Flight engineer reveals what it was like to operate Concorde | Hacker News Reader

Flight engineer reveals what it was like to operate Concorde

cnn.com

86 pointsdxs40 comments

How many of us here wanted to be Scotty or Geordi over any other role. This was the real life version of those very characters, and the article's subject was a man who was one of only 57 Flight Engineers to ever work on the Concorde.

The comradery with the pilot and copilot struck me- they all knew the importance of each other's role. They left their ego's at the door, or at least that's the tale that's being told here, and I like it.

I wanted badly to be a pilot as a youngster, but after reading this, and looking at what I do now, I wonder if I should've been wanting to be a Flight Engineer!

> I wonder if I should've been wanting to be a Flight Engineer!

Probably not; they barely exist anymore, do they? I think Concorde was the last civilian jet to have one, anyway.

The article states that.

Still it is a dream to aspire, like a dream for becoming Scotty.

> I think Concorde was the last civilian jet to have one, anyway.

That would surprise me - the 747 typically had a crew of three.

Only up to the 747-300. Though actually, some of those seem to still be in use; I wonder were they ever retrofitted to dump the flight engineer.

Wikipedia says there are only 2 747-300 remaining in operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_747_operators.

Also about 15 200s, tho, and, amazingly, precisely 1 100 operated by the Iranian airforce.

Even more surprisingly, there are a few 707s still in use!

And any other remaining 707 system will remain in standby and service for ten years after the last 707 is retired. I’m sure someone with an in-depth knowledge of DO-178C could formulate it better than me.

> one of only 57 Flight Engineers

Minor correction, because the article failed to mention that Air France also had a fleet of Concordes, that's 57 Flight Engineers working _at BA_ on the Concorde. But your point stands, I suspect the global total barely touched three figures.

>I wanted badly to be a pilot as a youngster, but after reading this, and looking at what I do now, I wonder if I should've been wanting to be a Flight Engineer!

Considering their entire profession has been completely obsolete for 20 years, I should think not.

The modern real-life version of Scotty or Geordi is being a US Navy nuclear reactor technician. But instead of warping around the galaxy on a beautiful starship, occasionally fighting Klingons or Romulans (or worse, Gorn) but most of the time exploring strange new worlds, meeting new sentient alien races and establishing peaceful relations with them, and enjoying tasty food from the replicators and watching Shakespearean plays or violin concertos by your highly-educated crewmates, life in any modern-day navy is nothing like this.

Or rather he doesn't. The entire article fails to explain what he did in any amount of detail.

IDK about the Concorde specifically, but the flight engineer mainly monitored a bunch of the aircraft systems, made sure they were all within normal parameters, monitored fuel usage and rebalanced the fuel in the tanks, in some aircraft they would operate the engine throttles/thrust levers on command from the captain.

Like the position of Navigator, they were made obsolete by greater automation, full authority digital engine control (FADEC), and similar technological advances.

I found it interesting that he described the job as requiring not only constant full attention, but constant adjustments. Like for the full 3 hour flight he has to be tweaking knobs and flipping switches without even enough free time to have a coffee. You would expect that once the aircraft is level and cruising the workload should be significantly reduced, but apparently not.

If you're around Bristol, UK, I recommend to visit Aerospace Bristol which has a Concorde museum and it explains the role of the flight engineers.

Rebalancing fuel tanks was a major thing in Concorde indeed. I don't remember details exactly, but to maintain the supersonic speed, Concorde needed to be in a certain position, and to maintain that position, fuel would have to be rebalanced regularly.

I'm pretty sympathetic to your case (I remember visiting Cape Canaveral and watching a replay of the countdown to a rocket launch in the control room, which was incredibly disappointing when they just flashed lights on the various consoles without explaining what happened at each). But to be fair, the article wasn't titled "what a flight engineer actually did on Concorde" and does give a flavour for the general feel of the role.

Half the article is listing out the flight engineer duties and why it was different on the Condorde versus other aircraft

There’s got to be a flight manual floating around for the Concorde that would outline each role.

Concorde had 13 fuel tanks, but only four directly fed the engines, so they were constantly moving fuel between tanks. In addition, fuel was used to cool the aircraft structure because it got very hot from supersonic speeds. And fuel was also used to trim the aircraft pitch - if you were a little out, it increased fuel consumption, but if you were a lot out it would be uncontrollable. And of course all the changed constantly as fuel was consumed. So a key part of the flight engineer's role was managing fuel.

https://www.heritageconcorde.com/fuelgeneral

Due to the necessity of the article being intended for the "common public".

If you really want the technical details;

1) Flight Engineer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_engineer

2) Concorde specific (see Technical Section) - https://www.heritageconcorde.com/

3) Concorde Center Mid Engineer's Panel - https://www.heritageconcorde.com/mid-mid-engineers-panel

4) Concorde from the Engineer's seat (another Flight Engineer) - https://www.britairliners.org/airliners-article?title=from-t...

