

What was it like to fly the Concorde - siddhant
http://www.concordesst.com/flytrip.html

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karlkrantz
I flew twice Concorde twice while working on an early telepresence project
back in 1999-2000. Once on Air France and once on British Airways.

Things that stood out for me:

It is REALLY small inside, I bumped my head both times getting into the plane,
and they just laugh and said "first time?"

Passengers were all 50-70 year old white men, no women at all on either flight
I was on, I was the youngest person on both flights.

Takeoff is violent, Landing is more Violent, the Concorde was just not
designed for low speeds. I thought something was wrong both landings, but that
is just the way it lands. It felt like slamming into the ground at 100 MPH.

The windows were really tiny, just a few inches wide and probably thicker than
they were wide. The view outside was amazing and you really had a sense of
being at the edge of the atmosphere, but it was so hard to see it through the
tiny little windows.

It was pretty amazing to be at a 9AM meeting in Europe and then make it back
to New York for a 10 AM meeting.

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russell
Hey, I did. In the cockpit.

Well, OK, it wasnt a full-blown Concorde. It was an engine flight simulator at
Rolls Royce in Bristol, England. (They made the engines.) Two of us from
Control Data were installing software for a month at Rolls Royce. They let us
stand in the simulator cockpit while the flight engineer controlled the
engines. He had a flameout but recovered nicely.

Our office was at the en of the runway. Every day at noon, a Concorde would
take off right over our office. Noisy beasties.

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jasonallen
I flew the concorde NYC->London in 2000. The actual flight experience was
underwhelming. The seats are narrow and you can't really 'feel' how fast
you're going. I never heard or felt anything when we crossed the sonic
barrier.

As for the good stuff: I loved crossing the atlantic in 3 and a half hours. I
remember enjoying the caviar and a little too much bubbly. I also enjoyed the
custom boarding process - everything was so damn convenient.

Nowadays I can still relive the experience by walking through the concorde
stationed at the Seattle flight museum. My boys never get tired of me
explaining how fast the plane goes or how the fuselage expands by a few inches
during flight.

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cageyjames
It was a different world back then (both the design and implementation of the
Concorde). France and Britain both put billions into the program in the hopes
of being on the leading edge of the supersonic revolution. Clearly they were
the leading edge, but there was no revolution.

It was the small, slow 737 and A320 that really changed aviation. I can fly
between cities for less than $50 (on special) in 2011. Price won out over
service and speed.

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oiuytyuioiuy
The US spent billions on a stealth air superiority fighter which is terribly
useful for dealing with the Taliban.

~~~
cageyjames
Got to spend money to make money.

Hmm, wait that isn't right...

~~~
StudyAnimal
Don't worry, whomever we are fighting, someone is making money out of it.

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benatkin
Also on Quora: [http://www.quora.com/Flying/What-was-it-like-to-fly-on-
Conco...](http://www.quora.com/Flying/What-was-it-like-to-fly-on-
Concorde/answer/Rocky-Agrawal)

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coin
| Concorde operations are from the International terminal at the airport, so
even though we were not actually leaving the country we had to go through
passport control.

I've always wondered why so many counties outside of the US require showing
one's passport when _leaving_ the country. Is there a restriction on leaving?

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cstross
The US does, in fact, indirectly check passports for foreigners leaving the
country: they have the airlines collect and return the I-94W visa waiver
counterfoil that the immigration folks staple inside the passport when
stamping it. (I assume that visa holders on a white I-94 got similar
treatment. Not sure how it works/will work now that ESTA has entirely replaced
the visa waiver cardboard thing; I'll be finding out in February.) The
airlines in turn check passports against tickets to ensure that (a) the right
person is flying, and (b) they're legal at the destination (so the airline
doesn't get fined).

Presumably it gives them a chance to check for over-stayers.

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javanix
I flew on the Concorde at the EAA AirVenture (or whatever it was called back
then) fly-in in 1994.

The thing I remember most about it was the ridiculously steep takeoff angle -
that was when you could really tell you were on a different breed of aircraft
than your standard Boeing.

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Qz
My dad flew on the Concorde several times for business trips. He was actually
on one of the flights that had to turn back to paris after an engine blew out
(or something). Considering what happened to other flights, could have been a
lot worse for my family...

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jrockway
Stuff breaks. Engine failures and "turning back" are not amazingly rare
events. Like all complex machines, sometimes something fails, and it's best to
fix it sooner rather than later. The engineers that design the airframes
understand that things fail, and they design the system to function in a
degraded state. But you don't really want to keep the thing in a degraded
state for very long, so sometimes you try to land the plane as quickly as
possible (even though there was almost no actual danger).

It's like when a drive fails in your RAID array. The hot spare takes care of
the failure, and you aren't even in a degraded state. But you still order the
replacement drive as soon as possible, because it feels bad to not have as
many backup systems as you had before. Same with planes.

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Aqua_Geek
_The engineers that design the airframes understand that things fail, and they
design the system to function in a degraded state._

The linked site has some interesting info on the technical design of some of
the flight systems. There are multiple redundancies on the hydraulics, for
instance. Very interesting stuff.

~~~
jrockway
Incidentally, sometimes triple-redundancy isn't enough:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232>

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yannk
A good time to watch "Airport 79, the concorde" with Delon and crew.
(available on Netflix Instant)

