Today I Learned

Aw the Concord is a TIL now. They were really cool looking.

No post on here has ever made me feel older. Just the thought that somebody might not know about Concorde because it's so far in the past makes me want to hide in a closet.

A fun fact about Concorde: there is one aerial photo of one of them flying at supersonic speeds, and the fighter jet that the photo was taken from could barely keep up long enough to take it. Here's the pic.

The image was taken by Adrian Meredith who was flying a Royal Air Force (RAF) Tornado jet during a rendezvous with the Concorde over the Irish Sea in April 1985. Although the Tornado could match Concorde’s cruising speed it could only do so for a matter of minutes due to the enormous rate of fuel consumption. Several attempts were made to take the photo, and eventually the Concorde had to slow down from Mach 2 to Mach 1.5-1.6 so that the Tornado crew could get the shot. The Tornado was stripped of everything to get it up to that speed as long as possible.

https://theaviationgeekclub.com/heres-the-only-picture-of-concorde-flying-at-supersonic-speed/

Time savings in today's economics would be completely negated by waiting two hours in line at the airport.

Thanks to Concorde, Phil Collins was able to play at both the London and Philadelphia Live Aid concerts. He Played in London, got a helicopter to Heathrow, Concorde to NY and then another helicopter to Philadelphia.

One of today's lucky 10000.

I remember fantasizing about flying in that thing when I was a kid. Not because it was a super luxury flight, only because it was supersonic. I was sad the day they mothballed it.

I lived under the Heathrow-Noo Yoik flight path, and every evening within a couple of minutes, there'd be a dull thud sound on the roof.

By that point, the plane has reached a supersonic speed and the sonic boom was striking the ground in a reduced fashion. It just sounded like someone had dropped a bag of sand on the house.

This was of course back before the days of ADSB tracking.

My grandpa was a mechanic on one of these. Impressive plane it's too bad it didn't work out.

The snoot drooped.

I used to have outdoor PE up on a hill near the sea and we would hear the booms from Concorde out over the ocean. Takes me way back. Also makes me feel way old that someone old enough to write this didn't already know about it lol

They also occasionally took off and landed at a local airport and we would go and see them sometimes. Noise on takeoff is unimaginable unless you've witnessed something like a Typhoon jet. The kind of noise you can feel entirely through your body.

Concorde is cool as heck, but honestly, supersonic travel is fundamentally impractical.

It’s kinda like space "colonization." It’s a really cool dream, but once you take a hard look at the physics (never mind engineering, just assume that will be worked out), it just makes little sense outside of science missions or niches like that.

And if it’s really urgent these days… teleconference. Or charter a private jet between closer airports.

I think it would be cool to have one or a few SS passenger planes in operation for weird niches (medical emergencies? Charity? Political flights? Stuff like that,) but that’s about it.

The former president of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) had a Concorde-capable airport built at his home village, so that his wife could charter it to go shopping in Europe.

The CIA assassinated his predecessor and put him in power so that he would do their bidding and that of the American mining companies. It's estimated that he was worth around $6 billion, $30-40 billion in today's money.

When flying supersonic the entire plane would expand and get longer to the point where flight engineer could put his hat between his console and bulkhead.

However, when it slowed down and cooled the engineer had to remember to get his hat or it would be stuck in the shrunken space.

The Concorde on display at the Udvar-Hazy Center had this happen, and it has a hat permanently stuck in the cockpit.

(At least according to the tour guide.)

The crash was caused by part of the engine cowl from the previous flight (continental DC10) falling off and remaining on the runway

wiki

Whilst taking off from Charles de Gaulle Airport, Air France Flight 4590 ran over debris on the runway dropped by an aircraft during the preceding departure, causing a tyre to explode and disintegrate... five minutes before the Concorde departed, Continental Airlines Flight 55, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30, took off from the same runway for Newark International Airport and lost a titanium alloy strip that was part of the engine cowl...Concorde ran over this piece of debris during its take-off...cutting the right-front tyre of its left main wheel bogie and sending a large chunk of tyre debris into the underside of the left wing... It did not directly puncture any of the fuel tanks, but it sent out a pressure shockwave that ruptured the number 5 fuel tank at its weakest point, just ahead of the left landing gear well.

British Airways used to sell these really nice double-sided leather bomber jackets at events that were imprinted with the British Airways logo on the black leather side and the Concorde sown into the quilted side. The reason I know this is because somebody found one in a thrift store and gave it to me as a gift, and I did a lot of digging to find out where it came from as they never sold them in stores or anything, only at events. The leather was worn thin and torn even when I got it like 20 years ago, but the Concorde looks just as good as it ever did:

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Boom Supersonic is essentially trying to bring it back.

Never flew in a Concorde, but I've been inside a grounded one, at the Museum of Flight near Edinburgh. Not sure if they still have it or not, this was some years ago.

It's so small inside! I mean, I'm a tall guy, but even allowing for that, it was horribly cramped and generally not very nice inside. IIRC it had a brown and cream colour palette, and not in a tasteful way.

Still beautiful from the outside, of course.

To be fair, any passenger plane crashing would usually result in everyone dying.

What killed the Concorde was economics. It simply wasn't worth while doing and then when one finally crashed that one time, the entire fleet was mothballed

To expensive to operate, you needed a lot of fuel to flew few passengers faster, they decided regular airliners were fast enough.

And dumbass musk and his followers said we'll use rockets for intercontinental flights.

Well There's Your Problem | Episode 78: Supersonic Transport

Supersonic planes were a victim of the end of the Soviet Union, curiously enough. It was a new iteration of The Space Race that just stopped being worth public funding.

That, plus a high profile crash pretty much ended civilian supersonic travel