Episode 21: Iconic aircraft - Meet a Concorde pilot

welcome to cae pilot podcast a podcast that brings together aviation professionals to discuss life as a pilot training and career advice you can find us at cae.com forward slash cae pilot dash podcast or subscribe to our show on your audio podcasting platform of choice you can also find our video podcast on our youtube channel welcome to this episode of the cae pilot podcast and we're thrilled to have you with us you know in the aviation industry there are certain icons and those are people those are aircraft and those are also eras and periods of time that you know many people within the industry will consider it to be the glory days um and today we are going to talk about uh someone who really you know personifies all three of those um we're thrilled to have john hutchinson with us and he is um he really lived the glory days of flying um started his career at boac um on the 707 and ended it on an aircraft that is probably the most iconic certainly in civil aviation and of course i'm talking about the concorde um john welcome to the cae podcast well it's very nice to be here and that's a great model you have there behind you i thought i'd better have concord firmly in the background there oh you're looking good there we're going to try something new this year before starting our discussion and um i'm looking forward to your answer on this because i suspect you have a lot of great memories from your career but what would you say is the most significant memory you have from your career in aviation i suppose the greatest privilege i've had in my aviation career was being one of the captains on the royal flight to the united states in 1991 when we carried hm the queen and his royal highness the prince philip duke of edinburgh over to washington we landed at andrews air force base rather than at washington's dallas international and that whole trip was just fantastic having spent a couple of days in washington we then flew the queen and prince philip down to miami and they then boarded the royal yacht and went on a on a great cruise around the voyage around the florida panhandle and we picked them up at tampa and then took them on to houston and dallas um and the queen disappeared at that point and went off to join some stud breeding racehorse breeding chap who was a friend of hers in kentucky or somewhere and we took prince philip home and that but you know that was a huge privilege and it's an extraordinary thing doing a royal flight because for a start you don't go anywhere until the royal arrives having said that of course as you probably know but for anybody who doesn't the queen is punctilious about timing so she was never ever late she would arrive minute perfect uh to get on the airplane to fly onto the next destination but the trick is you've got to arrive at the red carpet at the destination spot on time and and you can't just sort of land and think crikey i'm about seven minutes too early and go and park in an obscure bit at the airport and then taxi up to the red carpet you have to time it so that you land taxi off and arrive second perfect the red dumb by the red carpet and we manage that on every single occasion was a fantastic flight i mean i just feel hugely privileged to have been one of the crew on it it sounds like an amazing experience and flying the concorde i would imagine that timing the red carpet was more a matter of slowing down than speeding up it was very much a question of slowing down not speeding up that's exactly right you've hit the nail on the head perfectly there why would why we're just on the subject it's quite funny um somewhere either i've got my logbooks here just in case i needed to refer to them i hope i can find it um maybe it's another log book which one's it in which one is it in but it's quite amusing i had to send a message from the queen to the president um a dad link message it was george bush the first of course and the message reads as far as i had to transmit this on the air and through fire air traffic to the president of the united states as we fly south i'd like to express heartfelt thanks on behalf of prince philip and myself for a wonderful visit to washington we shall never forget the friendliness with which you and mrs bush looked after us nor the warmth of our welcome throughout our stay we look forward keenly to seeing you again in london in july elizabeth r how about that i feel like i'm in an episode of the crown somehow that's the said telex there wow which is brilliant you must have some uh some wonderful uh mementos from your career uh i got lots of incredible memories what i should have done of course on concord i should have got autographs from all my passengers and i can vlog it on ebay it would have been a priceless collection we're going to talk about who you've met and the sort of the the uh the great um the great times uh aboard concord but before we do that and we typically ask this of everybody is um you know before you got to concord you know you were presumably a young man who dreamt of flying tell us a little bit about the progression of your career where did you get the bug to fly how did uh how did you end up you know in uh in the concord at the end of your career well it's a very good question actually patrick and i don't really know why i got the bug for flying i was actually born in india in rural pindy which is now pakistan of course but it was india when i was born there and we lived there until the winter of 1947 48 and in that time that sort of ten and a half years um i never saw an airplane but i can i've got still in my loft i think a whole stack of books aircraft identification books the boys wonder book of the royal air force god knows what the inspiration was i have no idea at all my father was in the indian army he couldn't understand where all this sort of enthusiasm for the air and for