What was it like to fly the Concorde
concordesst.com
concordesst.com
Things that stood out for me:
It is REALLY small inside, I bumped my head both times getting into the plane, and they just laugh and said "first time?"
Passengers were all 50-70 year old white men, no women at all on either flight I was on, I was the youngest person on both flights.
Takeoff is violent, Landing is more Violent, the Concorde was just not designed for low speeds. I thought something was wrong both landings, but that is just the way it lands. It felt like slamming into the ground at 100 MPH.
The windows were really tiny, just a few inches wide and probably thicker than they were wide. The view outside was amazing and you really had a sense of being at the edge of the atmosphere, but it was so hard to see it through the tiny little windows.
It was pretty amazing to be at a 9AM meeting in Europe and then make it back to New York for a 10 AM meeting.
Well, OK, it wasnt a full-blown Concorde. It was an engine flight simulator at Rolls Royce in Bristol, England. (They made the engines.) Two of us from Control Data were installing software for a month at Rolls Royce. They let us stand in the simulator cockpit while the flight engineer controlled the engines. He had a flameout but recovered nicely.
Our office was at the en of the runway. Every day at noon, a Concorde would take off right over our office. Noisy beasties.
As for the good stuff: I loved crossing the atlantic in 3 and a half hours. I remember enjoying the caviar and a little too much bubbly. I also enjoyed the custom boarding process - everything was so damn convenient.
Nowadays I can still relive the experience by walking through the concorde stationed at the Seattle flight museum. My boys never get tired of me explaining how fast the plane goes or how the fuselage expands by a few inches during flight.
It was the small, slow 737 and A320 that really changed aviation. I can fly between cities for less than $50 (on special) in 2011. Price won out over service and speed.
Hmm, wait that isn't right...
It's interesting how the world has changed. Any political entity with the ability to make war has realized that wars do not help them get richer, and so everyone pretty much gets along. It's the people with nothing to lose that want to start wars now.
I'll take the Taliban over the Soviets or Axis as a primary threat, easily. The couple of generations before mine worried about the bomb, and the generation before that worried about the Japanese landing in San Francisco. All we have to worry about is having airplanes hijacked? That's success, not failure.
Another problem might have been that Concorde was not priced highly enough. Today's first class costs as much as Concorde did, and it's twice as slow... and people still buy it.
And it was a scale problem because the other little problems:
1-Price(>6000USD for London-NY USD is high enough for me)
2-Contamination(look at the tail of the one taking of in the article, an environmental hazard )
3-Noise
4-Poor performance, breaking the sound barrier means increment exponentially the resistance. Fuel is not "free" anymore as it was.
5-With Internet an small jet planes, not needed anymore.
After that, it couldn't make money. Then everything else started to become more significant and you could see the writing on the wall.
I've always wondered why so many counties outside of the US require showing one's passport when leaving the country. Is there a restriction on leaving?
It also gives information on people who are overstaying visas, which can be taken into account if they apply again in the future.
Presumably it gives them a chance to check for over-stayers.
The thing I remember most about it was the ridiculously steep takeoff angle - that was when you could really tell you were on a different breed of aircraft than your standard Boeing.
It's like when a drive fails in your RAID array. The hot spare takes care of the failure, and you aren't even in a degraded state. But you still order the replacement drive as soon as possible, because it feels bad to not have as many backup systems as you had before. Same with planes.
The linked site has some interesting info on the technical design of some of the flight systems. There are multiple redundancies on the hydraulics, for instance. Very interesting stuff.