Concorde

BAC / Aérospatiale · United Kingdom / France · first flew 1969 · airliner

The Anglo-French supersonic airliner — a needle-nosed ogival delta that cruised at twice the speed of sound.

Recognition (WEFT)

W — WingsLow-mounted, delta
E — Engines4 × turbojet, wing-mounted
F — FuselageVery long pointed fuselage with a droop nose
T — TailNo tailplane

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Spot it by:

Unmistakable: an extremely slim fuselage, a curved (ogival) delta wing with no separate tailplane, and the drooping nose. Nothing else in civil aviation looks remotely like it.

Specifications

Figures are for the representative variant described above; marks differ. See how AircraftIQ sources figures.

History

Developed jointly by Britain and France in the 1960s, Concorde first flew in 1969 and entered service in 1976. Only 20 were built. Afterburning turbojets pushed it to Mach 2 and a cruise of around 60,000 ft, crossing the Atlantic in under three and a half hours.

Variants

A single production type, operated almost exclusively by British Airways and Air France. Retired in 2003 following the 2000 Paris crash and rising costs.

Where you'll see it

No longer flies, but preserved examples are on display in the UK at Brooklands, Manchester, Filton (Bristol) and the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune.

In depth

Concorde's slender wasp-waisted body is the visible result of a rule of transonic aerodynamics called the area rule, which demands that the total cross-section of an aircraft change smoothly along its length to minimise drag at high speed. The ogival delta wing, that graceful double-curved leading edge, was the product of years of British and French wind-tunnel work and a deliberate choice to generate lift at low speed through controlled vortices spilling off the sharp leading edge rather than through flaps and slats, which is why the aircraft rears its nose so high on approach and lands fast. That high nose-up attitude on landing is precisely why the pointed nose droops; at cruise it sits streamlined and raised, but for takeoff and landing it hinges down so the pilots can actually see the runway over the long fuselage.

The engineering compromises hidden inside are as remarkable as the shape. The airframe heated and lengthened by around a foot at Mach 2 as friction warmed the aluminium, and on every retiring flight the crews would wedge a cap into a gap that opened on the flight deck as the structure expanded, a gap that closed again as it cooled. The four Rolls-Royce Olympus engines, developed from a design that also powered the Vulcan bomber, used variable intake ramps to slow the incoming air to subsonic speed before it reached the compressor, since a jet engine cannot swallow supersonic air, and reheat, or afterburning, was used only briefly for takeoff and to punch through the sound barrier before being switched off for the cruise.

The service record was small in scale but outsized in glamour. British Airways and Air France flew the flagship transatlantic routes, London and Paris to New York, at a fare aimed squarely at the wealthy and the corporate, and the type set the still-standing record for the fastest transatlantic crossing by a civil airliner, under three hours from New York to London on a favourable day. For decades its safety record was flawless, which made the July 2000 crash at Gonesse outside Paris, caused by debris on the runway rupturing a tyre and puncturing a fuel tank, all the more shattering; combined with the collapse in premium travel after 2001 and the mounting cost of an ageing fleet, it brought the programme to a close in 2003. Its only real rival, the Soviet Tupolev Tu-144, superficially similar enough to earn the nickname Concordski, flew earlier but served only briefly and unhappily.

Britain is generously supplied with survivors for those who want to stand beneath one. The prototype and development airframes and a full production example are at Brooklands in Surrey, the very site where much of the British test work was done, where you can walk the cabin. Another sits at the Aerospace Bristol museum at Filton, the aircraft that was the last Concorde ever to fly, delivered home to the field where the British aircraft were built. There is one at the Manchester Airport runway viewing park, and Alpha-Alpha resides at the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune near Edinburgh, its interior open to visitors. Across the water, examples are preserved at the Musee de l'Air at Le Bourget in Paris, at the Intrepid museum in New York and at Seattle's Museum of Flight. A piece of hard-won spotter trivia: the cabin is far narrower than the pictures suggest, barely wider than a small regional jet with two seats each side of a single aisle, and the windows are famously tiny, no bigger than a paperback, because a window failure at 60,000 feet had to be survivable. The droop nose is the single detail every enthusiast checks first, and on the preserved aircraft it is usually displayed in the lowered position, forever frozen on final approach.

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