@Aeronaut1975

2 years ago

A few fun facts about Concorde (Not "the Concorde") that weren't mentioned in this video: 1 - Concorde's top speed wasn't limited by the power of it's engines, but by the heat of the aircraft's skin at the tip of the nose and wing leading edges of 127°Celsius. This was because it used an aluminium alloy for it's skin, and not titanium to save weight and production costs. 2 - Concorde was the first production fly-by-wire aircraft with analogue control. 3 - It was the first aircraft in the World to use carbon fibre disc brakes. 4 - At idle (especially at low weights), the engines provided enough thrust that the crew had to keep braking to keep it's taxi speed in check. Often they would have to "pull over" during taxi to allow the brake cooling fans to reduce the brake temps to a safe level, this was so that if it had to do an emergency stop/aborted takeoff, then the brakes wouldn't explode from the heat. For this reason, Concorde often shut down 2 of its engines while taxiing to the gate after landing, and each wheel had it's own brake cooling fan which could be monitored and activated by the flight engineer from the flight deck. 5 - Concorde flew so high that part of the pre-flight checks and paperwork involved checking radiation levels in the atmosphere, and there was a dosimeter instrument on the flight deck that detected the radiation, and if it got too high, would slow the aircraft down slightly so that it could descend to a safer altitude. 7 - Concorde's wing shape meant that it could theoretically accelerate down the runway to infinite speed and would never take off, it actually relied on the wing vortices caused by lifting the nose up to actually get it into the air. There's a few more interesting facts I could mention, but the sun is shining and pub is open. Cheers!

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