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Aviation History
2003
2003 - 2366.PDF
Concorde Russian delegation was visiting the Con corde plant, I noticed our guests stamping their feet, so I told the security people to check the Russians' shoes when they left. Sure enough their crepe-soled shoes had shavings of our material stuck to them. One perception that I would like to cor rect is that the USA did not co-operate with us. While this was true concerning the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which barred us from landing at New York Kennedy Airport, we had genuine co-oper ation from the FAA which changed the landing regulations at the airport, thus allowing Concorde to land. It is a major disappointment to me that Concorde never had a successor. Aerospatiale and British Aerospace, together with McDonnell Douglas, did begin a "Super Concorde" study while Snecma, Rolls Royce and Pratt St Whitney started to look at a new engine. It was a dif- "Nobody had ever certificated a civil supersonic aeroplane, so we wrote the rules as we went along" JOHN COCHRANE John Cochrane (front right) stands next to fellow test pilot Brian Trubshaw with several Concorde flight test engineers, including Bob McKinlay (far right) ficult and expensive programme, which would have taken 25 to 30 years to come to fruition. But if France and Britain want to maintain their technology they must be prepared to give it funds. Undertaking a project like Concorde without planning a follow-on is unfortunately senseless. The test pilot - John Cochrane As deputy chief test pilot (Concorde) at BAC from 1968, and later assis tant director of flight operations at BAe, until he left the company in 1980, John Cochrane was at the sharp end of the Concorde pro gramme from the start. He first became involved with the pro gramme in 1966, when he was appointed project test pilot. With our origins on the Vickers' side of BAC, chief test pilot Brian Trubshaw and I had just come off a reasonably current civil aeroplane - the VC10 - when we joined the Concorde programe. When we went down to the former Bristol works at Filton where the UK component of Concorde's design had originated, we took a look at the plan for the prototype and thought that this thing will never see the light of day as a civil aircraft because it was an out moded concept. It had, for example, a solid heat shield for the flightdeck visor - it was nonsense. BAC (and former Vickers) chief executive Sir George Edwards had no compunction at all - he said to Brian quite simply: "Get yourself and Cochrane down there and sort it out." That was my intro duction to Concorde. The misguided original approach to Concorde's design resulted in a huge impact on the programme, because we knew we couldn't tear up the original plans and throw them away and so we had to go to another development aircraft, which gave rise to the pre-production air craft - Concorde 101 and 102. Until the first flights of the prototypes in 1969, much of my time was spent on the S . <jfcs simulator in Toulouse. This was not a net contributor to the programme, it was a bit of a deficit in some respects. It misled us over a number of things, resulting in very significant delays to the development pro gramme because we modified the proto types in order to overcome defects dis closed by the simulator, many of which were largely imaginary. As we got a little bit into the flight test programme, it became perfectly evident that there were one or two simulator char acteristics that just weren't reflected in the actual aeroplane. For example, the simula tor predicted catastrophic results from excessive sideslip resulting from wrong corrective pilot action in the double engine-fail mode at Mach 2. The risk of los ing the fin made it hard to argue against the necessity for the modification, so the prototypes were grounded to incorporate very extensive modifications for automatic rudder application in the event of double engine failure at Mach 2 before the aero planes could actually fly to that speed. In the final event, as we got the aircraft up to Mach 2, it became clear that its response to a double engine failure was nothing like as bad as was predicted by the simulator. If you switched the auto-stabili sation facilities off you found the aero plane was very easy to handle at Mach 2. I was co-pilot on 002's maiden flight - a month after the French 001 flew - and this was the first time I'd flown on the aircraft. While Trubshaw was down in Toulouse tak ing a trip on 001 with Turcat, I was banging out the engine runs on 002 at Filton. My main memory of the first flight from Filton to Fairford was how uncomfortable it was, as we were decked out in safety equip ment - hard hats, parachutes and the like. The major drama was on the way into Fairford when we nearly blew it as both radio altimeters failed. These were very nec essary pieces of equipment because of Concorde's large pilot-eye-to-wheel height of about 42ft (13m) - when we touched down I thought we were still at about 200ft. Once the pre-production aeroplanes were available, we began testing aircraft that were more representative of the Concorde the airlines would fly, with the glazed visor and modified, digital intake control system. In my view, these were the real Concorde development aircraft. When testing the intake control system on 101 we carried out horrendous manoeuvres to prove it could endure a jet upset and the engines wouldn't surge. That involved doing push-overs at speeds well in excess at Mach 2; push-overs to zero g, combined with sideslips of up to 5s held for periods of about 20 to 30s, and then trying to milk the aeroplane out of the horrific dive that we were in. Nobody had ever certificated a civil supersonic aeroplane, so we wrote the rules as we went along, and exposed the aircraft to abuse-testing of the most extreme sort in order to prove to the authorities that the aircraft could withstand situations far beyond that which any airline pilot could find himself. The airframe engineer - Bob McKinlay Bob McKinlay began his involvement with Concorde in 1966 as the pro ject's systems development manager at BAC. He became assistant chief engineer Concorde in 1968 and in 1971 was appointed the programme's assistant director flight test. As design director from 1976, McKinlay was central to the development of the procedures for the aircraft's oper ations at New York Kennedy Airport. He was later managing director of BAe Commercial Aircraft, and chair man of BAe Airbus. 40 21-27 OCTOBER 2003 FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL www.fliqhtinternational.com
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