Ropy?

[1]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ropy

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ropy

Branson would have loved to buy the Concordes, but BA refused to release the service records for them. Without those, it was impossible to certify airworthiness. BA were absolutely determined that their precious Concordes would never fly with a Virgin logo on the tail, even if Branson lost a king's ransom on each flight.

No airline was ever going to be able to fly Concorde after Airbus withdrew support for the aircraft. That's what killed their airworthiness certification. It had nothing to do with access to the airline's service records.

If you choose to believe Beardie's bullshit about BA keeping the planes for themselves, go ahead. The truth is rather different.

His "bid" to buy Concorde was yet another in his very long list of half-assed publicity stunts.

Interesting to see quite how many Reg commentards know so much more about Concorde than the International Air Transport Association, that they downvoted you:

https://iatanews.com/what-if-virgin-atlantic-had-bought-british-airways-concordes

Takes a lot of ego to turn down £5M for a white elephant - more even that to post ignorant downvotes here. 's why none of you run national airlines, I guess.

The Concorde at Manchester Airport (AFIK) is probably the nearest to still being airworthy as it hasn't had its wings cut off for transport at some point in time

002 at the Fleet Air Arm museum hasn't been disassembled, it was flown to Yeovilton after it had finished being a testbed.

It has been robbed for parts over the years though

I went a few years with the parents, and the level of access and detail was incredible. Was taken through how it achieved supersonic flight without afterburners at a level of detail I just about managed to grasp

Still the only aircraft to cross the atlantic supersonic without afterburners. And still beautiful. And still a wonder that the Vulcan used the same engines (almost) :-)

Both the Vulcan and Concorde used RR Olympus engines, but with significant differences.

I worked on development of a few components of the 593 version for Concorde (refinements, as it was just as the production models were being built). I saw all the UK ones take off from the factory. On one occasion, I was walking across the end of the runway when one of them (not on its maiden flight) was taking off. No danger (unless it overshot the end and was going to plough through the perimeter fence and cross the A38 road that ran alongside) - but it wasn’t very high as it passed over my head and I’ll never forget the sight (and sound*) as I looked straight into the four engine exhausts.

*Felt, as much as heard. If you worked in aerospace, it wasn’t as noisy as the hostile media claimed. My wife’s job included collating reports from the various airports it operated and she would often tell me of noise complaints received at times when there was no Concorde flying (or ground running) anywhere near the complainant. In the USA, there seemed to be a competition as to who could submit most complaints - anything to stop a foreign-built aircraft. The UK aircraft flew to Fairford (in Gloucestershire) for their individual flight certification. It was one place there were very few noise complaints - in fact, once Concorde work finished and the base returned to full USA military use, there were a lot of complaints of the noise from the Boing tankers (being military aircraft, engine systems didn’t need to compromise power for noise reduction) - and the 707s were load when taking off full.

Concorde 101 was also delivered by air to Duxford and has remained there since.

It was interesting to read about the Concorde running at a loss for the UK and French government only for BA to make a nice profit when it took over. Cutting down cruft and running it for the right target audience magically fixed the economic issues.

Agree, whilst it was known Concorde, in the version which went into service, would not repay its development costs(*), hence why the government simple wrote them off. Leaving BA to make it operationally profitable, which they successfully achieved by the late 1980s with only 7 aircraft.

Given ElReg is US-biased these days, it makes sense they would want to downplay Concorde, however, given Richard Speed is UK-based it would be interesting to understand how he arrived at his conclusion.

(*) whilst the numbers are smaller, the cost overrun is of a similar magnitude to HS2; I’ve always maintained we should have designed HS2 properly from the get go, putting it in tunnels so that it would not require landscaping etc. and also protecting it from the (changing) English weather which has caused the railways to suspend services several times this winter.

Tunnels for HS2 make a lot of sense, but so do long elevated sections, for keeping the trains away from animals and trespassers. Japan's Shinkansens use both. However, regardless of the merits of the chosen route and construction of HS2, cancelling it was a stupid decision when the design work and purchase of land had got as far as it had.

Concorde has, believe it not, the exact same failing that General Montgomery had. If only they had been American they would have been renowned.

So Concorde takes 100% of the blame for Market Garden, whilst everyone else sidles off quietly?

I had the fortune to be in the right place at the right time and got to fly this remarkable feat of human capability three times, all work related, I happened to work for the airline.

