Concorde Flight-Deck Tour with John Hutchinson

[Music] okay well the first thing I would like to say is this is a proper flight pick none of this poncey glass cockpit rubbish these are proper instruments needles and dials so what we've got here first of all the flight instruments you've got a suite of flight instruments for the captain the left-hand seat being the captain's seat and those instruments all reproduced for the copilot on the right-hand seat and I don't know how whether you can see them clearly or not but the instruments are airspeed and it's a standby that that's the airspeed indicator there artificial horizon rate of climb and descent indicator that's a radio altimeter pressure altimeter and another altimeter here compass here and a compass here and the Mac meter there and that shows the angle of incidence that instrument there and those instruments are all reproduced on the right-hand side in the middle you've got engine instruments for the four engines n twos and ones here fuel flows eg cheese and the area of the nozzle at the back end of the engine coming across here you've got all these stuff associated with the autopilots autopilot switches are there auto throttle switches of their flight director switches and you can set the whole thing up coupling up with the inertial navigation systems to the autopilot you do that all through the switch array up here and you also couple it up for automatic landing automatic approaches and landings if you're landing in foggy weather as Heathrow so that's for the all the autopilot stuff and then coming up here you've got a master warning system and then coming up here a whole series of instruments really well switches related to various sort of technical issues to do with hydraulics and-and-and engines I'm not going to go into all that lot there and you can't actually see the flight engineers panel but maybe we'll get a picture of that later on but it's without doubt the most complicated flight engineers panel of any civil airliner and one of the reasons the flight engineer was such an important person on the Concorde flight crew was because when you go supersonic with Concorde you create a shock wave and that shock wave forms on the nose as a sort of wall on the nose and as you go from Mac one to Mac two that shock wave gets deflected backwards and finally when you're flying it back to that shock wave is like a cone radiating from the nose trading along behind the aircraft down to the surface of the earth out sideways and up to the upper levels of the Earth's atmosphere and that shock wave trails along like that behind the airplane for the whole time that you're flying supersonic now as that shock wave changes shape from the sort of wall if you like and then it gets deflected backwards what it's doing by changing its shape like that it's pushing the center of lift back down the wing and if you didn't do anything about it you'd end up in the center of gravity where it was the center of lift having me push my way back here and you'd end up with a horribly unbalanced aircraft wanting to pitch nose down all the time which you could correct for aerodynamically if you wanted to but that would incur sort of drag penalties which are highly undesirable so the solution to it and this is just one of the examples of what a brilliant team and I can't emphasize this enough the team of aerodynamicists and engineers who created this wonderful wonderful airplane we're a brilliant team of people they really were and one of the solution and the solution they came up for that particular problem was hey if the center of lift moves back down the wing let's move the center of gravity back with it and then when it goes subsonic and the reverse process happens as the center of lift moves back forwards again we can pump that fuel back forwards again and that's exactly what we used to do and that was the flight engineers job was to change the position of the center of gravity and just to illustrate the amount of the change by comparison with the position of center of gravity at takeoff by the time you were flying it back - and you'd push the center of gravity back by pumping fuel into tank 11 in the tail cone the center of gravity was about eight or nine feet aft of the position it was in for takeoff there was a substantial movement and it was something that needed to be monitored obviously very very carefully very important aspect of the whole thing another thing while I'm on the subject of these brilliant engineers and their dynamicists because you're going so fast you're the airplane the airframe is being subjected to frictional heating and two heating caused by compression and the temperature on the skin on the nose goes up when you're flying it back to to a maximum of 127 degrees that was the limiting temperature 127 degrees Celsius that's about 260 degrees Fahrenheit and you you could I could pull back this trim up above my head here and actually touched the bare metal of the airplane and I tell you what you didn't keep your finger there any length of time at all it was red-hot and the airplane actually expanded by about nine inches they tell me so you've got this airframe expanding as you go supersonic and then contracting again as you go subsonic you can't have that process affecting the passenger cabin I mean the passengers would be most disconcerted