airplanes came from so i had no idea it was i must be had it implanted in there at birth for some reason and i just knew from the age of about eight that's all that all i wanted to do was to fly and i joined the royal air force in 1955 on my 18th birthday and i was sent out to canada to do my flying training under a nato flying training scheme that existed in those days spent the last three years in my air force career as a flying instructor on jeb provis at that point i knew that i wanted to leave the air force not because i didn't love the air force i did and in fact i owe the air force everything in terms of my flying career um but i knew that i didn't want to end up doing desk jobs um in whitehall and that sort of thing i didn't want ground jobs i just wanted to fly airplanes so i left my timing wasn't particularly good because at that point we're now talking we're talking 1963 april may 1963 and there were no jobs around in the airlines at all and i literally ended up writing to all the flying schools around the uk knocking on people's doors and i happened to knock on the doors of a company called mcalpine aviation in luton on the very day that one of their pilots had had lost his license for medical reasons he'd had some heart problem and lost his license and i just walked straight into a job there and i had three years of mcalpine's doing corporate flying and i applied to qantas bea british european airways that is and boac british overseas airways as it was and i was accepted by all three of them and i was i would have been very very tempted to go to australia i mean i just think australia is a fantastic country i love the australians it's a great way of life for youngsters a tremendous country but my mother was dying of cancer at that time and i just didn't think it appropriate for me to be disappearing down to australia with her grandchildren uh leaving her to die without the presence of the grandchildren so i decided against qantas and then it was bea or boac well i decided i wanted to fly long-haul rather than short haul so boac it was and of course that was a fateful decision you never know about these things at the time and of course if i joined qantas i'd never gone on to go to concord so you know i qualified as a captain in 19 january 1976 and then to my utter astonishment in the summer of well the spring early summer of 1970 up 19 let's get the years right january 1976 was when i qualified as a captain so it was in the spring summer of 1977 that british airways as it had now become was asking for bids to go on to concord and i put in this speculative bid never thinking for one moment at my extreme juniority level that i'd get anywhere near this aeroplane and to my utter astonishment i found i was on the third course and well the rest of it the rest of my time in the airline was spent on that utterly magnificent fantastic airplane and i still pinch myself in disbelief that i had the privilege to fly for 15 years it was wonderful that's very nice actually if i can jump in here patrick i have a question for john so you say you just went on the concorde after having just been the captain for one year on the vc 10. i'm actually wondering uh what was the course on the concord like or long was it or difficult what was it like from a pilot's perspective was it i guess it was very difficult wasn't it the course on concord was the most intense course i mentioned the cfs courses being the one i learned most about flying it was very very hard work it was eight weeks of grand school filton with lecturers from british aerospace doing the lectures about all the systems hydraulics electrics undercarriage navigation flight instruments all that stuff pressurization you name it covering all aspects of the aircraft and every week you had a an exam and you had to get at least 90 or you had a big question mark being flagged up over you at the end of the grand school you had to do the air registration board um final exam technical exam which was something i can't remember something like 450 questions covering all the different systems as i was saying earlier hydraulics electrics and so on and you had to get over 90 in each section and by some miracle i did um and that was just pure hard work i think um and then you had 85 hours in a flight simulator where you learned not only to fly perfectly conventional airplane in subsonic flight you also had to learn to fly an airplane with rather different responses when you were in supersonic flight so it was a very very intensive simulator course once you've completed that and in my case we went to royal air force prize norton and did about eight hours of circuits and bumps out of bryce norton was conquered and you then as the final thing you then went down the route for about three months with one of what were known as the core group of pilots and flight engineers that had done their training not not with british airways trainers as i'd done in the simulator they'd done then i had civilian british aerospace lecturers in the grand school but the simulator training was entirely done by british airways training captains and these guys have been seconded to british aerospace about three years before concord came into service and they've been on the test flights um route proving trials with brian trump shaw and john cochran they've been all over the place flying on concord they've been seconded to british aerospace to learn all about concord and they became as i say the nucleus group that um that formed the training cohort that was responsible for the initial courses on concord and they were the people who set the whole sort of standard of flight operations for concord um anyway after three months of going down the route with one of the with these um nucleus group pilots um i was finally endorsed as a concord pilot so the total course length was around six months and it was very it was very hardcraft