The race to Mach 2.0 at scale | Nickolas Means | #LeadDevAustin

[Music] thanks so much for that intro Mary it is such a privilege to be on this stage again I believe that has become sort of a second home for me as often as I speak here it is an incredible honor every time I get to come back now Mary asks how many of you have seen me speak before and I did a little bit of math to figure this out if you've seen me speak before there's about a 33% chance that you've seen me give a talk about airplanes it's no secret at this point that I really love aircraft and the world of aviation but today's a special day for me because today I get to tell you the story of my very favorite plane concorde but I don't get to start there because to really talk about Concord we have to start a couple of decades before it flew to understand what Concorde achieved we have to understand supersonic flight and any story about supersonic flight has to start here with the bell x-1 this plane piloted by Chuck Yeager and powered by four rocket motors was the first aircraft to fly faster than the speed of sound in level flight flying at a brisk Mach 1.06 about 600 miles an hour on October 14 1947 now breaking the sound barrier was a huge achievement until Yeager did it and came back home safely it was a widely held belief that doing so would be unsurvivable and this was for good reason because so many previous attempts to fly close to the speed of sound had indeed proven fatal pilots exceeding Mach 0.7 often encountered strange problems with their plans the controls of the Mitsubishi zero would freeze because of the aerodynamic loads on the wings you literally could not pull the plane out of a dive if you got close to the speed of sound the controls of the Supermarine Spitfire would reverse unpredictably somewhere between Mach point 7 and Mach point 9 because of the way that the wings flexed when I got close to the speed of sound the pilot would literally pull back to go up and the plane would dive faster and the de havilland eh 108 to swallow this plane was flown in progressively faster dives in a program attempting to fly faster than the speed of sound they were doing it on purpose and it experienced severe buffeting right at mach 0.9 causing it to break apart there's a reason that flying close to the speed of sound came to be called the sound barrier so what exactly happens to a plane when it gets close to the speed of sound to understand that we need to talk a little bit about how a wing works in the first place here's what the wing of a plane looks like when it's flying subsonically the wing is propelled by the engine through the air and the air flows cleanly and smoothly around it the forces acting on the wing are very predictable and one of the forces we particularly care about is lift Bernoulli's principle says that in any fluid including air an increase in speed results in a decrease in pressure airplane wings are designed to take advantage of us the curve of the top of an airplane wing is more dramatic than the curve of the bottom this results in a slight increase in distance and this means the air has to move faster over the top of the wing than the bottom and Bernoulli's principle tells us that this faster air will have lower pressure than the slower air under the wing and now essentially give that lower pressure gives the wing lift causing the wing to move towards the lower pressure area on the top and away from the high pressure on the bottom this is what allows a plane to fly that'll changes as the plane approaches the speed of sound the wing gets as the wing gets faster it starts to move too fast for the air in front of it to actually get out of the way so the air stops flowing smoothly around the wing and instead starts to compress and then once the air is past the leading edge of the wing it rapidly decompresses causing a shock wave that disrupts the flow of the air over the wing the air compression at the leading edge causes severe aerodynamic drag huge aerodynamic loads and the shock wave disrupts the wings ability to efficiently generate lift this is why it seemed like there was a barrier at Mach 1 because any time a plane approached it it's wings became very inefficient the x1 was able to break Mach 1.0 because it was basic a flying bullet the fuselage was actually modeled after a 50 caliber machine gun bullet because that was one of the only shapes we knew that was stable at supersonic speeds the wings were also incredibly thin which you can see little bit better in this picture these small thin wings minimized the wing surface area that was impacting the air as the planes rocket motor pushed it along minimizing the shockwave and allowing the wings to continue generating lift and providing control above Mach 1 they provided lift but not much the ex ones useful load was basically fuel plus one pilot and that was it once the sound barrier was broken though research quickly intensified one of the next big steps was this plan the ferry Delta to first flying in 1954 and becoming the first plane to exceed a thousand miles per hour in level flight this plane introduces one crucial concept the delta wing the delta wing has a couple of significant benefits first on a traditional design the elevators the control surfaces that control the pitch up and down of the plane around the tail plane but because the wing on the Delta design is so elongated it doesn't actually need a tail plane at all instead it uses elevon at the back of the wing which are combined elevators and ailerons and these control surfaces control both the pitch of the plane and the roll of the plan it's one less thing to get in the way of the oncoming air second the Delta design has a huge advantage of