if they saw the cabin floor sort of stretching and the carpet ripping itself apart so the whole cabin floor sits on a system of rollers if you like so that the fuselage can expand and contract and leave the cabin floor completely unaffected by the whole process I mean they were just a brilliant team of people like they were geniuses some of them they really truly were the the brainpower that went into this is staggering no other word for it yep the throttles are here and I can unable to move them forward for some reason they're locked and I can't unlock them I don't think now anyway they're the throttles and the reverse thrust the little handles there and you once you've landed the throttles are fully closed and you pull back on those reverse thrust levers and that helps you decelerate on the runway and then the reheats in the actual airplane that I flew we're sitting on a prototype Concorde here and it's a bit different the instruments are not entirely exactly the same as they were on the airplanes that I used to fly I've never flown this one at all the reheat switches in the production airplanes that British Airways flew had piano keys for reheat switches on this airplane you can see they're just switches just toggle switches on the real airplanes that I flew they were nice white piano keys four of them in line there and there's a gang bar that you could select them all for up at the same time and a gang were to select all four off at the same time so when you got to the pre take off checks one of the items would be to select the reheats pre select the reheats on they wouldn't come on because the throttles are at idle at the moment and then once you started the take-off run you as you opened the throttles up those reheats would automatically cut in and off you go blasting into the air and whatever the noise abatement time was something like a minute and 15 seconds after starting the take-off would be a typical sort of noise abatement time the non handling pilot would go three two one noise and the flight engineer would then cancel those reheats and throttle the engines back to a predetermined setting on the throttle quadrant and that would obviously cut the noise level and we tiptoe past Windsor Castle so as not to disturb her majesty and and then sort of gradually reintroduce full DRI power unruhe heating power for our climb up to the subsonic cruise altitude yep the nosecone does move up and down and there's the control and they're basically four positions for it the one that it's in at the moment with the nose fully up and the visor the heat shield you might be able to see it on the picture you've got what you've got here is a conventional windshield like any other airplane and then beyond they're encased in those heavy-duty black bars that you may be able to see is the the visor the heat shield so here we are with the nose up and the heat shield in its streamlined position to give the airfare nice aerodynamic shape the first stage of lowering things is to put that lever down to that detent there and that brings the note the the visor down into the nose cone the next stage is to lower the nose to five degrees which is that one there so that then the whole nose cone goes from fully up to five degrees down with the visor stowed inside the nose cone and that's the position that we used to use for taxiing for takeoff and for flying around in the immediate airport area and then the final position is fully done those 12 12 degrees done and that was the 12 and a half degrees done actually and that was the position we used for landing and that was part of the landing checks so after you'd selected the undercarriage done the next item was knows 212 nose nose fully done and the only reason the lowering the nose was to get that great long nose cone out of the pilots line of sight because you're coming in to land at about eleven and a half eleven three-quarters degrees nose-up attitude and if you didn't get that nose cone out of the way all you'd see no sign of a runway just a nose cone which is not very satisfactory we were trained during the training incidentally to land with the nose stuck in the up position as far as I know it never ever happened certainly didn't in British Airways I don't think it ever did in there France either and in fact there was a very effective emergency drill for luring me for the emergency lowering of the nose which was simply to depressurize the hydraulics and that mr. Newton's laws of gravity do the business said they sort of dropped down clunk into a dot nose down position so there we are that's the that's the reason for the nose cone and the fact that it moves around is just simply to give the pilots a decent view of the runway when they're coming in to land you

Channel: Aircrew Interview

Views: 67,872

Keywords: concorde, ba concorde, concorde take off, concorde crash, concorde flypast, concorde london heathrow, concorde flight deck tour, john hutchinson, concorde bristol, concorde afterburners, concorde documentary, concorde pilot, concorde landing, concorde jfk, concorde and red arrows, british airways, boeing 747 documentary, boeing 787 dreamliner, british airways documentary, heathrow airport, airbus a380 documentary, jfk airport, airport documentary, concorde cockpit

Id: iCPhY6V2dLQ

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 18 2017