FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
2003
2003 - 2368.PDF
PepsiCo from BA in 1982. chartered I was seconded to the Concorde pro- Air France's gramme in around 1966, as one of a small F-BTSD in group of BOAC pilots led by Capt Jimmy April 1996 Andrew that was tasked with working with for the high the manufacturers to prepare Concorde for profile introduction to service. relaunch of By chance, I was the co-pilot of the its soft drink VCIO that flew the BOAC board members to Toulouse for the roll-out ceremony in December 1967, so I got to see the new air craft first hand. We were seated in a grand stand in front of the hangar, with a French military band tootling in the background. The doors opened to rapturous app lause, revealing quite the most beautiful aircraft I'd ever seen. A mechanic then walked across to the tug that was attached to the nose gear. He stepped in, adjusted his gloves, and towed the aircraft out, causing the needle nose to swing right over the crowd. Prior to the aircraft's entry into service, we were part of a small committee of air- "On the f Hghtdeck we felt we had done nothing extraordinary, but we'd made history received as we prepared for the first service, Bahrain was chosen for various reasons - mostly because it was acceptable to the ruler of the Gulf kingdom. As I drove to work on the big day, I could feel the adren alin running - we were about to make his tory and everything had to go right. During the taxi, we linked via ATC to Pierre Chanoine, captain of the inaugural Air France Concorde flight from Paris to Rio (via Dhakar), to co-ordinate simultane ous departures. Brakes were released at 12.40 GMT. We took off to the west and turned left to begin the first sector of the flight - the lh sub sonic, overland leg to Venice. This was flown at Mach 0.95 at 29,000ft - still much faster than other traffic. Then we lit the afterburners and climbed and accelerated down the Adriatic to Mach 2/55,000ft. Even though we'd briefed all the ATC centres in the days running up to the flight about how to deal with Concorde, some controllers struggled to keep up - for instance when nonetheless1 CAPTAIN BRIAN CALVERT Brian lines which included representatives from Calvert was Air France and, for a time, Pan Am, that in the right worked with the manufacturers. While hand seat there were many challenges to tackle to for the first ready Concorde for passenger services, it BA service, quickly became evident that noise would alongside be the hardest to overcome - both from captain the engines and the sonic boom. Norman The USA - specifically New York - was Todd and going to be Concorde's premier market flight and they made life hard for us in every way engineer - not just about the noise. They told us John Lidiard that we had to operate Concorde exactly like a subsonic jet, and we would have to hold at less than 200kt to stay within spe cific zones. We wanted to hold at 250kt, and I spent a day flying holding patterns over the VOR at Land's End to prove that we could keep the aircraft within the required zone. With clearance for US services still not reporting our height as FL530 they thought we surely meant FL350! We had to navigate an accurate sweep ing supersonic turn through Syria to ensure that the boom's ground track avoided large conurbations. We then con tinued across the Saudi desert to Bahrain, touching down at 15.17GMT - 3h 37min after leaving Heathrow. On the flightdeck we felt we had done nothing extraordi nary, but we'd made history nonetheless. The powerplant engineer - Jean Calmon In 1970, Jean Calmon was appointed director at Snecma of all activities related to developing the engine for Concorde. He later became senior vice-president for engineering and production and after his retirement became president in 1999 and 2000 of the French Academy for Air & Space. Developing Concorde's powerplant was a difficult task as we had to constantly upgrade its performance - the power of the Olympus 593 grew 14% before Concorde first flew. We had to make technological leaps in the materials used and the manu facturing processes, the combustion, the aerodynamics of the exhaust nozzles and the electronic control systems. The result of our efforts was the satisfactory in-service performance of the Olympus 593-14-28. Concorde was Snecma's first large-scale civilian project so we had to learn new work methods and learn to be rigorous when writing our justification documents, preparing and executing the tests and trials necessary to meet all the requirements set out by the UK, French and US certification authorities. The Olympus was also Snecma's first experience in supplying aftersales services to airlines. , Between 1968 and 1975, nearly 1,000 people in Snecma worked on the Concorde engine. From the outset Bristol Siddeley Engines (later Rolls-Royce Bristol) and Snecma put exceptional people into key management posts and they were able to instil a remarkable sprit of respect and con fidence between the two companies' teams. To paraphrase Sir Stanley Hooker: "We had the happiest partnership with Bristol Siddeley." Certain aspects of the programme were very frustrating, and the inefficiency of the programme's overall management was tire some. In 1969, the Concorde project was extremely complicated. There were too many involved, with up to 50 or 60 people attending meetings, directors drowning in technical details, major decisions uncon trolled, incomplete or simply just not taken. Everyone was blaming everyone else for delays, with economic aspects taking a back seat. Things improved hugely with the nomination of programme directors and, meanwhile, we had learned our les son of how not to work in co-operation. Our inability to reduce the engine noise was a major disappointment although the best UK and French acoustics specialists were mobilised from 1967. In 1970, Snecma initiated technical exchanges with General Electric, which was developing the engine for the US supersonic project. Numerous configurations of silencer were 42 21-27 OCTOBER 2003 FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL www.flightinternational.com
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