how much surface area it presents to the air that is moving through both designs have about the same surface area on the top of the bottom but because the wings are so deeply swept and there's no tail plane the Delta design has a much smaller surface area facing forward for compression to build up against because of that it has much lower drag at supersonic speeds the Delta design does have one huge disadvantage though in order to produce lift at low speed it has to take off and fly at a very high angle of attack that basically means that instead of flying straight forward through the air like you would normally expect a plane to do it has to crawl its way through the air at a sharp angle that requires a lot of engine power to keep it from stalling and that engine power requires a lot of fuel it was incredibly inefficient but the ferry Delta proved the superiority of the DeltaWing for flying fast it just was inefficient at low speed and that meant that an airliner sized delta wing would have to carry so much fuel but it wouldn't have enough useful load left to carry passengers so step in the right direction but not enough that next step though followed very quickly early in 1955 doctors dietrich couch amana yana weber working together at the Royal aircraft establishment the UK's primary Aeronautics research lab published a series of paper detailing a concept they called the slender delta wing now it was already known that any delta wing flying at low speed and a reasonably high angle attack would generate a vortex over the wing running along each side of the fuselage now normally you want to reduce vortices and other kinds of turn you on air flow over a wing because they they cause drag and they reduce the efficiency of the wing but in this case coochie-man in favour theorized that these vortices might be doing an important job speeding up the airflow over the top of the wing and according to Bernoulli's principle faster airs lower pressure air and so these vortices are actually generating lift but Kucha want a vapor went a step further their studies indicated that the more swept wing was meaning the smaller the angle between the fuselage and the leading edge of the wing the more pronounced the Sport X effect was and the longer the wing the more surface area this vortex had to act on increasing the lift that the wing was able to generate this meant that a slender long delta should be able to generate significantly more lift at lower speeds than a standard Delta importantly sir Mauryan Morgan one of the design leaders at the Royal aircraft establishment happened to be in one of the meetings for kutiman presented their findings and he knew almost immediately that this was the missing piece to a puzzle he'd been trying to solve about how to build a supersonic passenger plan on the back of these findings the UK Ministry of supply asked Morgan to form a committee the supersonic transport aircraft committee our stack to design a supersonic transport or SST and rally the British aircraft industry to get it built well the first thing they did was build a plane to test the lift at low speed theory the plane they built the Handley page HP 115 is nothing more than have sped for the slender Delta concept it literally is designed around no other concept and they only built one of these but it worked you can see the plane flying at the necessary high angle is hack here and you can see the smoke swirling as it comes off the back of that wing it shows the vortex in action given the extra lift generated by the vortices this plane was safely controllable as slow as 70 miles an hour a 300 percent improvement over previous delta wing designs well that was enough for stack they green-lighted government funding to both Hawker Siddeley and Bristol aircraft two prominent UK design firms to design a slender Delta supersonic transport Lee but the Brits weren't the only ones working on a supersonic transport across the English Channel the French had just launched their first successful supersonic plane that assault super mist la fighter bomber the French knew the British had begun a supersonic transport project and we're eager to not get left behind so they began pursuing an SST in earnest the French government awarded grants to three manufacturers Nord aviation sued aviation and Dassault to begin work on SST concepts toward the design competition across the Atlantic late in 1956 the Americans had just flown the Mach 2 capable convair b-58 the first supersonic bomber now it wasn't a great design it was very difficult to control and I had a very narrow flight envelope if you got it too slow you'd lose control of it every time but it could carry a significant load and it could do it close to twice the speed of sound well that was enough for Life magazine to write an article imagining our glamorous supersonic future stoking American public imagination and as if that weren't enough the Soviets had just launched Sputnik 1 a short while later proving them well ahead of the Americans in the space race that gave additional fodder for the folks in Congress and at the FA who were advocating for American began work on an SST but President Dwight Eisenhower was firmly against the idea Boeing ended up starting a small research program around an SST but there was no government funding forthcoming for an SST in America and speaking of the USSR there focused on the space race wouldn't prevent them from getting in on supersonic flight as well they already had a couple of supersonic fighters in the famous MIG series and in 1958 they debuted this planner the yeah Kalev yak 28 it's not a big plane but it is a supersonic bomber where the MiG's were basically a cockpit strapped to an engine this plane