Dear Friends and Followers Welcome back to my channel for the follow-up video about my previous
Concorde video here at the brooklands museum of British Motorsport and aviation history in today's video
We'll be taking a closer look at the cockpit of this beautiful lady right here
We'll go over some mind-blowing facts
What made concord so different from all other airlines and go through an entire flight profile on a typical
Concorde trip from London Heathrow to New York's John F Kennedy airport, so let's get right to it
So welcome to concorde's cockpit this is in fact a flight simulator
And I would like to start with a quote by Former British Airways captain
John Hutchinson who we'll talking to in the next episode
The first thing I would like to say is this is a proper flight deck.
None of this poncey glass cockpit rubbish. These are proper instruments needles and dials
The man has a point. So the cockpit is laid out for the Captain and the left hand seat and the first officer in the right-hand seat and a flight
Engineer seated here at the side of the front of this huge panel with all sorts of dolls and switches
Primarily to monitor the four engines and their intakes such as the fuel and hydraulic system
Concorde is one of the rare airliners who have never had an APU installed
Meaning she was relying on the electrical ground power once it reaches parking position, plus
She needed an air starter to get Bleed air for air conditioning and for engine start upon
Startup the Pilots would start the inboard engines first and then perform a cross-bleed start to the outer
Engines one and four and the engines Idle power was so high that the pilots had to apply brake pressure to stop her from
rolling off which was one of the reasons why she had brake fans and used up to two tons of taxi fuel prior reaching the runway
Now. Let's imagine we're sitting on a runway getting our takeoff clearance, the pilot monitoring reads back the clearance and the pilot flying
Applies full Throttle on all four engines
Okay, three two one
NOW
Primarily the counting was to get the attention of all three crew members the flight engineer turned towards the pilot
Closely monitoring the engine instruments and starting a timer after the pilot calls out three two one now
Because concorde had to follow very strict noise abatement procedures being one of the loudest airliners at a time then
Then 152.000 thousand pounds of thrust
Including the reheaters which automatically come on once the throttles are fully moved forward you get pushed back into your seat and the pilot
monitoring calls out
airspeed building
to assure that the airspeed gauges are working properly followed by
One hundred knots. Power set
Confirmation by the flight engineer "power set"
V1
pilot flying puts the hands onto the yoke
Rotate
the pilot gently pulls onto the yoke as the nose wheel comes off the ground
The Delta wings slowly creates lift as it is presented at a relatively high angle of attack
the main Gear leaves the ground
V2
Indicating the safety speed shortly followed by positive climb and gear up by the pilot flying
So the typical flight path of concorde would look like this she takes off at heathrow with the reheaters on
Until reaching the nose abatement altitude at about one and a half minutes cut the reheaters by announcing
the flight engineer reaches into the thrust levers and reduces the thrust by 15% and shuts off the reheat and
after reaching a safe altitude and speed
The Pilots line would request nose and visor up to make Concord more
Streamlined for high speed slides and at the same time reducing the noise level within the cockpit
She would then be on away flying
Westbound towards Reading where I used to see her as a little boy looking out of the window of my godfather's house
Excited to see and especially hear her heading Skywards then
continuously climbing at subsonic speeds of mach point nine five to 28,000 feet
In bath Bristol and cardiff and as soon as you reach the Bristol channel
On the West coast of England then the pilots requested a so-called
Transonic climb and acceleration Clearance to fifty Thousand feet
But there was no stopping in between so the ATC controller
Had to lay out a clear path for concorde so that she could climb
Unrestricted without any traffic on her flight path to a pre assigned cruising level the issue was that below mach two
She dealt with so much aerodynamic drag therefore. She didn't fly very well at those speeds plus
There was a time limit of fifteen minutes on the reheated
So after receiving the clearance the pilot re-engaged full sauce and the flight engineer adds the reheat --is
which you can see coming on right here the passengers again were pressed into the seats and a sudden roar as the
Afterburners fire up and accelerate the plane she would then slide
Effortlessly through the sound barrier at mach 1. No bumps no bangs and then
