Concorde developement vid

[Garry Russell]

Oh the days when we looked forwards to a great future

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P32qKWE6QvY&feature=user

Garry

[nigelb]

Gary, thanks for posting! Very interesting. The earnings estimates were a bit optimistic, were'nt they? Unfortunatly the noise issue, at least on this side of the pond, did much to delay the start of service here. I used to watch the Concorde come into Dulles from my garden and never found it any nosier than anything else.

In the video, I wondered why they kept the landing gear down for so long after take-off, but I imagine it was because it was a test flight.

[Garry Russell]

The undercarriaged remained down on the first flight.

The noise may well be where you were but at LHR Concorde was far noiser than anything else and shook the airport.

I used to see Condorde overfly at altitude and the noise of one at 35,000 was about the same as a One-Eleven at 8-10,000...something else I used to see daily.

Unforgettable.

As to the optimism......In 1960 it was believed that sometime in the mid 1970's Supersonic airliners would suddendly kill off the long range subsonic jets in the same way the jets killed the long range props. Also by 2000 we would all be flying arround on Jet-packs, hovver cars but not before adorning ourselves with our silver suits. .......They never predicted the seventies fashions, :o perhaps if they had they would have put the brakes on then

I even remember articles posing threats to Concorde in the shape of sub-orbital passenger rockets with London-Sydney times of 2.5 hours..that is the way they were thinking.

I think with the war finally well in the past things had changed so much in those fifteens years that everything seem possible and all you had to do was get the idea. One thing that did not seem likely was getting a man on the Moon for many years but that was achieved in really quite a short time given the complexity.

It really was a different age then......full of hope, misguided a lot of the time, but folks were happy believing that it could and sometime in the future would be happen.

Garry

[FlyTexas]

Thanks for the video link, Garry. I remember the days when Concorde briefly flew into Dallas from Washington DC. Once I was meeting a friend at DFW International when Concorde arrived. I ran down to the gate just in time to see a small handfull of passengers deplane. I can still vividly remember seeing an older woman (immaculately dressed) escorting a young boy (who appeared to be wearing some sort of private school uniform) off the aircraft. I'm sure they thought I was some slack-jawed yokel for staring at them.

Brian

[nigelb]

The undercarriaged remained down on the first flight.

The noise may well be where you were but at LHR Concorde was far noiser than anything else and shook the airport.

I used to see Condorde overfly at altitude and the noise of one at 35,000 was about the same as a One-Eleven at 8-10,000...something else I used to see daily.

Unforgettable. ......

Garry

Thanks for the landing gear info, Gary. To be fair, I think the noise was not a factor because I would usually see the Concorde flying on downwind to rwy 1R at KIAD - probably at a relativly slow speed since I lived about 3 miles from the airport. I would even get on the roof of my house to get a good view as that beauty majestically passed by. I never did see a takeoff because it would be hidden by trees, buildings and so on. I may have heard one, but could not positivly say it was the Concorde.

I now live on the other side of town and a bit further from the airport and only rarely hear any signs of aircraft, except sometimes on a very cloudy day. I still see them, but they are too high to really hear them. Either that or I'm going deaf in my old age! ;-) - :think: May explain why the Concorde did'nt seem loud to me, but I was younger then so it may not.

[John]

What a fantastic find... I could watch it over and over again...and in fact will!

Kind regards

John

[Jetstreamsky]

Oh yes it's so much better now, no high speed flights across the world, just larger cattle trucks taking forever to get anywhere, and new space craft that look and work exactly as Apollo did, none of that reusable in atmosphere vehicles that were once the way ahead. We seem to be going backwards rather than have the courage to tackle the issues :flying: