Concorde - The Greatest Plane Ever Built?

At Mach2 it was quite literally ‘faster than a speeding bullet’. It could carry 100 passengers in style. So was Concorde the best plane that the aviation industry has ever built? And just why is there no modern replacement?

For the last 27 years, Transatlantic passengers have routinely flown supersonically when they climbed on board one of British Airways or Air France’s Concorde’s. Its passengers were 80 percent business passengers and included film stars, royalty, rock icons and sports legends. Flying at more than twice the speed of sound they could travel form London or Paris to New York in little more than 3 hours. Sadly, now at the end of October 2003 the service is no more.

The invention of Concorde ranks right up there alongside the Wright Flyer and Apollo 11. It was a huge step forward in aviation. Just twenty years after the sound barrier was first broken Concorde was designed and built to carry 100 passengers at Mach 2 in comfort from one side of the Atlantic to the other. At the time it was brave and visionary. And every pilot who has flown it thinks it was great - from the cockpit 11 miles above the ground, that’s 55-60,000 feet high, they could see the curvature of the Earth’s surface. Apart from spy planes no one flew higher.

One of the greatest achievements of the original design that engineers had to overcome was the immense heat problems. At Mach2 the air is compressed so much it heats the body of the plane. The front of the nose can reach 127 Celsius – well above boiling point even when the ambient outside temperature is subzero. In fact it heated up so much that overall it increased by 15 cms in length. When it’s at full speed it feels hot if you touch the bare metal of the fuselage from the inside. Without efficient air-conditioning the inside air temperature would become unbearable and dangerous, higher than 100 Celsius! Fortunately the fuel remains relatively cool inside the wings and this can be circulated and used as a ’cooling’ fluid to lower the air temperature inside the cabin. By the time a plane arrives at New York the remaining fuel is much warmer than when it took off in London.