Did You Know?....Concorde....

[ToraToraTora]

I have been fortunate enough to have flown on Concorde, I had Champagne and Lobster at 56,000 feet but did you know at Mach 2 Concorde stretches 6-10 inches? There is a stretch gauge on the floor of the flight deck and experienced pilots can tell how fast they are going just by that. Oh and yes I have been up with the pilots. Magnificent aircraft, I was so sad when it was taken out of service, sad that my kids will never be able to fly on it. A great achievement from the time when we could conspire with our French cousins to make something wonderful.

[wolf63]

This guy is easy to listen to

[calmck]

Yes I knew. Was invited into the cockpit for takeoff on a flight to NY. Magnificent experience

[wolf63]

Here he is again

[Spicerack]

Heard/read something like that. Didn't realise how much it was.

[bhg481]

TTT - a person with your interests in vehicles would find it interesting to visit the Technik museum at Sinsheim, Germany. They have both a Concorde and a Concordski (Tu-44) there that you can go inside.

https://sinsheim.technik-museum.de/en/

[ToraToraTora]

Wolf 09:20, yes he explains it very well. I was aware of those issues.

[Peter Pedant]

Incroyable ! Tupolev ( he is nart a thing - but a person silly!) got the plans for Concorde and..... couldnt make it fly

( a bit like the Brits and V2 - they gardda enough of them 1945. and still cdnt get ont to fly - I know why - one ( no two) of the British Rocket Group tried to teach me maff. - one had memorised the log tables ( so didnt need a book ) and that STILL er did me no good)

The concorde flew because an uplift vortex er uplifted it
and if you 'shed the vortex' (*) it fell out of the sky as happened to the concordski at regular intervals

(*) vortex shedding is what makes aeolian harps go ningy ningy nong - and accounts for the constant wind at Tacoma 1940 making old grumpy ( the bridge silly!) come down - vortex shedding at reg intervals gave the repeating propulsive forces(*)

(*) if you look at film of old grumpy ( the bridge at tacoma silly) then you will see it twisting at its first torsional frequency too

[ whistles and catcalls from the usual suspects complaining wot orl dat abart den etc etc]

thx to Karolyi
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468013321000267

o come on.... it makes a difference to the usual AB crap innit

[Gromit]

Concorde was technically advanced and ahead of its time, but the wrong airplane for the time and a commercial failure.

[SparklyKid]

o come on.... it makes a difference to the usual AB crap innit

You should know.

Or, as you would say, "U shud no" wot dat den.

[Gromit]

wolf63

Mentor Pilot is great. I subscribe and have seen all his videos.

[Ellipsis]

If you want to bring back some memories, there's a Concorde at Imperial War Museum Duxford you can walk around ...

https://www.heritageconcorde.com/duxford

[wolf63]

Gromit - I am still working my way through them. He should have been a teacher.

[Gromit]

wolf63
He is well respected by other pilots. One told me he sometimes learns stuff from watching the channel.

[douglas9401]

For viewers unlucky enough to live somewhere other than Germany or London there's a Concorde at National Museums of Scotland's National Museum of Flight at East Fortune, a few minutes east (oddly enough) of Edinburgh.

https://www.nms.ac.uk/national-museum-of-flight/

[ToraToraTora]

...are we English *&^%£"ds allowed in Dougie?

[rowanwitch]

Used to fly over my mum's flat almost every evening. Sometimes the setting sun but it returned it gold. Stunning plane.

[douglas9401]

Of course you are Tora, dogs too. :-)

[ToraToraTora]

Yes Rowan, it was art as well as engineering.

[LadyCG]

From what I understand, from Concord's cruising altitude of 60,000ft, passengers were above the weather - hence no turbulence - and you could see the curvature of the earth.

Never going on Concorde was one of my biggest regrets.

[New Judge]

//From what I understand, from Concord's cruising altitude of 60,000ft, passengers were above the weather - hence no turbulence//

Yes that's correct, LadyGC. Above the Tropopause (which is about 30,000ft at the Poles and around 50,000 feet at the Equator) there is little wind or turbulence. Virtually all the "weather" takes place in the Troposphere below it. I have a friend who was an Air Engineer on Concorde and he went on to become Chief Air Engineer for BA. Concorde was the last commercial aircraft to carry an engineer on board routinely. He described the aircraft as quite choppy below about 30,000 feet and particularly at subsonic speeds. When he first flew in it, being used to much older and lumbering but more stable aircraft, he thought it would crash every time it came into land as it had some very unusual characteristics at very low speeds. But once at cruising altitude and speed he explained that you could stand a coin on its edge, so smooth was the flight.