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Have you ever flown Concorde?
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14-01-2015 8:16pm#1
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Moderators, Social & Fun Moderators, Regional East Moderators, Regional North West Moderators Posts: 12,526 Mod ✭✭✭✭
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I was in a plane in the take off queue in Heathrow once when the Concord was about to take off. The captain came on to tell everyone to look out the right hand side as it was about to take off. It was amazing
It took off and then the noise of it a second or two later! Awesome. 0 -
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Apparently the tickets were like €10,000
I have never been in a situation where I would pay €9,000 over-the-odds just to arrive in a place two hours earlier.
You'd need to have been capable of earning around €5,000 per hour for that to make financial sense. Sadly I don't fit into that category.
That's time travel though.
New York +5 GMT.
London - New York via concorde = 3hrs flight time.
Arrive before you set off.
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Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,217 Mod ✭✭✭✭
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IIRC S and I think I do, it was actually covering its costs in the last years. It was a loss leader for much of its life in fairness. The story goes that in the 80's an exec at BA looked at the price of tickets and then asked his secretary I believe, to ring various frequent flying types how much they thought the price of a ticket was(they never actually paid directly themselves) and that back of the fag packet research showed that their market actually thought it was far more expensive and exclusive, so BA(and AF) raised the prices in line with that perception.
BA and AF flew the thing primarily at a huge loss for the last years of its existence,
I'll bet the farm they are not S. Not even close. The heat stresses alone would bugger them at Mach 2. Carbon fibre et al ain't worth jack when the temps go up. And that's before we come to the engines that might drive one, never mind the wing form. A widebody in pretty much every metric is as far away from Mach 2 as a Landrover is from a Formula 1 car. The engineering requirements scale up in a near exponential rate. Don't let the 1960's timeframe throw us, the tech and engineering involved in Concorde was one helluva leap. Indeed it has been noted that when some of the Concorde engineers met with the Apollo engineers, the latter expressed the opinion that Concorde was in many ways the equal of Apollo on the pure engineering front. And they daily and commercially operated a jet where the passengers could chug champers and eat lobster, while flying at such a speed that no ground based interceptor fighter could catch it if it passed overhead. Put it another way, the Russians attempted their own Concordski, the Tupolev T something or other and it was a dismal failure and a hairy old bastard with it, even though it was a near copy of the Concorde. In short; to make a "new" Concorde, they'd pretty much have to rebuild the old one in modern terms.I suspect supersonic passenger flight will come back eventually. Modern widebodies are practically engineered to handle that stress already
Talk about a step backwards when such things are museum pieces. Though you can be sure our Yankee cousins have an SR71 replacement. Project "Aurora" the likely one. When you consider the first flight of the Blackbird was in 196 fecking 3(IIRC), A) that's bloody amazeballs andThey have the Concord, the SR-71 and now there's the Space Shuttle.
you can be sure the Lockheed skunkworks or similar have improved upon it since then. The first "stealth" plane flew in the mid 1970's. Then again... There's an awful lot of 60's tech we haven't improved upon much, or have merely polished further. How do we get into space these days, if manned missions are the order of the day? The Russian Soyuz capsule, another 1960's design*, though folks like Space X are looking good on that score. Not so much the Chinese, they're just ripping off the old Russian stuff. Though that IMH makes them clevererererer. They have the cop on to see what actually works and run with it.
*and waaaay safer than the Shuttle was. I recall watching an episode of that shíte BIg Bang theory and one of the cliched nerds was going into space and his girlfriend was freaking out cos he'd be going on a Russian spacecraft and not the Shuttle and they kept on this slant. I wanted to kick the fcuking telly in at that point, or hunt down the "writers"... Far safer in Russian hands than in that overweight, over engineered, underfunded and over compromised housebrick with wings that was the space Shuttle.Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
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I stand corrected. Looking around the web, the prevailing belief is that AF were running at a loss and BA at a slight profit, but they were operating the thing in some joint maintenance contract or something. Once AF pulled it from operation, BA were left as the only carrier paying for everything, and it became a lossmaker and they pulled it.IIRC S and I think I do, it was actually covering its costs in the last years. It was a loss leader for much of its life in fairness.
I'll have the plot in West Cork pleaseI'll bet the farm they are not S. Not even close.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380#Specifications
Maximum design speed is 0.96 Mach. And there's probably some wiggle room in there where you could push it harder with no real consequences. OK, so there's a little weird bit of extra shear when you actually push through the sound barrier and you need to go more like 1.1/1.2 mach for a smooth ride, but just a little but more engineering and even a big guy like the A380 could handle it. Not the insane speeds of the Concorde, of course. There's a reason why it had the shape it did.
I imagine the reason they need to make them so hefty is for emergency scenarios - lose cabin pressure and it's throttle up, nose down, to hell with everything else.0 -
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Ditto. It was an absolute pig of a plane in my experience, but then I was trying to fly it like a B747, just faster.I flew it on Microsoft Flightsim, does that count?
You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found. I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
―Oscar Wilde predicting Social Media, in The Picture of Dorian Gray
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