Once was a totally unplanned upgrade to the jump seat in the cockpit sat next to the flight engineer and his myriad of dials.

Asking the captain after a while when his workload tailed off as to when we’d go supersonic, he replied “about 20 minutes ago!” I didn’t notice the transition to supersonic, it was so smooth.

I was also glancing occasionally at the speedo which had topped out around “600”, I couldn’t see the units, I was too far away. When I mentioned the speedo indicator and my surprise we were supersonic, he replied with a laugh, “oh that? It’s the subsonic speedometer, the supersonic one is over here to the right!” I looked, and sure enough, we were whipping along at Mach 1.5 at 40,000 ft and slowly increasing speed to almost 2,0 and an eventual altitude touching almost 60,000 feet, a couple of hundred lower.

A quarter of the way into the flight the flight engineer remarked that one engine was indicating a temperature a few degrees higher than expected. He used a programmable scientific calculator to predict if and when the engine would fail. He checked over the radio back to base. He concluded that they could safely continue to JFK, and that once the engine was turned off it wouldn’t be able to restart and would need a thorough service.

Memories that I’ll never forget, especially since it wasn’t even planned to happen.

The sister of a colleague was sitting in Heathrow waiting to board her routine BA shuttle to Belfast. When boarding was called she was astonished to hear "your aircraft today will be Concorde". Seems it was due to perform at the NI airshow later that day, they saw no point in flying it up empty but obviously didn't want to announce that beforehand, so they just slotted it into the schedule at a quiet time.

Not supersonic, of course, but an amazing experience all the same. Eveyone in the office was very jealous...

Back in the mid 1970’s, when Concorde was under final development, RR and BAC flew trials in their prototype. At weekends, they took factory workers along for the ride (as payload) - a very popular perk. On one occasion, the flight was a bit longer than normal and returned after the factory shift ended; the unions demanded extra overtime payments for the workers as compensation for a longer shift. They got their money but the companies then invested in sandbags for payload and the workers’ perk was ended. Nose, say goodbye to face…

No difference.

£80bn to save 12 minutes between Birmingham and north London.

Think how much 80 towns and cities could have each done with £1bn

Try again.

HS was never about speed - it is about capacity, putting high speed intercity trains on their own lines frees up local lines for stopping services and frieght.

Dumbest sales job in the history of Whitehall, that and letting most of the Tory counties scream for their own cuttings where not necessary.

HS2 was all about making New Labour look good and with it for the upcoming election, ie it was all about political vanity. Hence why it was so poorly put together.

There is an excellent BBC podcast “Derailed: The Story of HS2” which skims over the surface of the various problems successive governments have had in delivering HS2.

From various conversations, I am sure the engineering is top notch, it’s just the rest of it that leaves much to be desired…

As for cuttings, agreed they were not necessary, the entire line should have been tunnelled, the costs were too high for politicians, but set against the current level of overspend, there would still be money in the pot.

IMO, those counties will vote for Reform at the next election ... Not that they will make a success of the Government given that most of them appear to be failed Tories.

I'd fully expect Dear Leader Nigel to cancel HS2 (not withstanding that it will be 95% complete by then) along with all renewable energy projects just to appease his boss Trump.

HS was never about speed - it is about capacity, putting high speed intercity trains on their own lines frees up local lines for stopping services and freight.

Bollocks. It was originally claimed it would pay for itself by time savings for highly paid businessmen - until some clever clogs pointed out that it's possible to work on a train. So a couple of consultants with a spreadsheet were hired to 'prove' that the WCML would run out of capacity in a decade or so. Trouble is, if capacity is the issue, HS2 is completely the wrong solution. A new 'traditional' (say 150mph) 4-track main line could have been built for a fraction of the cost of HS2 and provide much more capacity. But that wouldn't allow our glorious leaders to win "mine's faster than yours" willie-waving competitions at Davos.

Very high speed rail makes absolutely no sense in Central England, which (with nearly 50 million people living in 25,000 square miles) is one of the most densely populated areas of its size on the planet.

Not much. After each local politician took his cut, it would only leave about 100 million and most contractors would not be interested in that...

People still parroting this 12 minutes / 18 minutes take your pick thing. Despite all the attempts to explain it’s not about that, they still don’t get it. What chance does the country stand with people like that?

No comparison. Concorde was a rocket ship that more than halved the time to around 3 1/2 hours between London and New York.