and uh during the course so you said you've done basically a base training on the concorde right so it means you've been flying patterns around an airfield in an empty concord that must have been interesting right being such a powerful airplane being completely empty and doing base training i think this these instructors used to have a lot of fun at our expense because you're quite right i mean the airplane had no passengers on board had no baggage on board all it had got was a few crew meals sort of hamburgers and things and maybe we'd have sort of 10 or 15 people on board as a sort of look-see experience and it had been decided that although british aerospace had a procedure for doing takeoffs at lightweight without the use of reheats you had to do the calculations differently and british airways deemed that to have two different takeoff procedures could cause confusion so we never used the reheat this takeoff procedure ever all take-offs in concord were done with full power and reheats so here you are training at bryce norton with this incredibly light aircraft and you're cleared to three thousand feet as your first cleared out you believe me you you have one hell of a struggle containing the airplane and leveling off at three thousand feet it's like a rocket well so actually in the end you've been flying a fighter jet of some sort right in the air yeah that's a good point so that that partly explains why i now look back on the shackleton with great fondness because i've done my fighter pilot flying in a concorde exactly and i think that you know allah to put it into context for people british airways at the time wasn't just introducing a new aircraft type they were introducing a completely different way of commercial flight at the time and that must have been a very interesting time to live through oh fascinating time you're absolutely right the prevailing philosophy at that time was just bums on seats as many bums on seats as you can get the sort of top end of the market wasn't something that british airways at that time was interested in um and it wasn't until uh john king who became sir john king and then later lord king the average flight time from new york to london or london to new york was about three hours and a quarter from takeoff to touchdown um i think the fastest flight was 2 hours and 56 minutes from new york to london but you know you're talking about just over three hours was this sort of bog standard takeoff to touchdown timing so you have to take out at least 15 minutes after takeoff while the airplane's sort of accelerating and climbing away and getting clear of any um any turbulence and then you've got to take out another 20 20 minutes 25 minutes clearing the whole cabin up uh prior to landing so those concord crew members cabin crew had about two and a half working hours to do a full drink service and then a full meal service three-course meal service with all the fine wines accompanying it and then and this again this is what happened in the early days they then went around with um coffee and cognac and cigars and people be sighting up their cigars it became like a gentleman's smoking club and speaking we're talking about a totally different world aren't we and speaking from experience uh doing all that in two and a half hours is uh is a serious cardio workout that's not uh not easy work by any stretch with with one single aisle and you know quite often on the new york flights we had 100 passengers i've done several flights with 101 passengers carrying one on the flight deck a paying commercial passenger on the flight deck and you know those that for the cabin crew to provide wonderful unhurried service looking totally calm and unruffled it was a fantastic act on their part it really was and as far as as pilots and and cabin crew go there must have been enormous pride to be operating this aircraft i went far beyond just the pilots and the cabin crew and all the flight crew and the cabin crew i mean it was the grind engineers the dispatchers that people did our load sheets the refuellers the whole gamut of support that was involved in the concord operation felt a tremendous sense of ownership of that operation and pride in that operation and the determination that they were going to get the airplane away on time i mean it was the morale in that sleep was just fantastic and we've we've spoken a lot about the uh you know the there was two daily flights if i'm not mistaken to uh between new york and uh and london but what was the rest of the uh the route network like on concord well it to start with and i'm going back to the very very first flight commercial flight of the concorde was 21st of january 1976. and that was to bahrain that was the only route that was cleared for operations in the very first instance so the british airways concorde went to bahrain and on that day that first flight it was a synchronized departure from heathrow the british airways aircraft and from charles girl with the air france one which went to dhaka in senegal and then onto rio de janeiro we wanted in british areas to get into washington but there were a whole lot of regulatory hurdles that we had to get through in terms of noise and all the rest of it and environmental impact and so on and so forth and eventually washington blessed them dallas airport gave us clearance to go on a trial basis i can't remember years trial or something something like that um to go into washington so that service started up in the summer of 1976 and we at this point i think my if my memory is correct we had three times a week to bahrain and three times a week to to washington and of course it was the clearance into washington that led to the big prize the big prize which of course was new york and we got the clearance to go into new york in the end um i think it was october or november 1977. and that was a massively big day for the for the airline