Farewell To The Concorde

mstamat writes "BBC has a number of features on the Concorde airplanes, the timeline of their existence and their retirement. Among else, there is a virtual tour of Concorde's cockpit and a few words from journalist Mary Goldring who was opposing Concordes from the start."

Comments

Sad to see it go

[NickFitz]

The Concorde is a beautiful thing, both aesthetically pleasing and impressive in its use of (for the time) advanced technology. It's a shame to see it go, even if the likes of me couldn't afford it.

I don't know which is more impressive: that it was done with slide rules, or that the English and French stopped squabbling long enough to agree on which units of measurement to use :-)

Re:Concorde II

[matthew.thompson]

Concorde's engines are actually the most efficient of their type in the world.

And although you think of all the analogue crap in Concorde it had fly by wire when designed, the bulk of it's instrumentation was digital and the brake design is only now being adopted by other larger aircraft.

Concorde, despite being 26 years old in full service and even older by design, is still leading the way in terms of aircraft design.

Well...

[Bluesman]

Mary Goldring sounds like a fun, upbeat person. I think I'll invite her to my Halloween party.

Farewell?

[Stonent1]

That was the problem, the Concorde did not fare well. One problem with it is that early on in its career, it was determined that supersonic travel over populated land could shatter windows, upset livestock and generally annoy people. Thus limiting travel to continent to continent travel. If only it could have made a space in the New York to LA slot, London to Moscow (over land) or even LA to Montreal it could have allowed more funding to be developed into making the travel more efficient, cleaner environmentally, and lower prices. They introduced a Supersonic Limo into a world that wanted a Supersonic Bus. That being said, the Concorde is still a breathtaking aircraft to behold and 30 some odd years later still looks more modern than anything current from Boeing or Airbus. It is sad to see it gone.

Technological regression

[simulate]

The retirement of the Concorde is a rare example of technological regression. If our children ask us why airplanes don't fly faster, we can tell them we used to have supersonic commercial jets, but now we don't.

This isn't necessarily bad since the Concordes lost money throughout their existence.

What are some other example of technology regression, I wonder?

Re:Technological regression

[HarveyBirdman]

Is it really fair to call it technological regression? There's more to flight than raw speed. The Concordes were notoriously inefficient. I think an argument can be made that some of Boeing's latest offerings are technologically more advanced.

You have a similar situation with the SR-71. It's still probably the one of the most amazing and fastest planes ever built, but it required a support staff similar to that of an aircraft carrier.

It's possible the Space Shuttle may be replaced by cheap, simple capsules. Technological advancement isn't always about faster and more complicated. It's also about discovering what's the most efficent and practical way to do something. They've done a lot of work on advanced space planes, but there's a lot of hurdles there, and the space plane could easily become another boondoggle like the Shuttle.

In the early years, cars got faster and faster. Now we're looking to more safety and fuel efficiency. And some days I think we might have been better off when our car engines didn't have 57 computers all over the place increasing the rate of failure. Most people I know who were into working on their own cars have just given up. There's just too much crap under the hood now, some of it requiring specialized and expensive equipment just to test. The manuals are multivolume.

Re:Never to be, I guess...

[PD]

Well, here's something that's pretty cool to want to ride on. The SS United States. It is going to be refitted and put back into service. If you don't know about this ship, it's the fastest ocean liner ever.

Re:Concorde II

[TamMan2000]

2. More efficient turbofan engines instead of the gas-guzzling turbojets on the Concorde.

Ummm...

A low bypass turbofan (read lower efficiency) or a turbojet would do better than a high bypass (modern) engine at those speeds.

You have competing effects that you have to optimize. Fuel spent because engine is inefficient (to varying degrees), and fuel spent overcoming drag. High bypass turbofans, the efficient ones, have HUGE frontal areas, and the induced drag because of this at supersonic speeds severely outweighs the efficiency benefits gained.

From memory the bypass on the 777 varies from about 5-9 (depends on engine manufacturer, and version of aircraft), the only supersonic jet in the world that doesn't need an afterburner to go supersonic is the F-22, it's bypass ratio is under 2 (again from memory). If I had my way, a future supersonic transport would have a low bypass turbofan or turbojet (same as a bypass 1 turbofan) sized such that an augmenter is not needed.

BTW, the Concorde engines aren't guzzlers because they are turbojets, it is because it is augmented for the duration of supersonic flight.

(yes I am an aerospace engineer at a jet engine company...)

where their customers are..

[martin]

Documentary on BBC 2 last night..

40 of their frequent flyers where killed in the WTC. Not only that, those 40 also authorised Concorde flights for their company's staff, so in that single day they lost a huge number of customers.

It was one of my dreams to fly on Concorde, but by the time I had the cash to allow me a special trip I had a family to support, so my priorities are now elsewhere.

.

Re:(sco re: +1, tasteless)

[AlecC]

But, in terms of crashes per flying hour, that one crash took Concorde from the worlds safest airliner to the wqorlds most dangerous. Boeing has about 10,000 aircraft which probably have an average utilisation over 12hr/day. Concorde had about 12 aircraft with an average utilisation about 2 hr/day. It is not surprising if Boeing have three or four crashes per year - they are piling theo hours on 100,000 times faster.