I flew twice Concorde twice while working on an early telepresence project back in 1999-2000. Once on Air France and once on British Airways.
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.
I flew the concorde NYC->London in 2000. The actual flight experience was underwhelming. The seats are narrow and you can't really 'feel' how fast you're going. I never heard or felt anything when we crossed the sonic barrier.
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 a different world back then (both the design and implementation of the Concorde). France and Britain both put billions into the program in the hopes of being on the leading edge of the supersonic revolution. Clearly they were the leading edge, but there was no revolution.
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.
I don't think price was the problem, it was scale. It's cheap and easy to fly a 737 because there are a lot of them, and there are a lot of parts and a lot of expertise on how to fix them. Concorde, not so much; there were only a few, and so there was no secondary market of parts and labor and extra planes.
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.
The real problem was noise. Everything was predicated on being able to do cross-continent mach 1+ flights. When the US then Europe closed off faster-than-sound flights over land, that was it.
After that, it couldn't make money. Then everything else started to become more significant and you could see the writing on the wall.
Having an unassailable conventional military isn't a waste of money because terrorists are the US's primary threat--terrorists are the US's primary threat because the US has an unassailable conventional military.
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.
Well, to be fair, our enemy was the Soviet Union when these projects were started, and stealth technology would have been very helpful in a war against them.
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.
| Concorde operations are from the International terminal at the airport, so even though we were not actually leaving the country we had to go through passport control.
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?
The US does, in fact, indirectly check passports for foreigners leaving the country: they have the airlines collect and return the I-94W visa waiver counterfoil that the immigration folks staple inside the passport when stamping it. (I assume that visa holders on a white I-94 got similar treatment. Not sure how it works/will work now that ESTA has entirely replaced the visa waiver cardboard thing; I'll be finding out in February.) The airlines in turn check passports against tickets to ensure that (a) the right person is flying, and (b) they're legal at the destination (so the airline doesn't get fined).
Presumably it gives them a chance to check for over-stayers.
If you don't have the required visas for entry to the destination country the destination country will charge the origin country the cost of sending you back. Apart from the cost it's just a lot less hassle all round if a passport problem is discovered before you actually travel.
I flew on the Concorde at the EAA AirVenture (or whatever it was called back then) fly-in in 1994.
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.
My dad flew on the Concorde several times for business trips. He was actually on one of the flights that had to turn back to paris after an engine blew out (or something). Considering what happened to other flights, could have been a lot worse for my family...
Stuff breaks. Engine failures and "turning back" are not amazingly rare events. Like all complex machines, sometimes something fails, and it's best to fix it sooner rather than later. The engineers that design the airframes understand that things fail, and they design the system to function in a degraded state. But you don't really want to keep the thing in a degraded state for very long, so sometimes you try to land the plane as quickly as possible (even though there was almost no actual danger).
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 engineers that design the airframes understand that things fail, and they design the system to function in a degraded state.
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.
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.