Inside Concorde

Nice pictures Davex. Flight decks are not the easiest places to take pictures.

The red buttons are not normally too bad. The ones to watch are the yellow and black ones, especially when they are attached to the chair you are sitting on.

Useless Concorde fact:- the fourth picture shows the engineer's station. At full speed and height the airframe got hot and expanded and a gap of about one inch appeared between the rear of the panel (Right hand side as shown in the photo) and the box next to it. On a couple of occasions, engineers have put their peaked caps in the gap forgotten to remove them, and once back on the ground were unable to do so.

I flew in one many years ago. A "Flights of Fantasy" deal paid for by my wife's parents.

The flight lasted about an hour and we hit Mach 2 somewhere over the Atlantic.

I've flown a lot over the years, but that experience was just the best.

The photo's are all in a suitcase somewhere waiting to be scanned.

I've seen several Concordes in various configurations including a full test set up, a full passenger configuration, an old passenger configuration, hybrid test/passenger, restaurant ...


Heathrow - the remaining one now in the BA parking area
Heathrow - several in service and during maintenance
Yeovil - one of the prototypes
Duxford - another prototype
New York - passenger aircraft now a museum

Farnborough during various visits
Newquay / St Mawgan during flight testing and later training visits.

And a 1:1 fake in Germany. It is a very good model and almost everyone is fooled.

Three times I had flights booked but had to cancel due to work commitments!

I still have a hard time figuring out why a Concorde is in New York. After all, the Americans did everything they could to make sure the Concorde would be a commercial fiasco.:::

It's along side US aircraft carrier Intrepid which is now a museum.

I know they tried to stop Concorde flying but Wall Street and The City (London) provided most of the passengers though, so being at the south end of Manhattan is appropriate.

The things I like about the Duxford Concorde are the parachutes and escape hatch.

This might be the only time I will get to see the insides of one of these Dave, so great to see. Thank you.

PS - Why was the discussion around the centre panel (looks like the master cautions?), as you've outlined with the pink highlighter?

Nice shots, shows just how tight things were inside.

I was lucky to work on a couple of the Concordes shortly before they were withdrawn from service - as it happens the work related to installing kevlar reinforcing in the wing tanks following the "incident", unfortunately it was all too late

Simon

The highlighted area are the autopilot control buttons. Master cautions are on the overhead panel....you can just about see it in picture 3.

You can't see it. It is in the galley. Only to be used when running low on champagne.

Thanks Peter - George hasn't aged well then, looks nothing like he does now...

Great shots Davex, I see they are going to open the other two planes on the viewing park of a weekends free. Thanks for the heads up on the fly past on the 15th, I,m sure Howard and GX10CLIFF will be there with me If anyone is going let us know we could meet up

Is the fly past definitely in Manchester? If so I'll do my utmost to get there.

Cheers,

Howard

Yes, on Sunday 16th see here for further info.
Not sure if it`s the full flight or just the Lancaster.

Davex.

Thanks for the link Dave. I shall be there early to get a good spec and as John has said a meet up would be good.