Found it!
Thought I'd seen it somewhere
RAF Golden Jubilee Souvenir Book 1918 - 1968
An article by John WR Taylor called "The Next Fifty Years"
Steve
Blimey! Never heard of this before
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Hot_Charlie
- Concorde
- Posts: 1018
- Joined: 30 Jul 2004, 23:51
- Location: Bomber County
Re: Blimey! Never heard of this before
I think the pprune thread sums it up well enough. The artist's impression brings up several points in itself....
a) Blue Steel is considerably larger than that - about 13 ft across with the flying surfaces, and the main body of the missile itself is 1.2m diameter. They were mounted semi recessed in the V force, so imaging the drag of one (let alone three) externally mounted on Concorde!
b) 16,000lb - the weight of one Blue Steel. Average pax load of Concorde? 90 to 120? 16,000lb is about equivalent to 88 180lb blokes, so how it would carry two let alone three...
To do it successfully IMO would have involved severe re-engineering to even fit one, and that's not considering the militarisation of the rest of the aircraft...
...and we still had the Victor and Vulcan airframes...
...and we'd ordered Trident.
Nice drawing though.
a) Blue Steel is considerably larger than that - about 13 ft across with the flying surfaces, and the main body of the missile itself is 1.2m diameter. They were mounted semi recessed in the V force, so imaging the drag of one (let alone three) externally mounted on Concorde!
b) 16,000lb - the weight of one Blue Steel. Average pax load of Concorde? 90 to 120? 16,000lb is about equivalent to 88 180lb blokes, so how it would carry two let alone three...
To do it successfully IMO would have involved severe re-engineering to even fit one, and that's not considering the militarisation of the rest of the aircraft...
...and we still had the Victor and Vulcan airframes...
...and we'd ordered Trident.
Nice drawing though.
Charlie
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Re: Blimey! Never heard of this before
RAF F-14 Tomcats would have been nice. It was a serious proposal, because in the event of WW3, one of the RAF's main responsibilities was intercepting Soviet maritime aviation coming down from Murmansk to attack the Reforger convoys heading over from the US. The USN had an aircraft already in service carrying out the exact same mission against the exact same opposition, the only difference being that they were protecting carrier battle groups rather than convoys. The F-14, with its two-man crew, long loiter time and immense Phoenix missile, would have been the ideal machine for the job.
As usual the decision was made by politicians, not pilots. :roll:
As usual the decision was made by politicians, not pilots. :roll: