Posts by user "EXWOK" [Posts: 111 Total up-votes: 0 Page: 4 of 6]¶

CliveL -

Many thanks for the superstab explanation -it makes more sense as a manoeuvre-driven input than as low-speed protection as the conversion course implied.

I'm trying to remember what drove the fixed nose-down elevon input at low CAS/high alpha which I alluded to earlier. Presumably it wasn't superstab but some other element of the autostab system; is NW1, Bellerophon or Brit312 able to help me out here?

You're more than welcome.

It's nice to stretch the memory a bit - it's supposed to be good for the brain, and may make up for the seasonal synapse bashing that's about to start.....

Thanks all - I'd forgotten a lot of the SFC stuff. (May need to visit the dark corners of the loft in the near future).

Concorde would produce contrails in the same conditions that a conventional aircraft would. I've seen pics of it contrailing in supercruise, and it's a big trail.

Outbound, for reasons of best efficiency, the subsonic cruise would be at FL260 or 280 so contrailing was unlikely, but I would expect the occasional contrail inbound (cruising in low- to mid-30's) so you were unlucky not to see one if you were looking at the right time.

It would have been no more or less visible on primary or secondary radar than other commercial types.

It would be hard to see with the naked eye, unless the sun was reflecting off it.

That's not my recollection - no.2 system used for inbound flights, and this used the stbd outflow (oops! discharge ) valves.

No perf penalty, as 'Dude noted. I vaguely recall being told that the drag from the recuperator cancelled a lot of the recovered thrust. I've no idea how true it was.........

It could be felt on the flight deck, although the onset was not particularly noticeable, and tended to be masked by the fact that one generally lowered the visor and dropped the nose to 5 degs at about the same time.

I was always under the impression this was the equivalent of the 'bird speed' limitation some older Boeings carry.

We would definitiely have performed better if we could have got to 400kts at, say 3000'.

Interestingly, this was a fairly blunt instrumenet insofar as it was based on pressure altitude, so departing from Nairobi (where there's a good chance of meeting sizable birds) one would find the barber's pole already at 400kts or so.

That's a very 'Concorde' picture, Bellerophon.

Gentle descent in the crz, N1 max, N2 max, similar fuel burn per engine as a 747 (but over double the speed), Airspeed and Mach numbers just shy of the barber's poles, must have been well above FL500 given the Mach number yet the cabin alt is a smidge over 5000'.

Elapsed time 1hr 31, Longitude over 41W. Took me over three hours to get to 40W yesterday.......

PS and it has to be OAD, because for some reason the nose/visor control panel is black. I've no idea why I can remember stuff like that, but not the name of someone I met last week......

Further PS ref. the fuel flow gauge - somone wondered if the target flow veeder counter was for reheat. We now know that it wasn't, but you will see a small 'Fe' annunciation in the 9 o' clock position indicating that the gauge is measuring engine flow only. When fuel is being supplied to the reheats this changed to 'Ft' with a white background to indicate that the gauge was displaying combined fuel flow. (Fe=engine, Ft=total)

Fair point topbunk - I mis-phrased that, we certainly didn't achieve double the miles per gallon of a 747. I should also have made it clearer that I was comparing it with contemporaries, i.e. -100 and -200. (I recall about 2.5 - 3tonnes per hour per engine on a typical Atlantic sector)

So I agree it wasn't double the miles per gallon - although in terms of mpg the Conc was markedly better in the cruise than the 747 classic. Of course, you paid for it in the process of actually getting to M2 as well as dragging around the pattern at 300kts.

Bellerophon -

And a Happy New Year to you, too.

......well, people are hardly likely to volunteer interesting/incriminating information if they think you're likely to remember it!

Thanks for the kind remarks Landroger.

No time to expand, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I still miss it even 7years later.....seems like far less than that.

Still, there's no point in carping over something we can't fix, and at least we have vehicles like this one to remind ourselves what it was all about - and I can only add that I'm learning as much as anyone from the likes of M2Dude and CliveL.

Worthy of note is that the very last time I walked up to it in order to operate a service I still found it breathtakingly impressive.

And I still have to stare wistfully at OAB whenever I drive past the engineering base en-route to Cranebank.

Landroger - the 'tube' houses various nav antennae - can't remember offhand which - it's less obvious than it appears in this pic which is at just the right angle to accentuate it.

It was always impressive how similar the ADCs' outputs were compared to the 747 of the same era, and M2Dude has mentioned how the RVSM trials showed their accuracy.

Of course there was always the infamous OAF 'glitch' which threw up false ADS warnings accelerating through M1 which happened regularly during my time on the fleet and was subject to a tech log supplement. It never seemed to affect the machine in any other way. I dunno if she did this from new or it was a result of her nosejob.

That's terrible news - I'm downroute and hadn't heard.

Can only echo landlady's comments, Barbara was a lovely person.

I'm with M2dude and the majority of those involved who thought this was an unbearably naff concept - the whole point of Concorde and the millions of man-hours of development was that Mach 1 was a non-event. To introduce this nonsense convinced most of us that the marketers had lost the plot regarding Concorde and its purpose.

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

hissinsid;

The answer is that they were remarkably similar in handling, I guess this is a function of the flight control system. Certainly the 747-100s and 200s I flew before Conc had a definite change of 'feel' from hull to hull. (The 777s don't).

They all had certain other 'foibles', although none were of any note operationally. I believe that AF's habit of generating ADS master warnings at M1 has been prevously covered, as has AG's 'French' DC system. There were certainly some hulls you'd rather have than others on the LHR-BGI sector, although I think I flew them all there at some point or another.

As for Filton - it's always sad to see an airfield close, but especially so when there's so much history attached. It would be great to see the runway remain active, but the costs are pretty steep and the value of the land rather high. I wish all thise involved the very best of luck and hope you succeed in at least turning the hangar into something which recognises its own history and gives it a real purpose for the future.

Just thought I'd drop by and see what was happening on this thread........

My best personal experience of a quick t/round was a tech stop at SMA which we turned around in 45mins. Fuelling was taking place for about 30 of that. AF used to tech stop SMA on the way to GIG, I believe, so the station had some Conc experience.

As for the differences between AF and BA a/c I think most have been dealt with before. AG stood out in BA as a partly 'French' hull; the stuff noticed by pilots was generally:

NiCd main batts, with slight differences to the DC system (no SSB I recall).
No ability for flt crew to 'steal' pax O2.
Perspex flip up visual level on the glareshield instead of open metal construction. Sounds trivial, but I hated it!
No annunciation of DTG to next INS WPT on HSI unless in NAV mode (or was it TRUE?)
Undercarriage monitor not fitted.
Different audio select panels - get this: 6 a/c in the fleet you pushed for TX and pulled for intercom.....AG.......the other way round. Genius.
Probably a lot of other stuff under the skin that I've forgotten.

Allegedly this was representative of the AF fit (certainly as far as the batts/DC) but I can't say for sure. Obviously the cabin fits were very different and over the years the two airlines will have carried out different non-mandatory mods (e.g. the infamous 'cowcatcher' mod).

OAF was a standard BA machine, except that being younger it (like OAG) didn't have the 'crown area' mods done.

All from memory, usual health warnings apply......

1) Effectively it was (not the skin, but the TAT probe. The highest temp rise would be at the stagnation point so one can be confident that TAT is a realistic answer for max skin temp).

2) AFAIK pretty standard:

Q from pitots
S from statics
T from temp probe

Modified by ADC for position error. It's possible that ADC used beta inputs and I'm sure it used alpha inputs to achieve this.