had significant load carrying ability the Soviets also knew through their extensive espionage Network that the UK had begun work on a supersonic transport and they weren't about to get left behind so they set to work the French would be the first to tip their hand announcing this plane at the 1961 Paris Air Show then and now the center of the commercial aviation industry suit aviation super Caravelle design had won the competition among French manufacturers it was intended to fly 75 passengers at Mach 1.2 on mid-range routes within Europe the French announcement at the Paris Air Show kicked off a few key developments in the supersonic transport race first not to be outdone by the French the Soviet government announced their FST project as well the tupolev tu-144 early in 1962 in a soviet propaganda magazine this publicly confirmed that to the UK the US and France Soviets were indeed working on a supersonic transport second in addition to Boeing small research program NASA had began funding SST research and development the u.s. via the scat prototypes in the name of general aeronautical research they were kind of doing this under the radar without official government blessing but the French announcement followed by the Soviet one along with John F Kennedy succeeding Eisenhower in the as the president the United States changed the US government position on supersonic transport almost overnight and the u.s. handed research contracts to four major US manufacturers to begin developing the scat prototypes in the planes preliminary prototypes were design were due in 1964 and finally the French announcement presented a solution to a problem that the British were eager to solve Bristol aircraft had won the UK SST design competition with this design the Bristol type 223 it was two-seat 90 people in fly mach 2.2 the problem was the bow act the British overseas Airways corporation the predecessor to what we know as British Airways said that well it would be delighted to buy and operate SSTs if they made economic sense they would not be willing to buy to bear one bit of the cost of development that meant that if the British government wanted an SST it would need to fund the project itself and given the estimated cost of development and the unknowns involved the British government needed a partner to bear the risk well the super Caravelle design that the French had just announced was so similar to the Bristol two-to-three that they made perfect sense together what's more the French government had already realized that they were in the same dilemma as the British they had a great design but they couldn't afford to take the risk to develop it and so the transport ministers of the British and French governments instructed Bristol now called BAC after a merger and sued aviation to get together and work out a combined design a short time later in November 29 1962 Julian Emery the UK Transport Minister and Joffrey de corps sell the French ambassador to the UK signed a very short seven article treaty outlining the ways the governments were to cooperate on delivering a supersonic transport there were a few notable clauses to this treaty around sharing the cost labor risk and profit from this project but the most notable clause was one that was not part of the treaty there was no out clause unless the countries decided together to end the program it would continue by law there was no way either country could unilaterally exit the agreement and that would actually save Concord several times during its development the treaty would also give the nascent plane its name Concorde meaning agreement harmony or Union in both French and English well a short time later on June 5th 1963 President Kennedy and a commencement address at the US Air Force Academy publicly announced that the United States would build a supersonic transport the angle of French treaty had largely forced his hand he had to make this announcement or America would look like it was falling behind the thing he didn't publicly acknowledge was that the US was still in design stage far behind the angle of French and Soviet projects the next year 1964 Boeing and Lockheed were selected as finalists for the u.s. SST but because of how far behind the u.s. program was the government changed what they were aiming for in calling for final designs they asked for a capacity of at least 250 passengers and a cruise speed of Mach three twice time the speed a time of faster than Concord if the US was gonna get beaten to market by another SST we were darn sure gonna have a better SST in Europe the design for Concord was finalized in contract construction of two prototypes began in February of 1965 one at the suit Aviation Factory in Toulouse and the other at the BAC factory at Filton now having two factories of course added significant complexity of the project they had have two sets of manufacturing jigs to supply chains two sets of technical experts for every system on the plane and they spent a lot of time varying both people and parts back and forth across the English Channel but despite the bureaucracy of the two headquarters and the duplicate labor of two factories they were making fantastic project progress the next year in the u.s. Boeing's entry the 2707 was named the winner of the design competition this is an early full-scale mock-up of the design it would hold 247 passengers in a to 3-2 configuration and economy plus an additional 30 in first-class for a total of two hundred and seventy seven passengers and it was designed to fly Mach 2.7 if this had been built it would have been the largest passenger plane in history one of the key components to the design was a swing wing mechanism which you can see here the wing