Concorde documentary

[dkatwa]

Great documentary on Concorde...

https://youtu.be/JbyFhYtEby0

Lovely to see the other, older planes that are no longer with us commercially

[48k]

For added amusement, turn the YouTube subtitles on. It struggles somewhat with the aviation terms

[LotusOmega375D]

The guy being interviewed at 9 minutes is the spitting image of a young Mark Carney, Governor or the Bank of England. Sadly I don't think he would have been quite old enough then.

Also funny when discussing a replacement bigger and longer range Concorde. The Rolls Royce engine designer talks about 5 - 10% improvements being just about possible for engine technology, whereas he would expect the airframe boffins to improve their designs by nigh on 100%. Talk about passing the buck...

[Eric Mc]

I think that is from the BBC series "QED". The narrator was the Irish born and sadly, late, Dr Anthony Clare. He was a trained psychiatrist and was probably better known as the originator and host of the Radio 4 series, "In the Psychiatrist's Chair".

[Europa1]

Although quite old, this is available online from BBC 4 and is also good: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p041ffyh

[Talksteer]

LotusOmega375D said:

The guy being interviewed at 9 minutes is the spitting image of a young Mark Carney, Governor or the Bank of England. Sadly I don't think he would have been quite old enough then.

Also funny when discussing a replacement bigger and longer range Concorde. The Rolls Royce engine designer talks about 5 - 10% improvements being just about possible for engine technology, whereas he would expect the airframe boffins to improve their designs by nigh on 100%. Talk about passing the buck...

Engines are governed by the laws of thermodynamics the maximum efficiency you can get out of a brayton cycle is around 55% burning kerosene. It simply won't burn hotter than ~2300k so and you don't really want to go much higher than on the Olympus on pressure ratio. The Olympus was doing around 43% thermal efficiency at cruise.

There are less fundamental limits on aerodynamic drag reduction NASA showed loft to drag ratios of around 10-1 were possible in the mid 1990's.

The fundamental issue is that the public aren't prepared to pay extra to go faster.

On subsonic planes the airframers are the lazy ones with minimal gains to be made in airframe aerodynamics but engines get better by about 1.5% per year.