisionist narrative that has the USA betting on mass transit with the 747 versus Europe betting on supersonic transit with Concorde - but all the contemporary material I've read indicates no such thing. Even setting aside the protests within the US against the Concorde, the simple fact is that SST was never going to be a viable domestic solution, so that limited the market for the 2707. Whereas a transatlantic SST was very much a viable proposition due to the transoceanic nature of the journey. It could be argued that even with the oil crisis and the subsequent drop in orders, the UK and French governments gave up on the Concorde project too soon.

If that were genuinely the case, then there would have been no Airbus project or consortium. As Clive correctly points out, the A300 project started taking shape while Concorde was undergoing her proving flights. While there's no doubt that the Concorde project was completed for political reasons most of all, the idea that she was a forlorn hope before she went into service is grossly unfair.

Yet, as alluded to before, the R&D gains and technological knowledge coming from the project helped to lay the foundations of a pan-European aircraft maker which would eventually go toe-to-toe with the best the USA had to offer. The sidestick technology which led to an unprecedented level of commonality between short-haul and long-haul types was first tested on a Concorde airframe (Google "concorde minimanche"). Added to which is the fact that in Concorde, for all the project's problems, an airliner was produced which - on a technological level at least - left every competitor in the world in the dust. That is something that can never be taken away.

Not really. For one thing, the 2707 design was only at the mock-up stage when cancelled, so the practicalities of its engine arrangement hadn't been touched on. If you go back and read the Ted Talbot 'oil and lamp black' story, you can see for yourself that Concorde had solved problems that even US military designs were struggling with half a decade later.

As for the Concorde nacelle/engine arrangement - it didn't really have that large an impact on the F-BTSC accident - because even if the nacelles weren't grouped, the hot gases from the burning fuel would still have had a negative impact on the airflow to the adjacent engine. If I recall correctly, the investigators calculated the way the damage spread through the structure and control connections and proved that even if all four engines were still producing the correct thrust, the fire would still have caused sufficient structural damage to prevent the aircraft making Le Bourget. The nacelle structure itself was proven to be strong enough to withstand an uncontained failure of the engine when it actually happened on the line.

Apropos of nothing, the separate "podded" design was proven to be no protection against damage to adjacent engines when the inboard starboard engine of El Al 1862 took out the outboard as it fell away.

Again, as I referred to earlier, the Concorde "B" on the drawing board when the project was cancelled was intended to do away with reheat/afterburner entirely!

The problems a modern project will run into include the fact that a lot of the research will be in the wind - and sadly a lot of the people involved are no longer with us.

Or FAAnEC, if you will...

(My god, that makes an awful acronym! )

Hardware-wise, maybe. In most other aspects, absolutely not - otherwise the transition from analogue to digital would not have happened.

"Triplication"? I'm unsure as to what you're referring to. If you're referring to the two disparate software implementations used in the Airbus FBW systems of the A320 and her descendants, then there were only two - not three - distinct implementations, and they were not so much a necessity as a "belt-and-braces" failsafe, given that the A320 was the first implementation of its type.

Software likewise, as AirborneAgain alludes to.

Not necessarily - see AirborneAgain's post.

But in a software-based system, the logical functions can be replaced simply by replacing a ROM IC or by re-writing to an EPROM IC - a much less problematic process than re-jigging discrete hardware across hundreds of airframes.

Airbus/Boeing FBW systems use hardened versions of obsolete commodity hardware - the suppliers won't stop making them as long as there's a demand.

It's a fascinating posit, and one for aviation nerds to discuss at length down the pub - I'll give it that!

The general trend follows, but he doesn't spend much time on external factors (such as the 747's degree of success being aided significantly by the tribulations of Lockheed's L1011 development and MD's reaction to the DC-10's flaws).

It's interesting that the article writer seized on the paragraph about Concorde to frame his article though - it's almost a footnote in the original journal piece!

Well, the theory as presented *could* be argued to encompass that, but as far as I could tell from the original journal article, that's not what it was about - it did not distinguish supersonic from subsonic in terms of the conclusions drawn. This is why I pointed out that the mention of Concorde was almost a footnote in the original article, but for some reason bumped up to headline status in the phys.org article linked above.

Concorde was only mentioned in the original journal piece as it was (naturally) an extreme outlier on the general trend.

Of course - however the original journal article was not intended to be a historical precis of relative success of airliners - it was a purely scientific theory which showed that various equations regarding airliner specifications could be used to plot a trend showing how commercially successful they were based on the historical aspects (and presumably extrapolated for future reference if desired).

@Bellerophon:

Interesting info - cheers!

As a sort-of tangent, as an aviation-mad nipper I watched and recorded the 1988 BBC Concorde Special, and pretty much wore the VHS tape out. The skipper on that flight was Hutch (who also just-so-happened to be a BBC aviation correspondent on the side). The reason I bring it up was that the FO was Chris Norris, who mentioned that he was just about to be made Captain - and regretfully that meant he'd be leaving the Concorde flight deck, most likely for a subsonic short-haul type (he reckoned it'd be the B757).

As I recall, I think I remember reading that Capt. Norris did end up returning to Concorde as a captain before the type was retired - so I'm guessing that previous experience as FO did count when making the bid. Was that the case?