accelerated and climbed with the reheaters until passing Mach 1.75
which was at about
43,000 feet then cut the reheaters
And then gently accelerated and climbed to 50,000 see where she then reached mach 2 the whole
Supersonic acceleration process would roughly take about 20 to 25 minutes
And concordes normal cruising level was in between flight levels
FL500 and FL590 (50.000 and 59.000 ft)
once it passed flight level
FL 500 it reached Mach 2 - but she never really stayed at one cruising level as the engines burn a lot of fuel during
Climb the plane got lighter and lighter and for that matter she constantly climbed
finding the level she felt comfortable with
The pilots didn't have to get any clearance to further climb cuz there was no traffic above flight level FL410 anyways
So concorde performed a so-called
Cruise climb
meaning she never stayed at one level as she was constantly climbing until reaching the top of the scent point for approach a
Positive side effect of the high cruising level she was always above anyway like thunderstorms jet streams
turbulence areas and no traffic
Besides other concordes on their way back to Europe but boy did she had to deal with some difficult issues at those speeds and altitudes
Due to the air compressibility and friction the outer skin of the aircraft heated up to
120 degrees the limiting temperature of the structure was
127 degrees and if you were to be flying in warmer air
The Normal the Clever autopilot system wouldn't control the speed of the aircraft by the mach number
It controlled the speed by the heat of the airplane skin and due to the warm skin temperature Concorde would
Stretch up to 9 inches in length during cruising speed so to compensate the stretching
Engineers had to install expansion joint throughout the aircraft for example the cabin floor was sitting on rollers
So that the airframe around it could expand
But wouldn't affect the cabin floor as it wasn't fixed to the airframe another big issue was as the plane
Accelerated Towards Mac 2 due to the supersonic shockwaves the center of lift moves further back than usual
But the center of gravity didn't change at all meaning the airplane got a nose down attitude
To compensate that problem the center of Gravity had to be moved to the rear now
You can expect the high class passengers to walk to the rear of the airplane
So instead the flight engineer
pumped fuel from the forward fuel tank to the aft fuel tank and if I say aft I mean
Way aft into tank 11 which was below the vertical stabilizer, but the fuel was then
unusable during Supersonic cruise as it had to remain cane in the tank to keep the balance of the aircraft and
Pilots nameless ballast fuel as you were flying it around with you
But you couldn't use it until slowing down to subsonic speeds and the center of lift moves forward again
but how fast she really was tells the story by many Concorde pilots saying she was a Time-traveling machine
as they pulled up their car at Heathrow airport for evening flights Speedbird, three departing learning at 7:00 p.m.
to New York John F. Kennedy
They saw the sunset and then took off in a pitch dark at about
two-thirds into the flight that pilots and passengers were treated with a
Spectacular view as the sun was rising in the West
So they would then land in the late afternoon in New York and would see their second sunset on the same day
So that proved that concord was faster than the Earth's rotation
so now let's end our cruise flight and prepare for approach that the descent planning was crucial as concorde had a
Requirement that she had to fly subsonic 50 nautical miles prior reaching the coastline and this video here shows
Why?
He can clearly hear the double bang created by the shockwave at Mach 2 now. You wouldn't want that bang over
Manhattan and by the way this was one of the reasons why Saudi
Arabia didn't want Concorde to fly across their country as the loud bang would disturb camel breeding
I am not kidding that was their argument
so it took her 110 to 120 nautical miles to decelerate from
Supersonic speeds to ana cruising level to subsonic speeds and
Flight level where other airliners would cruise and prepare for approach, but a pilot started their descent profile
160 170 miles prior the Coast line to match the speeds and slight levels to get in Secant with other
slower flying airliners
So that was it for today?
Make sure to tune in for next week as I'll be going through the approach and landing phase of Concorde and we'll be talking about
The exclusive passengers who enjoy the privilege to fly on this extraordinary plane?
make sure to form a touch-And-go at my instagram account as I'll be uploading many pictures of my
Experiences with this beautiful plane and don't forget to hit the subscribe button
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See you next week all the best your Captain Joe