Posts by user "M2dude" [Posts: 257 Total up-votes: 1 Page: 11 of 13]¶

CliveL
Thank you for your reply, what you describe is absolutely fascinating; It seems that composites may not be the panacea for all aircraft structural problems after all. I confess. I'm afraid that I did intentially use that awful pun (sorry ).
Regarding strucural materials, I remember reading what Ted Talbot wrote in the manuscript for his brilliant work 'Mach 2 and Bit' (not sure if he ever did get it published) when he spoke about the Bristol 188. He said something like 'the never to be repeated experiment of making an aircraft structure out of stainless steel'. One can only imagine the manufaturing problems that Brisol must have had with that one. (I seem to remember that the strucure was welded and not rivetted together ).
Yes the US now has a supercruise aircraft (the F-22 Raptor) but not of course for up to 3 hours of up to 400\xb0K either. (Although a truly superb aircraft nonetheless). And as you say, military structural material airworthiness standards in no way apply to a civil project.
I can only imagine what the original Bristol (for the Type 223?) mixing unit you described must have looked like. The Concorde unit certainly dominated the whole underfloor picture in quite a sizeable area down the back; here's a diagram of the beasty:
For all it's complexity however I can never recollect any problems occuring there.

It looked far more intimidating in the flesh under the floor however.

Best regards
Dude

That is amazing Clive, these guys were indeed legend as far as the AICS development went. (And they were doing all that simulation work using analog computers too . Here is the one of the 'forward' pages from 'The Concorde Air Intake Control System' publication: (Issue 3 Feb' 2001). There just might be a name or two there that rings a bell.

So much was achieved by such a very small team of people. An achievement that was absolutely pivotal to the successful development of Concorde.

With total respect
Dude

Poor old Etienne, yes he's a sage here rather than Fage, I never noticed that one before. I do remember that the late Terry Brown, who was part of your S & C department was a bit of a boat builder as well as being a brilliant aerodynamicist. But all these people were absolute masters of their craft, bad spelling and all, the result being something so very special and unique.
As far as the AICS book goes, there are quite a few copies (methinks a few hundred) that are dotted around; I'll see what I can find and PM you. There were so many of these 'lesser' Concorde works out there that are full of useful information about what made Concorde tick.

Best regards
Dude .

Would you all believe 35 years today Concorde entered airline service (BA LHR -BAH and AF CDG-GIG). I remember as if it were yesterday.....Gosh I'm getting old

Best regards
Dude

So many vivid memories from so many people.
I suppose personally I'll always remember the first time that I ever saw Concorde flying as well as the LAST time :
The very first, as I posted here many months ago, was in 1970 when I, as a young grotty little RAF erk, was in Swindon and heard this loud roar in the sky over what was then Bon March\xe9 (Now Debenhams). Looking up I saw this amazing sight of 002 complete with her attending Canberra chase plane flying over. (And trailing a sizable black exhaust plume to boot).
The very LAST time I saw her flying was in November 2003 at the side of LHR 27R as G-BOAF, the last Concorde ever built and the last one ever to fly, made her final departure out of a very dismal Heathrow bound for Filton. For me, the weather at LHR that day perfectly matched to gloom of the occasion I'm afraid.
A really lasting memory I wil always treasure is while my now VERY grown up children were still young, they were (almost) as big Concorde 'nuts' as their dad. Concorde would fly over our house daily and they would run to the window every time they heard the sound of an aeroplane. The general disappointed chant they would come out with was 'it's not Concorde dad, it's just a plane'. For the life of me I don't know why they would develop THAT kind of prejudice and from whom they would get it from . (I used this particular ditty in a 2003 Concorde BBC TV documentary we did, but my cover is blown here anyway, so what the hell .

EXWOK
I went over base for a meeting last week and saw OAB parked at the side of the apron. I had several lumps in my throat as I drove past too I have to admit. To think that the last time OAB flew was in August 2000. when Les and the boys brought her back empty from JFK after the CAA pulled the Concorde C of A.
Hopefully she will get a fitting 'home' soon so that more people can marvel at our absolutely beautiful and truly timeless aviation icon

Best regards
Dude

Not a stupid question at all my friend. Yes, that's where she now sits. (She's been moved around so many times since 2003, but this is the first time I've personally seen here here as I don't get over to that side of the airport much these days). Incidently she now sits right next to where the old Concorde hangar TBB used to stand).

