Concorde: Supersonic Icon - 50th Anniversary Edition

By Ingo Bauernfeind

This lavishly illustrated volume tells the amazing story of Concorde, the supersonic icon that has been capturing the world’s imagination since its maiden flight in 1969. With personal accounts written by former pilots and crew members, it covers Concorde’s history, her technology as well as her undisputed and timeless charisma. Moreover, this volume will focus on her legacy and the ambitious undertaking of bringing one Concorde back to service as a heritage aircraft. Included is a download video about Concorde.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bauernfeind Press
• Release date: Dec 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9783981598445

Ingo Bauernfeind

Ingo Bauernfeind studied military and naval history, visual communication, and documentary film at Hawaii Pacific University, Honolulu. Ingo has completed 30 books about naval, military, and aviation history and has directed or co-produced award-winning documentaries in cooperation with German and American TV network, including films about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War. In addition, Ingo has been producing interactive museum guides for history and naval museums in Pearl Harbor and in Germany.

Book preview

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BUILDING THE DREAM

Concorde was definitely well ahead of her time. Structurally she was amazing – she was all machined out of solid metal.

– Mark Claridge, former BA technician

Early Studies

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The German Heinkel 178 was the world’s first jet-powered aircraft, taking to skies in August 1939.

[U.S. Air Force]

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Take-off of Britain’s first jet aircraft, the Gloster E.28/39 in May 1941.

[Royal Air Force, MOD, Crown Copyright]

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Please see instructions on page 2.

The Anglo-French Concorde was the culmination of decades of aircraft design and research work conducted under war and peacetime conditions, leading to an aircraft that is still an inspiration to designers around the world. The desire to fly as fast as possible is as old as aviation itself. Since the early days, when the Wright Brothers and other pioneers took to the skies, speed has become one of the defining factors for aircraft designers and pilots – not only for prestige but also for practical reasons: saving time when travelling from one place to another has always been a human endeavour.

The history of supersonic flight can be traced back to World War II, at a time when aviation technology was making rapid advances due to the need to design more sophisticated aircraft than the enemy. Besides the construction and use of piston-powered fighters, bombers and many other aircraft types, British and German engineers developed and tested various jet and rocket engines. The world’s first flight of a jet-powered aircraft took place in August 1939, when the Heinkel 178, powered by Hans von Ohain’s HeS 3 turbojet engine, took to the skies. The British Gloster E.28/39 made her maiden flight in May 1941, powered by Frank Whittle’s W.1, followed by the American Bell XP-59 in October 1942, built with two GE Type 1A turbojets. While propeller-driven aircraft designed prior to or during World War II could not reach speeds much beyond 450 mph (725 kph), the advent of jet and rocket technology promised flying as fast as the speed of sound ‒ also known as supersonic speed.

The Speed of Sound

The speed of sound is the distance a sound wave propagates through an elastic medium. At 20°C (68°F), the speed of sound is about 343 metres per second (1,235 kph, 767 mph), or a kilometre in 2.9 seconds, or a mile in 4.7 seconds.

Concorde’s British Ancestry

During the war, after the tide had turned against Germany, the Luftwaffe became desperate to defend the homeland against the armadas of Allied bombers dominating the skies over Europe. As a result, advanced interceptors such as the jet-powered Messerschmitt 262 or the rocket-propelled Mess-erschmitt 163 were designed to counter the Allied bombing raids, the latter even capable of a speed of about 620 mph (1,000 kph). Built in small numbers and introduced late in the war, these aircraft had no impact on its outcome. At the same time, the Royal Air introduced its Gloster Meteor which was successfully used to intercept German V-1 flying bombs and whose early post-war variants were capable of reaching speeds in excess of 600 mph. Unlike Allied aircraft builders, German designers and engineers using state-of-the-art wind tunnel technology for determining the best aerodynamic shape, constructed various arrow-shaped aircraft with delta wings (named after the triangle-shaped Greek letter ‘delta’) and experimented with some even more radical designs. After Germany’s surrender in May 1945, various operational jet- and rocket-powered fighters, bombers, prototypes and tons of blueprints for unfinished aircraft designs became war prizes for the

victorious Allied powers – United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union – with most of them shipped to America and Britain for further testing and assessment. Moreover, numerous renowned German engineers and designers continued their careers working for U.S. and British aircraft manufacturers, and in some cases in the USSR. Two of these were the aerodynamicists Dietrich Küchemann and Johanna Weber who joined the aerodynamics department at the British Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough in 1946 and who were both later naturalized as British citizens.

During the war, however, British engineers also worked on a secret jet aircraft named Miles M.52 as a response to German developments. In order to reach unheard-of speeds of 1,000 mph (1,600 kph) during level flight, it involved a very high proportion of cutting-edge aerodynamic research and innovative design work. Before testflight stage, however, the M.52 was cancelled shortly after the end of the war due to budget cuts on military spending. It was, however, revived as a series of three unmanned rocket-powered 30-percent scale models of the original manned full-scale M.52. These unmanned scale models were air-launched from a modified de Havilland Mosquito mother ship.

