Wanted

Locksmith x 1

Pilot x 1

For well thought out plan to get Concorde back in the air.

 

They shouldn't have grounded her

 

What could possibly go wrong?

 

It's the green one, for GO

 

You can work it out Woo, you're a Wise Owl.......if not perhaps a process of elimination.

 

Not a problem Woo, it's not easy to understand manuals anyway. Armandii has wings of a different sort, would he be of help do you think?

 

I saw a documentary about Concorde a few years ago. It goes without saying that its an outstanding work of engineering, but some of the science was really fascinating.

Apparently you can design a plane to be stable in a certain speed range, but not easily across a broad range. Concorde was no exception. They said that to make it stable below mach 1 the weight distribution had to be very different to what was needed above mach 1. Obviously you can't start changing things en-masse at high speed and high altitude, so they overcame the problem in the most simple yet ingenious way. As the approached that threshold, pumps would start up and move the fuel from one tank to another to totally alter the weight distribution characteristics to keep the plane stable throughout the whole range.

I saw Concorde in action once at an air show when I was a kid. It was such a graceful machine. It looked like a hawk or some other such graceful bird coming down to land. A lot quieter and smooth than I expected.

 

I walked through the fuselage prototype many years ago at Duxford. The only plane of any sort I've ever been in. I went in through the front door and straight out the back, just toooo claustrophobic!

 

I find flying infinitely less stressful or scary than being on a bus or a train. Being one of those odd people that over-analyses everything, I was quite scared before flying for the first time (barring a short flight in a tiny plane when I was little, and too young to know fear). My view was that it amounted to getting into an object weighing tens or hundreds of tonnes, be forced up to well over 100mph along a strip of concrete, then accelerating to about 600mph in a tin tube 7 miles up in the air before eventually having to come back down, bouncing tens or hundred of tonnes of high speed object at well over 100mph onto another small strip of concrete.

I was almost disappointed when the acceleration of take off was less dramatic in terms of G-force or sense of motion than I get from driving my own car, then at nearly 600mph up in the sky the sense motion is just not there. You feel like your just sat in a stationary vehicle. Landing is slightly less boring, just feeling like you're slowing down coming off a motorway exit in the car, with the only thing making it even remotely interesting being the customary 'sign-off' speech from the captain/pilot followed by a few mechanical noises of things happening as we prepare to land.

I think I've experienced every conventional mode of transport, from pushbikes to motorbikes, cars, vans, even a lorry a few times (as a passenger), trains, buses, boats and ships, and planes. Even horses and on one occasion, a camel. Of all of them, planes are the most boring/least scary.

 

I've been in a Concord, they are very small compared to a regular plane. Father in Law helped design the computer system for it.

 

Blimey, a sonic Woo