Best regards
Dude

flying lid
What a fascinating story. I'd not heard about these tests before I have to admit, but the results would be quite typical of the tough old lump that was the OLY593.
As far as the engine bay doors go, well they were tough as old boots and weighed a ton (literally ) but had no integral oil tanks or anything. (Although in airline service the Olympus being a leaky old girl you could happily have an oil bath IN the doors once you opened them for access. (It was messy stuff too and it just LOVED to decorate white shirts ). The engine bay doors you mention in Yeovilton of course belong to prototype 002 and may well have some flight test gear attached. (Popping down there to take some photos in a few weeks, so I'll have another look too).

artee
You are most welcome here, and your story is anything BUT a bore. Passenger reactions to flying on our lady are always great to read. The likes of Bellerophon, EXWOK, NW1 and of course landlady would always go out of their way to make every passenger feel special. (And as you found out in the pre 9-11 days passengers were also invited up for flight deck visits after the meal service was finished).

Best regards
Dude

CliveL
It was found that the relatively miniscule differences in plate alignment produced errors in true Ps measurement and so individual corrections had to be applied to each aircraft. No big deal with a digital ADC of course but not so clever when you are dealing with steam driven analog as we were. (Bearing in mind that any analog ADC is an electro-mechanical device). To give identical Mach 2 cruise readings between ADC 1 & 2 a plug in resistor/diode module was hooked into the respective ADC circuit, and this module stayed with the aircraft always. If we'd ever had to replace a static plate in service (and at BA we never did) we'd have had to have done an in-flight pressure survey in order to calculate the required resistors and altered the module accordingly.
The air intake system, although it used Ps from THREE sources (the side static ports and the static ports built into the nose probe; this being a pressure head and not just a pitot as were the side probes) did not apply any individual aircraft corrections, it just made different corrections between side and nose pressure sources (Ps and Pt). Having a digital processor at it's heart, these corrections were signalled by using 'program pins' at the rear of the AICU rack.
As steam driven as the Concorde ADC was, when it came to RVSM implementation in the late 1990s we found that the air data system was in fact superbly accurate, and no modifications to the computers themselves were required. Such a testament to the original superb design.

Best regards
Dude

Pen Pusher
That really is a superb photo and shows just what a large but cramped affair the Concorde engine bay was. Although a pre-producion example, the picture generally shows what the production aircraft looked like inside the chasm. In the picture you can see the titanium roof of the engine bay that did such a good job in protecting the wing above (as was the case with the OAF engine failure in 1980 mentioned previously in this thread). What is missing from the 101s engine bay shown here are the air conditioning primary and secondary heat exchangers that were fitted above the engines. (The large trunking you can see coming forward from the jet pipes are the exhausts for the ram air from the exchangers). On a blunty, the heat exhangers are mounted in the belly of the aircraft, in what is generally known as a pack. But there was no room in Concorde for such lumpy bits, and so the only alternative was to mount them above the engine. The remainder of the equipment, the Cold Air Unit (or Air Cycle Machine as the blunties call them) as well as the, unique to Concorde, Fuel heat exchanger were mounted in the wings. With everything so sprawled about it could not really be called a 'pack' and so in Concorde we refered to an air conditioning GROUP.
The wiring you can see on the lower parts of the engine doors is generally Graviner fire wire, used for engine fire and nacelle overheat detection. At the forward part of the 2 doors (shown most clearly on the #4 engine) are two orange 'boxes. These are the engine bay ventilation 'ground running flap' electrical actuators (the flaps themselves being shown shut). Normally these spring loaded flaps would be open on the ground, being progreesively closed with increasing speed as engine bay pressure increased. The actuator would only run when the engine fire handle was pulled, to help seal off the bay. All the other orange stuff you can see is FTD, or flight teast wiring and equiment. (We used to not very kindly refer to it as 'orange s--t' ).

With regard to aircraft 204, G-BOAC I think you will find that all the engines are still installed. I took this photo (oops sorry, my wife did ) when we had a function in Manchester about 18 months ago. You can see what a wonderful job the folk up there are doing taking care of her, and as for dining under the wing.. it was truly a memorable experience indeed.



Best regards
Dude

Landroger
Actually it was a great and moving experience Roger. All the people at the function were BA 'Concorde family', so the noise we made that evening was certainly sufficient. It sounds weird I know, but it was almost as if OAC was entering the spirit of the occasion. (And the aircraft was open for us to take photos, reminisce and quite honestly to help remind us all that something really wonderful was now missing from our lives). The aircraft is in such good general condition that she never really seems 'dead' at all
howiehowie93
Nothing missing here Howie. On the RIGHT HAND engines, ie. 2 & 4, Concorde had 2 hydraulic pumps, but on 1 & 3 engines there was only a single pump. What you can see is the spare gearbox provision for the extra YELLOW pump, right next to the IDG. (You can see the pipes coming from the GREEN hydraulic pump in the forward face of the gearbox, immediately forward of the 'blank').