Found the anecdote at the end about him diagnosing problems while on a modern computer automated aircraft fascinating. Of course the roll of flight engineer was going to go disappear but it seems the are still knowledge gaps that modern pilots have that this roll was able to better address.

role -> the role of flight engineer

roll -> do a barrel roll

What's shown in the meme is actually an aileron roll, at least probably. Way too low poly to tell for sure.

As an engineer by training I feel we lost something with all the computerization. Direct observation, applying thinking and interactions in the field have been supplanted with sensors, models and actors splitting the job into a "higher" level planning and all the "lower" level field work. What is often lost is the instinct and intuition that comes from being part of the machinery and the impact may only be felt a generation later.

As a passenger all I really care about are the safety stats. If fly by wire is safer than manual flight them I'm all for it.

Moreover switching to all touchscreen controls. There's just something satisfying about getting to know a physical device intimately enough that you can do it blindfolded. Those sort of interfaces are fewer and futher between, unfortunately.

I wonder how easy those screens are to use where there's smoke in the cockpit and the pilots are wearing masks.

Touchscreen avionics are somewhat difficult to use during turbulence alone, so I doubt loss of control plus smoke makes for a good time.

I also feel that the fact that the systems were not modernized foreshadowed the demise of the concept. I would love to know any insight of the behind closed doors discussions, ie when did they know Concorde was unprofitable and shutting down, I’m guessing it was as early as 1985.

Concorde was in a slightly odd situation where it was, AIUI profitable to operate it on the London->NY and Paris->NY routes (though not elsewhere) but only because Airbus was on the hook for supplying parts and maintenance. But I think it was apparent that Concorde was not _broadly_ viable very soon after the first flight, if not _before_ the first flight.

AFAIK Concorde "B" (the planned fast-follow improved version - longer range etc) was abandoned by the late 70s; at that point the writing was on the wall.

UK and France seemed to have a few engineering projects like this(cool but not economical), I've seen the channel tunnel described slightly similar.

Channel tunnel's much harder to pin down, both because it has an economic benefit beyond the revenue from its operation, and because much of the benefit is ~permanent; in a century it will _still_ be producing an economic benefit (really this is a problem with judging the economics of rail infrastructure in general; huge capital outlay, but it lasts a _really_ long time).

The owner company has been close bankruptcy and needed debt restructuring in the past. I don't know what their current figures look like, but there have been special actions to increase utilization in the past, which does not sound like good news. With Brexit things are unlikely to improve, even if we neglect the pandemic as a one time disturbance.

Already in the second year of its operation there was severe fire requiring a closure for 7 months. Remember Twin Towers or Nord Stream. It's a risky project. I don't want to speculate whether it will still be operated in a century, but a lot can go wrong before that.

> I don't know what their current figures look like

2023: Revenue of 1.8bn, EBITDA of 979mn, FCF 638m, 1.5bn in cash. They'll be fine. They're not going to be challenging Nvidia any time soon, but they actually look financially healthy enough for a transport company.

> With Brexit things are unlikely to improve

Interestingly, they may be a rare Brexit beneficiary; their goods traffic seems to be down (as you'd expect) but their tourism traffic is up quite a lot, I suspect because Brexit has made airports more of a pain for British tourists, so taking the train probably looks relatively more attractive. Their revenue is up somewhat now on 2019 (the last non-Brexit-y/pandemic-y year).

> Already in the second year of its operation there was severe fire requiring a closure for 7 months.

Even if it has a major accident, it'll be repaired. For instance see Mount Blanc. Repairing a tunnel, even a badly damaged one, is far, far cheaper than building a new one.

Concorde was probably highly economical, just not directly. It could be seen as the project that started Airbus and saved European aircraft manufacturing. Except for not being able to know how things would have turned out if Concorde didn't exist.

Or, less optimistically, caused Airbus's predecessors' consolidation into Airbus, thus leaving the world with three, and then two, makers of large passenger jets, and leading to the current unfortunate situation where even though the 737's currently kind of a dud, you have to buy it anyway because it's half the market and the A320 side of the market is booked up for years.

Like I think there's a strong argument that the current extreme consolidation of the industry is quite a bad thing.

Admittedly I was only thinking in the direct sense. Saving european manufacturing is way outside my area of knowledge.

I wonder if and when we will see another supersonic passenger plane. A few years back there was a concept of launching starships between continents, but that seems to have died off. Maybe a hydrogen powered plane will be the future, at least the fuel is more green.

Boom Supersonic is working on it, with plans to deliver the Overture by 2030, but they have plenty of naysayers.

Managing fuel was included managing skin temperature and center of gravity against center of lift and pitch moment as the flight regime changed. Theoretically you could end up in a very bad place if you couldn't set up a proper CG in the landing phase when fuel would be low.

Nice

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