and for the whole concorde project but it's all thanks to washington letters letting us into washington in the first place um once the new york route had become established we then ended up with twice a day to new york as you've already mentioned the speed bird one which left at 10 30 in the morning and the speed bird three which left at seven o'clock in the evening uh and then of course the return flights i think i can't remember i think the flight out of new york left at something like nine o'clock in the morning and then there was a flight at 1 45 in the afternoon back to london which got in to london at about 10 o'clock at night and so that was twice a day to new york now so at this stage we got and i'm talking about for the late 1970s coming into the early 1980s we've got two flights a day to new york three flights a week to washington three flights a week out to bahrain but the bahrain route had been extended to singapore with the ultimate intention of going on to australia that that never never happened sadly and i had a a glorious in flying terms probably the best flying i've ever had in my life um flying i've spent what was it something like three or four months we had a singapore posting for some extraordinary reason don't ask me why so i was actually based in singapore doing nothing but flying between singapore to bahrain and then bahrain back to singapore you all will know i'm sure most of certainly most people are listening to it the earth's atmosphere is much thicker over the equate equatorial latitudes and it is over the polar latitudes so you've got a much thicker atmosphere in the singapore regions than you have flying between london and new york and your lapse rate at two degrees per thousand feet and that lapse rate goes on all the time and as you go up in the earth's atmosphere until you get to the tropopause um that what i'm really getting at in a rather long-winded clunky way is that whereas the outside air temperatures flying between london and new york at 50 000 feet and above or something like minus 55 because you were up above the tropicals flying between london singapore and bahrain the upper air temperatures were something like minus 85 to -90 30 degrees colder than the sort of temperatures i was used to flying to new york and i can tell you what it made one heck of a difference to the performance of the airplane i mean going across to new york we very rarely ever got to 60 000 feet would cruise climb once you got to 50 000 feet with the throttles wide open the airplane burned fuel off weight decreased you just gently drifted uphill and typically you'd reach about 58 and a half 59 000 feet before you needed to throttle back and re-enter out of singapore to bahrain with a full load of fuel full load of passengers you get to 50 000 feet and the airplane would just carry on climbing at about five thousand feet a minute straight up to sixty thousand feet and you'd then go into mac hold and out hold on the autopilot and you just sat there at sixty thousand feet the whole of the rest of the way it's very very different performance very interesting how deeply significant temperature can be or variations in temperature can be and other destinations i think were barbados if i'm not mistaken it was a saturday flight to barbados yeah we ended up with a weekly flight to barbados around that time i can't remember exactly when they started up sort of early 80s and that built up at the sort of peak season to twice all three times a week to barbados and we also for a short while had flights to toronto and the canadians god blessed them gave us clarence fly supersonic over some the northern northeast bits of canada so again we had quite an extensive schedule route structure and then in the sort of early to mid 1980s uh charter flights started up and notably there was a company called goodwood travel who became the leading concord charterer the british airways worked with and they did charter flights all over the place including around the world charters and so that added a whole new sort of and a whole new database of customers basically because on these charter flights these seats were being sold at prices that people could just about afford whereas the scheduled fares were distinctly unaffordable um and and they were just tremendous fun i mean i i mean we used to do these round the beige classes which lasted about an hour and a quarter and in that hour and a quarter you go through the whole spectrum of the of the flight envelope uh you'd go up to 50 000 feet back to up to 60 000 feet and then throttle back decelerate come in and land and we used to get all the passengers because they were invariably 100 passengers on board we used to get them all up into the flight deck for a quick look-scene and a photograph um and i remember one notable occasion there was a elderly lady she lived up in um in the newcastle area in the northeast of england and she was aged 101 and she had never flown her first flight was the concorde she decided that before she died she was going to have to fly in concord so she bought herself a seat on one of these around the bay flights got down to london i think she came with her daughter and um and they got on the airplane the cabin crew looked after after them as they did with everybody and actually that's something i was wondering john because you say okay uh the so the service on board the concorde there was obviously a lot of drinking involved right there was champagne before the meal there was nice wines during the meal and then cognac etc and the cockpit door was open during this whole time right did you ever have like a passenger coming in the flight deck and giving you trouble being drunk possibly was that something no i've had one experience of a of an actor who will remain unnamed who got completely horrendously drunk um and we'd had to dive he was flying out to go and watch the oh