Best regards
Dude

EXWOK
The OAF 'Mach 1 glitch' was pretty much from day 1, yonks before the nose job. All we were ever able to establish was that it was definately the ALTITUDE comparator tripping the red ADS master warning I established that one during a test flight. (At FL290 you needed around 350' comparison error between ADCs for at least 3 seconds in order to trip the warning). Trouble was the error was gone so quickly you never got very far. (And the AIDS/FDR system on OAF and OAG only took readings from #1ADC, and not both as was the case with the original 5 aircraft, so the FDR was not much help either).

ChristiaanJ
Not on the production aircraft my friend, there was now just a single raised fairing, offset to the left of the fuselage crown which houses both ADF sense antennas as well as the 2 compass flux valves. The smaller central fairing is the one housing the ADF Loop antennas.

This view from the top of the fin shows it all quite clearly.

Best regards
Dude

steve-de-s
Steve, I remember that OAB was fitted with the new loos and part of the new galley. They tested the new vacuum loos with DOG FOOD (no I don't know the brand ) and as far as I recall 'the suckers' worked as advertised.
The plan was that OAB would test fly the new loos and galleys, but that was before the nasty little greasy assassins got their way and OAB (and OAA) never got the RTF as well as the frame 72 modifications.

Best regards
Dude

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

Barbara was a truly lovely lady and will be sorely missed by all of us that had the honour to know her. She was such an unassuming lady and seemed to wonder what all the fuss was when the media followed her around in her early days on the fleet.

With greatest respect
M2Dude

Shaggy Sheep Driver
Quite right SSD. Most likely cause here would be either a failure in one of the two EDP pump case housings or one of the offload solenoids. These failures were relatively rare but still DID happen on occasion.

Best Regards
Dude

gordonroxburgh
Just looking at some old 202 pictures Gordon and by golly you are right. Could have sworn it was a 202 (DG) robbery but it obviously it was not. The plot thickens. (I do remember that we had a hell of a job getting hold of this electroluminescent panel for OAD, hence the memory).

It's not really an issue of technology, more one of utter annoyance. The regular passengers really would not want this nonsense, and nomatter what way you looked at it, it looked totally out of place and was a total waste of space. (Let alone weight). As I said before, it was all about 'emperor's new clothes' with certain people at the time'. (The rest of us saw it for what it was, blue hogwash).

steve-de-s
I think you will find that it was G-BOAB, during ground evaluation testing Steve. Fortunately Concorde never flew in service with any of this wavy blue ceiling crap.

Best Regards
Dude

G-BOAD's EL panel replacement will just have to remain one of lifes little mysteries.
So the light show was filmed on 202 eh? They were trying out this bilge on the ground on OAB. (Never saw it myself, but that's what was being said in 2001/2002). Obviously the light show is a recent addition to the G-BBDG itinery. Thank goodness none of this nonsense found its way onto the operational fleet.

And Coffin Dodger.. I think that you've summed up the general view.... naff indeed.

Best Regards
Dude

Ahhhhhh.. thanks Gordon. Glad you haven't really fitted that stuff to DG.. It is a magnificent exhibit as it stands; the restoration work done on that wonderful aircraft is nothing short of amazing.

Best Regards
Dude

Quax .95
The trick was to get as many hydraulic systems online ASAP during engine start/pushback, and that's where the sequence was defined. Now my tired/worn out/time-expired brain recollects that number TWO engine was started first, this gave us GREEN and YELLOW systems, followed by number THREE engine, which now gave us BLUE system. Once these engines were successfully started the 2 air start trucks (oh for that darned APU) could be disconnected and preliminary system checks, including full and free flying controls, could be carried out. After push-back the outboard engines were started by using adjacent engine cross-bleed (as BRIT312 quite correctly stated years ago, there was no 'cross the ship' cross-bleed duct), the remaining system checks would be carried out. After this the tow-bar would be disconnected, the nose lowered to 5 \xb0 and our Concorde would taxi away ready to leap up into the heavens; the place that she truly belonged.

Best Regards
Dude

I'm so glad and flattered at your comments, thank you very much spannersatKL. You are so right about working on the lady. It often seemed like gynacology, or even 'brain surgery 'for fun and profit' a lot of the time when changing stuff on 'The Rocket'.
M2V really was great stuff though, although now it is as rare as rocking horse excrement. (Got any spare)???

Best Regards
Dude