Concorde's contribution

As one of the most experienced Concorde crew members, I would like to remind you of some of the many developments that Concorde has contributed to aviation.

Without Concorde it is unlikely that we would have Airbus as it is today. Concorde was the first airliner with "fly-by-wire" electronic signalling to all the flying controls, and with full authority electronic control of the engines.

Concorde was the first airliner to use digital computers to control flight safety critical functions. These developments gave Airbus the confidence to produce its fly-by-wire family of airliners.

The knowledge gained producing Concorde has had wide use in many other aviation products. The intake design of many supersonic military aircraft, particularly Tornado and Typhoon, owes much to Concorde research. Production required many new materials and new manufacturing techniques and processes.

Perhaps the greatest achievement was to show that two widely differing peoples and cultures, with different languages, could work together for a common cause. Why did Britain and France succeed where America and the USSR failed? The USSR tried to force development too fast and took too many technical short cuts. America threw money at the problems, but that seemed to be the major effort.

But in the UK and France we had the confidence in our intellectual ability to solve the technical problems we could see and foresee and confidence in that ability that we would solve the problems we could not predict.

Where is that confidence today?

Ian V Kirby

Source: Flight International