Climb Inside a Concorde With These 360 Degree Panoramas

I've been inside the Concorde on display at Seattle Museum of Flight.......it's amazing how tiny the interior cabin really is. Pictures just don't do it justice until you walk down the aisle.

http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/concorde

 

"This aircraft is on loan from British Airways."

Is that just a technicality? If/when British Airways wants it back, how exactly would they do that? I'm assuming it would is not airworthy.

 

+100... been in it several times and it's pretty claustrophobic. But fun to go aboard!

Jedi

 

I'm sure it's just a technicality. No, I don't think ANY Concorde will ever fly again.

Jedi

 

I'm pretty sure BA-AF are trying to get one up and going for heritage flights. Seems pretty reasonable given the historic value of the plane. Better to keep something that important with at least one flying example.

 

That would be cool! But they better get on it.... the planes aren't getting younger,
and one of the reasons for retirement is a complete lack of critical spares (of course,
the crash was the BIG reason).

Jedi

 

flown on one before ... awesome experience ...

bonus - they let me into the cockpit to take a look ... all i saw was the inside of the nose cone ...

 

richard branson wanted to buy it off ba & fly it ... but was refused ...

now they're permanently grounded ...

 

The Concorde and TU-144 on display at the Auto and Technik Museum in Speyer, Germany are pretty neat to look at. The aren't really cutaway but part of the interiors are disassembled so you can see more of the structure as you are climbing around in them.

 

Loved looking around inside the Vulcan bomber, I've always had a soft soft for that plane.

 

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Really?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8712806.stm

Wonder what this is all about?

 

Just for the sake of argument.... Let's say you were to pluck a regular commercial airliner (Boeing, McD, whatever) out of a boneyard after it had sat for seven years and return it to flight. How much you think that would cost?

Out at the USAF boneyard at DM they go through the planes that might be returned to service pretty regularly, definitely not just sitting for seven years without any work done. My guess is that the Concorde would be a lot more similar to an old fighter than a regular commercial aircraft.

The 15 mil seems like it will come up a little/lot short getting one of these things running.

 

Eh, it's two large governments. That 15 million GBP figure is most likely an underestimate like every country's government ends up doing. Airbus (French gov't ) is a prime example of their inability to stick to budgets, but still get the project done since they take money from other programs. They'll get it done imo.

 

So why were they all grounded?

 

The Concord NEVER made one penny, sous, shilling, or whatever of revenue. It's aluminum steam gage technology is outdated and stretched to the breaking point...which it did. It gobbles up humongous quantities of fuel when it is over Mach 1 and prodigious amounts when it's under Mach 1. Its aluminum airframe is Mach limited and its supersonic shock wave limits its speed over populated areas which negates the purpose of the whole thing...unless they want run a supersonic circular race track course over the Atlantic or Pacific. The airplane is too small to make a buck commercially and it was operating on the ragged edge of something bad happening. I really don't know why they want to resurrect a 60's era failure.
Switches

 

Because its poor design resulted in numerous tire failures on multiple flights spanning decades without any real resolution. Heck, it took an FAA employee to get the attention of a flight attendant to tell them a hole had been blown through the wing because of the tire. Attendant said "oh that's just normal after takeoff." She was partially correct...it wasn't the first (or last) time that would happen on a Concorde, but they were too dumb to realize it. Had to emergency land not too far from Dulles for that.

Last one was a massive death toll...

 

i stand corrected mate ... i honestly thot they WERE ...

wld love to c it in the air agn ...

 

sounds like they have a zero missing on the end of that number ...

 

Very well stated Bob - you hit every point.

Jedi

 

Just for the sake of argument.... I wonder what it would take to stick some little engines in the thing with enough oomph to get it off the ground and cruise around the (occasionally) VFR skies of merry olde England. Kind of like buying an impossibly expensive sports car with a blown engine and dropping a VW Beetle engine in it to drive on and off the lawn at Concourso Italiano.....

So how about it engineers? Could they just stick some cheap reliable engines in rather than the Olympus engines and cruise around the sky to show off the former glory of the UK? Since we are throwing away originality put a couple of ejection seats up front to save the pilots when the thing craps out?

 

Powered by anything less than the Olympus the Concord would able to do just as you said, " Drive it on and off the lawn at Concourso Italiano. That Super Lawn Dart needs all the horsepressure it can get.
Switches

 

Yeah, suppose that is probably the case. Kinda like the B-1 where every takeoff has to be a massive dinosaur juice burning afterburner spectacular.

Again for the sake of argument... would it be reasonable to fit the thing with engines that a at least slightly more modern and perhaps in current usage? I seem to recall that when NASA worked with the Russians to get the TU-144 flying as an experimental testbed for a brief while they used engines from the Blackjack bomber which conveniently were more powerful as well. Any current evolution of the Olympus?

 

I take airliners out of the boneyard frequently and test fly them, from DC-10's to 747's and everything in between. If they are pickled correctly and the engines ran every month it is not a big deal. If they are neglected than it is horrific and makes my job very difficult.

The Concorde is not ur average airliner, however, a subsonic flight is not the same as a transatlantic mach 2 crossing.

They would need the equivalent of C and D checks to make them airworthy unless they had some sort of ferry permit for the olympic celebrations.

In any event it would be great to see them operate once again at any level

Cheers