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After the war, British, American, and Soviet high-speed research institutions retested the Me 262 to gain experience for their own supersonic aircraft designs. Some Me 262 and Me 163 pilots claimed to have exceeded Mach 1 in straight-down dives during the war.

[U.S. Air Force]

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Prototype of the rocket-powered Me 163 designed to intercept Allied bombers.

[Bundesarchiv, Photo 146-1972-058-62 / CC-BY-SA 3.0]

During the war, the design and the research gained from the original M.52 was shared with the American company Bell Aircraft which built the rocket-powered Bell X-1. On 14 October 1947, it became the first aircraft to break the sound barrier with U.S. Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager at the controls. It was droplaunched from the bomb bay of a B-29 bomber and reached Mach 1.06 (700 mph, 1,100 kph). A year later, a radio-controlled M.52 reached Mach 1.38 (1,060 mph, 1,700 kph) after an earlier attempt prior to Chuck Yeager’s historic flight had failed. However, the first supersonic flight by a jet-powered aircraft that took off under its own power and landed safely afterwards was undertaken by British pilot John Derry in a de Havilland DH 108 ‘Swallow’ on 9 September 1948. Three of these aircraft were built and all crashed one after another, killing their pilots, among them Geoffrey de Havilland Jr in 1946, the son of the company founder. Next came a succession of various research aircraft designed to investigate the challenges of supersonic flight.

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The unmanned Miles M.52 could reach Mach 1.38 but had to be air-launched from a mother ship.

[Royal Aircraft Establishment / Crown Copyright]

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A de Havilland Mosquito on the ground with a Miles M.52 model in place below the fuselage.

[Royal Aircraft Establishment / Crown Copyright]

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In 1947 the American pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in his drop-launched rocket-powered Bell X-1 aircraft.

[U.S. Air Force]

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In 1948 British pilot John Derry made the first supersonic flight in the jet-powered de Havilland DH 108 ‘Swallow’ after taking off under its own power.

[U.S. Navy]

Compared to subsonic aircraft, lift is created by different means in aircraft flying supersonically. In order to attain the appropriate amount of lift without unacceptable drag, the wings have to be very short, fairly stubby, and not too long and thin. Although such a short wingspan works fine at supersonic speeds (1,350 mph and more), the trade-off is usually a lack of lift at low speed occurring during take-off and also landing.

Intense research and flight testing led to the conclusion that one of the best aerodynamic shapes for high-speed flying incorporates a delta-wing shape. Given a sufficiently large angle of rearward sweep, the delta wing’s main advantage is that its front is not affected by the shock wave formed at the aircraft’s nose as the aircraft approaches and exceeds the sound barrier, thus becoming supersonic. The wing’s rearward sweep enables the aircraft to fly at (high) subsonic, transonic (close to the sound barrier) or supersonic speeds. Moreover, the delta-wing shape provides the largest total wing area in order to create lift for the entire wing, thus giving the aircraft a very high overall manoeuvrability. Despite its advantages at high and supersonic speeds, the delta wing has a high drag due to its low-aspect ratio causing a significant reduction in lift at slower speeds, in particular during take-off and landing. In order to generate enough lift during these critical stages of a flight and not to crash to ground, the pilots of early delta wing aircraft were forced to take off and land at high speeds compared to conventional swept-wing aircraft. Designers and engineers at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough tried to find a solution for this problem. Dietrich Küchemann and Johanna Weber who had been members of the team responsible for the highspeed-wing concept were concerned about the wing’s drawback at low speeds. Therefore, a number of test aircraft were constructed to fully investigate this problem and modify the existing delta-wing design, the most notable of them the Handley Page 115.

Further research and wind-tunnel testing showed that a delta wing generates large vortices over the wing at low speeds and high nose-up angles. A vortex on a wing can be described as a cone of swirling air which stretches from the wing’s front to its rear. These vortices increase the speed of the air on the wing’s top surface, thus significantly increasing the lift at low speeds. Küchemann and his team came to the conclusion that a larger sweep angle would result in a more robust vortex above the wing, and that a longer wing would enable the vortex to operate over a greater distance, thus creating more lift.

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The Handley Page 115 served as a testbed for low-speed research in support of the Concorde development programme.

[© Airbus]

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The HP 115 was able to demonstrate rapid changes of bank, while still safely retaining control at speeds as low as 69 mph (111 kph).

[© Airbus]

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The RAF Avro Vulcan bomber designed in the 1950s was a successful delta-wing design that even served as a flying testbed for Concorde’s Olympus engines. An aircraft designed with a delta wing is more robust than an aircraft of similar size with swept wings, as well as having more internal space for fuel tanks in the wings.

[RAF/MOD 45133331]

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A Concorde model in a wind tunnel seen from the rear. The two masses of rotating air above the wings are called ‘wing vortices’. The Office National d’Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales (ONERA), France’s national aerospace research centre, discovered the increase of lift due to vortex at low speed and high angle of attack on the delta wing in

Reviews for Concorde

[Todd Heft · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent I loved it but it didn't mention Emirates Concorde plans for 2022 :(