god what do they call the great big he was going out to that and we'd had to divert from new york because the weather was fun and ended up in baltimore my last memory of this actor was him lying in a complete drunken unconscious heap in the baggage hall so i don't know what happened to him speaking he went on to act more films so somebody somebody rescued him but that's the only sort of drunken um episode i've ever had i mean let's face it these people i mean they were all very very worldly wise people they they'd learned how to drink and how to handle themselves and they weren't the sort of people who got smashed out of their brains but given the exclusivity of the the concorde um you must have had the opportunity to meet you know countless movie stars high pro profile people you know you already mentioned you know flying the queen etc what was it like to meet these people it was a huge privilege of course i i used to look at the passenger list on every flight and scan the list think oh i wouldn't mind meeting her or him and it's issue an invitation would you like to come up and watch the takeoff out of london or landing into new york and you know people always accepted those sort of invitations and i've met some memorable people um sadly i never kept a log of it my brain isn't all that good at holding memories i can show you one notable one that definitely left a an impression on my mind and i don't know if that's at all visible but it gives you some idea of what the uh what the menu is yeah but this is the very this is a particular particularly special menu i don't know how well this will come out see if you can work out whose signature that is oh wow muhammad ali is that it exactly so wow yeah exactly so and that was december the 18th 1978 and that man came up onto the flight deck bloody hell he was gorgeous he was beautiful he was the most fantastic physical specimen i think i've ever seen he was witty he was humorous he was completely straightforward there's nothing pompous about him and he was just bloody good fun he was tremendous value he didn't have any of us a living legend uh who exemplified that right till the end if you know yeah great man great man so let's get to a little bit sorry go ahead it was an incredibly easy airplane to fly in terms of just handling it it was delightful it was responsive it did exactly what you wanted it to do um it was a very demanding airplane to manage if that distinction makes sense from all three members of that flag deck had to know exactly what their roles were and what they do you were working working your butt off to keep the whole thing under control you had to keep mentally way way ahead of the airplane in a way that i've never had to do with any other airplane it was a very very demanding unforgiving mistress of an airplane it did not suffer fools and i would imagine that the speed at which you're going just accentuates any mishap yeah yeah could do quite easily yes absolutely and tommy what was a typical roster like for a concord pilot you know did you uh you know some people might sit back today and say wow well did you do a turn around new york or you know i think the flying that we see today versus what you probably did was quite different um i would have loved to have done much more flying i mean i i don't think in my quite often there's only one there's three round trips a month we could have done but there and back in the day there's no doubt about that uh because the captain who's supposed to be taking it back had gone sick himself in new york and i took it back wow now um i know that uh renault's got a bunch of questions about uh about what it's like to fly the concord so i'll hand it over to him for uh for those few questions yeah thank you patrick and uh just before that maybe a last thing that i would like to know john uh so before being on the concord of course you've been on the boeing 707 etc and speaking right now as a young pilot you know the rosters that we are doing are very busy we spend not that much time down route because there's usually several flights a day so you know you don't need to be three four five days anymore a destination i'm wondering how different it was for you let's say in the 1970s when you were flying the boeing 707 like what kind of missions were you doing how long were they and how much time you you would spend on it was hugely different i mean typically i i did the 707 route structure back at the time i joined boec so now back in 1966 67 late 1960s um they had the eastern routes and western routes western routes obviously by definition went across the atlantic to the us and canada eastern routes like to australia basically and i was on eastern routes which is what i wanted to be um and typically we'd go away from two to two and a half weeks and you did you know you you you on that let's have a look at the sort of typical flight to sydney for instance you take off from london and you almost invariably on those far east there flights you'd have a european stop over first and we used to either stop at zurich or um frankfurt or rome and you'd have a night stop there maybe two nights there until the next airplane came through you then go from that european um airport to maybe tehran or karachi and you'd then slip there and have a night or two there or delhi and then you go to singapore and you'd have a couple of nights there and then you'd go on to sydney so it sort of worked on that sort of routine it was like a it was like a sort of two and a half week holiday trip um saved all these different places and you know we used to have uh ordinary membership of golf clubs in these various places squash clubs uh we had a flying staff recreation club which provided dinghies and things for sailing was if you were in a in a place where you could go sailing it was it was it was a remarkable a remarkable lifestyle very very different from anything