In fact, it was so fast that it allowed me to do something once in my life, which is impossible on any other passenger plane, that’s a day return LHR-JFK-LHR, and spending a couple of hours in the Concorde lounge at JFK drinking Krug and trying caviar for the first time in my life.

12 minutes LOL

Comments like this always make me wonder…

The £80bn didn’t just go up in a huge puff of smoke. It supported numerous families from being unemployed. Who in turn supported grocery stores, toy stores, auto shops, I don’t know what else, and most importantly… the local pub.

And on top of that, the scientific and engineering breakthroughs!

>” And on top of that, the scientific and engineering breakthroughs!”

Not sure about “breakthroughs”

But yes we now have a significant number of engineers skilled I. The delivery of high-tech infrastructure, just at a time when we are needed to build new high-tech infrastructure…

It's not 12 minutes once.

12 minutes, for every person taking the train, every day, for decades.

Enabling more slow trains - that probably save those punters time, every day, for decades.

It becomes hundreds, then thousands, millions and then billions of minutes saved.

Remember: Billions of pounds are spend every year on roads that eventually become more clogged and slower than the original road.

... was because it wasn't American, and they had nothing like it. It's a shame they were taken out of service, but financially they just weren't viable. The crash in France was the last nail in the coffin.

On a related point I watched the last flight of the Vulcan Bomber at Headcorn Aerodrome. One of the things that gets you is how slowly it could fly at low level flight, almost defying gravity. I looked around and could see the smiles on a few faces as the nose poked up. Next second there shocked gasps from the crowd at the roar of the afterburners and it shot up in the air.

P.S. I've got one of the mugs that were on sale at the time.

Dry thrust only on the Vulcan no re-heat on those Olympus engines... Vulcan 'howl' when pouring on the coal was, none the less, very noisy and very impressive!

Still is, apparently. They can't fly it, but Wellesbourne does fast taxiing runs a few times a year.

That Vulcan howl is quite something; I've seen one several times in my youth and every time it took me by surprise just how loud that plane was.

That wasn't true. BA's Concorde flights generated remarkable operating profits once they realised how much people were prepared to pay to fly on them. Air France never figured that out. So they were quite keen to stop flying Concordes and cut their losses.

The crash wasn't the last nail in the coffin. Though it did speed up the move into the departure lounge. Both airlines operated Concordes for a year or so once they returned to service after the crash.

Air France pulled the plug because Concorde made a big dent in their accounts which threatened the airline's privatisation. That left BA on the hook for all of the support costs from Airbus. BA couldn't/wouldn't pay these on their own. Then Airbus said they were withdrawing tech/engineering support and at that point it was game over.

Of course, the concept of financial viability here is theoretical because the French and UK taxpayers wrote off all the R&D and manufacturing costs. These never got charged to the airlines who flew Concorde.

Near Moscow, if still there, tere is a ''koncordsky' (Tu144) in the air force museum in Monino.

Pity it's used for storage/taking naps (at leas wehn I've been there) but it was possible to have a walk inside

You will find it easier to visit the one in Sinsheim, Germany. There is a Concorde on display as well.

I lived in Bristol and we had Vulcan bombers flying over the city creating sonic booms and smashing greenhouses late 60s, noisy evenings when they tested the engines at Filton. But best was the UK version's first flight. I saw it on the runway on TV, ran out the back door up to the allotments and watched it soar over Redland High School's playing fields headed for Bath.

My sister got her first job at Rolls Royce and became secretary to the project change controller. Although she spoke Russian I doubt she was the one who gave Brezhnev the blueprints.

The Vulcan wasn't supersonic so there wouldn't have been a sonic boom from them.

Concorde's profitability was badly damaged when the Americans wouldn't let it fly above the speed of sound, even after they allowed it to land at New York; it was nothing to do with the noise and everything to do with the fact that Europe beat them to it with a supersonic airliner. It was sour grapes and nothing more.

"The Project (Boeing 2707): After a federal competition, Boeing was selected in 1966 to build the Boeing 2707, which was intended to be larger (250–300 passengers) and faster (roughly Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound) than the Concorde."

"Timeline: The US program was formally announced by President Kennedy in 1963, shortly after the Anglo-French agreement for Concorde was signed. While Concorde's first prototype flew in 1969, the Boeing 2707 was intended to begin testing in the early 1970s."