that exists today yeah you're making me very jealous right now you know but but also you know i'm thinking there you are going for two weeks or two and a half weeks in time where emails whatsapp cell phones are non-existent it must have been also quite difficult on the family point of view you know like to to be away from home for that long and with little ways of contacting your family kind of i'd say you should have a word with my wife about that she she would agree with that statement so we've spoken already about concord the fact that it was a very fast airplane right the cruising speed was twice the speed of sound basically and the cruising altitudes were in in the high 50 000 feet 58 000 feet um but uh what i was wondering was in terms of takeoff speeds because right now you know i take off on an airbus 320 sometimes we have 140 maybe 150 knots take off speed when we are heavy what was it like to take off on the concord because i think you had to accelerate quite quick wasn't it at transatlantic weights um a sort of typical set of speeds for takeoff would be a v1 of around 155 knots a rotate speed of around 198 knots and a v2 of 220 knots um and when you the interesting thing about the concord takeoff because of the wing design at speeds below 270 knots you're not getting your lift from a lamina flow of air over the delta wing you're getting the lift from two huge vortices that develop over the wings massive massive vortices and it's the low pressure in those vortices that gives you your lift and in fact at slow speeds there's quite a lot of turbulence in the airplane buffeting which i used to warn passengers about i'd say look if anybody who's sort of being on airplanes or knows about flying that buffet you'll feel after takeoff isn't a stall buffet it's buffett caused by these vortices um and it wasn't until you accelerated above 250 knots and brought the nose up that suddenly the airplane would resume would take on a lovely sort of smooth aspect to its flight those wings are not developing any lift as you accelerate down the runway whereas in a 747 for instance you know those wings are beginning to generate lift as there's an airflow over the wings and it's relieving the load on the undercarriage and by the time you get to rotate you're almost sort of airborne anyway um not like that in concord at all i mean you could go infinitely fast on a concord and it would stay firmly ground gripping until you actually changed the attitude of the airplane and presented the delta wing at an angle to the airflow and then you start getting the lift so the stresses on the undercarriage were quite considerable not only in terms of the higher speeds that we're talking about but also in terms of the fact there was no load relief on the undercarriage during the takeoff at all in fact as you rotate it you're actually putting quite a lot of extra load on the undercarriage on the main undercarriage as you pivoted around that undercarriage to lift off makes sense and uh so i've read about i've read a little bit about the concorde because of course that's an aircraft that i have never really known uh i've never been on concord so i've read i've read about it and i've read that there there are a lot of technical features that are very specific to concord for example um i guess you know the afterburners the fact that it kind of retracts and there's like a visor that comes up etc can you tell us just a little bit about those features that are very specific to that aircraft actually the most important feature of the airplane really and the thing that enabled it to maintain sustain supersonic flight with a variable geometry intakes and by that i mean these huge sort of doors that came down in the intake they were hydraulically powered controlled by the only digital computer in the airplane because basically everything in that airplane because of when it was created was analog this was the first sort of um step into digital computer technology with the computers that controlled those intake ramps and those computers were fed with all the sort of information it needed and they would then command those blind door intake ramps into precisely the set right position for whatever stage of supersonic flight you were in and that intake system was just extraordinary it worked phenomenally well and just as an interesting fact once you were cruising at mach 2 in sustained supersonic flight um only about 30 to 35 of the thrust was being produced by the engines the other 65 of the thrust was being produced by the intakes right indeed and um and and can you let us know a little bit uh what that retractable nose and tilting nose was for what was the purpose of that because that's only unique to concord i think isn't it yeah i mean that was always a thing that sort of exercised people's imaginations a lot um the nose hinged from forward of the flight deck by the way i think a lot of passengers certainly in the early days of concord sort of imagined that that us in the flight deck were going down with the nose as well not at all this is all forward of the flight deck and the only purpose of the nose lowering was to enable the pilots on approach and to have a decent view of the runway i mean i've got a little model concord here but you can imagine if it's you're coming in at quite a high nose-up attitude and if you've got the nose stuck in the up position what you can see in front of you is this long needle nose and no view of the runway so the idea was you could lower the nose down to 12 and a half degrees which took the whole nose section out of the line of sight for the pilots and then left them with a lovely clear view of the runway surface the visor was a heat shield basically made by triplex triplex glass very tough glass specially made for concord um that was there to streamline the shape of the airplane with the nose down the heat shield the visor was retracted into the nose cone when you brought the nose fully up the final stage was then bring the visor up over the windshield i said you've got a lovely smooth aerodynamic um profile and there you are you can see what it looks like with the nose visor up and that's the way you flew all the way across the atlantic in that situation and then when you came to land of new york you would lower the nose down and down to 12 and a half degrees for the landing we also had another position five degrees down which is the position we used for takeoff and for taxing around in the airport area that makes sense and uh before with patrick i think we're just gonna uh dispel and or confirm a few myths about concord before finishing the podcast but i have one last question so basically uh concord was developed in the 1960s and they lived through the 70s the 80s and the 90s actually and then of course in 2000 there was the the famous concord accident in paris charles ago um what i was wondering is that at that time did you know that that the concorde was would be removed from uh air traffic uh because maybe of the fuel consumption of the fact that the price of the tickets was so high or other factors maybe and do you think that if there wouldn't have been that paris accident do you think the concorde will still be around nowadays um well if it hadn't been for that accident i'm absolutely convinced the concord would have gone on flying for a few years longer yeah people saying no it wouldn't have done because of the cost but what you have to appreciate is that the people who used it the cost was completely irrelevant okay so john i have some uh myth that i've read about concord and i want to ask you actually if those are true or if those are false the first one that i read a lot is that people say that when they were flying concorde as passengers or maybe as flight crew from the cruising altitude of 58 or 60 000 feet you could actually see the curvature of the earth is that actually true or is that a myth no it's true you can certainly see it um what rather mucked that up however was mounts and helens um erupting when was that i can't remember the early 80s something like that and it threw out it threw a huge amount of volcanic dust up into the upper atmosphere and for several years after that for several years after that this sort of cloud of dust was still floating around in the upper levels and that did definitely obscure the the division of the curvature of the earth but on on a truly clear day you could absolutely see the curvature for sure yeah and um and the next one that i read a lot is that uh and actually i think british airways used that as a slogan to promote the concord operation and i think they said uh with concord you can arrive before you leave on westbound flights is that true and how does that make sense well you were you you would literally you'd take off from london at 10 30 in the morning which would be 5 30 in the morning new york time so that's five hours time difference the flight would take three and a quarter hours let's say so you'd arrive uh an hour and three quarters before you left roughly speaking so you'd arrive at new york at about nine o'clock in the morning when you're taking off from london at 10 30 in the morning and the the really interesting one was the speed bird three where i would at certain times of the year and i'm talking about the spring and the fall um you know drive up to heathrow see the sunset take off from heathrow the pitch dark and get two-thirds of the way across the atlantic flogging along at mac 2 and you'd see the sun rising in the west as you overhauled it and you'd then land at kennedy airport in the very late afternoon see your second sunset of the day in new york and that told people rather more vividly than simply resetting their watches how fast they traveled that's amazing isn't it i it was unbelievable unbelievable the whole thing and you were talking earlier on about how this was a product of the 1960s i cannot let this chat pass without mentioning those absolutely outstanding brilliant and engineers in the late 1950s and the mid-1960s both in france and in britain who had the brain power to create this extraordinary piece of technology that did exactly what it was supposed to do i mean it was it was a an achievement that ranks in my view at the same level as the apollo luna landing program i mean to produce an airplane where you're flying on the edge of space flying faster than a rifle bullet and yet the experience is made to feel completely ordinary for the passengers that is one hell of an achievement extraordinary achievement uh i read a lot about of course the fact that concord was an extremely glamorous experience but actually you spoke a little bit about it earlier when you say that there's no question that a boeing 747 first class was actually more comfortable from a passenger's point of view and that actually the big um benefit of concord was also the speed right and the fact of traveling fast so is it true that actually the cabin of the concorde was pretty small and the windows were small it was pretty intricate in terms of personal space on board yes it was it was quite a crowded airplane and if mentioned earlier that we frequently had 100 passengers on board and you know that you are fairly densely crowded in having said that each of those seats was a nice comfortable armchair you had plenty of leg room the passenger sitting on the window seat didn't have as much headroom because of the sort of shape of the fuselage overhead um the guy or lady sitting in the aisle seat would have much more headroom um having said that i mean we've accommodated all ships and sizes from members of the harlem globetrotters to luciano pavarotti in my own personal experience two opposite ends of the bodily spectrum pavarotti actually required two seats blessing because he was huge he was a very large man um the atmosphere in the airplane was completely unlike the subsonic experience i think a lot of our regular passengers they almost felt that they were paid up members of a rather exclusive club and they they'd all meet up in the concord departure lounge to enjoy sort of a few drinks before boarding and some lovely canopies and things smoked salmon and so on [Music] and they'd all know each other you know oh hello sansa lovely to see you how have you been and that sort of gregarious chummy atmosphere went on to carried on during the flight people would be chatting away to each other you didn't have people sitting there with their headphones on another planet they were there enjoying meeting all their own mates and and having a generally good time flying across new york it was that sort of extraordinary atmosphere completely totally different from the normal experience of flying the last thing i want to ask you to kind of conclude this podcast and then i will let patrick finish and wrap up the podcast but it's been a tradition in all the podcasts that we have done uh since we started last year um you know that aviation has been going through a very difficult time during this past 12 months because of kovit and of course there are a lot of you know future pilots who are looking at okay should i start now what's going on in the aviation industry there are we have a lot of students in training right now that you know that are a bit disheartened by what's going on in the aviation industry so what advice or what what would you tell them those future pilots were not of their own will but arriving on the navigation market in such difficult circumstances all i can say is that i am utterly convinced that once this monstrous thing has been dealt with i can't wait to get back traveling um so once we've got this damn things sorted out um i think aviation will will bounce back very very quickly it's always an industry that has bounced back in the past and i see no reason why it shouldn't do in the future because i'm sure absolutely certain that the appetite for going to places like the seychelles or mauritius or singapore or i'm going to chicago hopefully um in july to oshkosh you know all this sort of thing this is part of the life i'm used to and i don't want to give it up i want to get back to it so i'm sure the great majority of people feel the same way i'm certain about it so i guess all you can say to these people who are looking at a shattered aviation industry at the moment is just hang on somehow find some job or another that keeps you going but don't lose sight of your goal and get back into it as soon as it all starts picking up again because it will pick up again i am quite quite certain thank you thank you john that's uh i think that's a great way to finish your podcast isn't it patrick it's been to me this has been like watching uh a wonderful movie and learning about uh learning about the concorde and about what i will still call the glory days of flying i can't tell you how much of a privilege it's been for me to speak to you and your lovely wife thank you so much for being on the podcast it's a greatest pleasure patrick and i just think as a final slaughter oh i don't know i'm going to have to leave you with a couple of final thoughts sure go for it go for it one is that if anybody had said to me in 1955 when i was doing my flying training on the harvards that 22 years later i'd be flying passengers supersonic across the atlantic or down to bahrain i just said you're out of your brain but that's the reality of what happened in just 22 years and the other story that illustrates what an extraordinary industry aerospace has been i was doing a flight in 1978 from london to washington and british airways contacted me a few days before this flight and said there's a very elderly lady traveling with you on that flight an american lady she had been the very first passenger to buy a ticket on united airlines when they'd started up in the 1920s she'd always been an avid follower of the airline industry was passionately keen on airplanes and would i please look after her um during the flight and show her the flight deck i said of course i will so on the day we're flying down to washington the meal service is over and i asked the cabin crew to bring this lady up onto the flight deck and we all introduce ourselves to her and i said i said well okay i said well where did you actually first see an airplane she said i asked her and she said oh she said i first saw an airplane when one of the wright brothers landed at savannah georgia in 1908. i said oh gosh i said well in that when did you first fly i first flew with louis bleria in 1911 and my jaw must have collapsed onto the cockpit floor here i was talking to somebody who in her lifetime had gone from meeting the wright brothers and louis valeria and flying with louis area at 23 miles an hour to flying with me in a concorde in 1978 at 23 miles a minute and i just it blows my brain away that i have actually spoken to and shaken hands with somebody who's spoken to the wright brothers and to louis perrier isn't that just amazing so anybody whose hands i shake now i can pass that on thanks again john for being with us great final story takes us really full circle and um for everyone else i invite you to please go to airside and check out all the resources we have there for pilots articles um the jobs board the cv builder all things to get you back flying as soon as possible thanks again cae pilot podcast is brought to you by cae the global leader in training for the civil aviation defense and security and healthcare markets for more information check out cae.com

Channel: CAEvideogallery

Views: 11,927

Keywords: CAEpilotpodcast, CAE, CAEpilot, Pilotpodcast, podcast, concorde, concordepilot

Id: 0bpi5LFvoU0

Length: 63min 49sec (3829 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021