would swing forward for efficiency in low-speed flight and swing back into a delta configuration for officiants formative annoys dragon high speed flight Boeing expected to start on a prototype in early 1967 aiming for a first flight in 1970 they had no idea how far behind they were because later that year on December 11th 1967 the first concorde prototype was rolled out of the hangar at hsu deviations factory in toulouse france and a ceremony attended by the media and dignitaries from both countries the wings are obviously the biggest innovation of Concorde but let's talk about a few of the other things that make this design so special first if you know anything about the concorde besides the fact that it was really fast you probably know about it's funky droop nose you may not know why it was necessary though it all goes back to the shape of the wings despite the vortex optimization Concord still had to fly it a pretty significant angle of attack to generate lift while flying slow including when coming in for landing that meant that the pilots couldn't see the runway for the nose so they simply folded the nose and the streamline windscreen out of the way when they were coming in for landing there's a really simple solution to a really hard problem the double windscreen configuration had a significant benefit and then it also reduced the need for cooling in the cockpit by keeping some of the mach 2.0 kinetic heating from reaching it but the windscreen wasn't the only place that kinetic heating was a concern that affected the entire plane well what is kinetic heating as you compress air it gets warm if you've ever filled up car tires and noticed that the nozzle got noticeably hotter as you did it this is what you're feeling you're feeling the air heat up as it compresses and the compressed air also creates friction against the leading edges of the plane what this means is that when Concorde is going Mach 2 the nose of the plane is about 240 degrees Fahrenheit above the boiling temperature of water and the rest of the plane's not much cooler than that so the Concorde designers did a few very specific things to help it cope with the seat first they very deliberately chose Mach 2 for Conchords target cruise speed as they were designing a plane and the reason for that is that if Concorde went any faster than Mach 2.2 they couldn't build it out of aluminum aluminum is fantastic for building planes because it's strong and light but it begins to lose its structural integrity at about 266 degrees Fahrenheit and so if you build a plane out of aluminum and you take it mach 2.2 it's literally going to start to melt as you're flying through the air going any faster than Mach 2.2 meant that they'd have to work with an exotic metal like titanium and nobody had any experience building planes out of titanium at this point it would have significantly extended the timeline of the project so this was a very pragmatic choice but even at mach 2.0 Concorde would still generate a lot of heat they still needed to keep their passengers comfortable and things like hydraulic fluid and oil from overheating they came up with a very clever answer for that they used their fuel as a heat sink just before they burned it there were heat exchangers in the main engine feed tanks and they took the heat from the air-conditioning packs from the hydraulic system from the engine oil and they dumped it into the fuel heating the fuel up just before it was burned and sending all of that excess heat out the exhaust he kept the passengers nice and cool and it kept the plane working beautifully there's actually another problem they solved with fuel as well trimming the plane one of the effects of flying supersonically is that because of the changes and forces exerted on the wings when pressurized air and when by pressurized air and shockwaves when you're going Mach 2 the wings center of lift moves further back as the plane speeds up this pushes the back of the plane up in the nose of the plane down now conventional wisdom would say to use the elephants to account for this applying a slight nose-up force but if you use the elephant's for the entire time the plane was flying supersonically you would add a lot of drag and waste a lot of fuel so instead Concorde is trimmed by moving fuel around as the plane speeds up fuel is gradually pumped from these tanks in the front of the plane to this tank and the very tail of the plane and that added ballast counteracts the shift in the links enters lift by moving the plane's center of gravity we are rearward as well helping it to fly without any drag penalty it's a very clever solution but Conchords biggest innovation was its ability to super cruise most supersonic aircraft had been built to this point could only fly supersonically for a few minutes and the reason for that is that they had used afterburners to achieve supersonic speeds afterburners what many of us think of when we think of jet engine orange flame coming out of a jet nozzle like this but most jet engines don't actually work this way you've never been on a plane that had an afterburner unless you're in the military what an afterburner actually is is fuel injected into a jet engines exhaust stream and lint this happens past the engine itself the combustion adds significant heat to the exhaust gases and because gases expand as they're heated this forces the exhaust out of the jet nozzles faster adding significant propulsion the only problem is that it's horribly inefficient it's basically pouring fuel out the back of the plane and this is why most planes that rely on afterburner for supersonic speed can only fly supersonic for a few minutes time they would run out of fuel otherwise and Concorde had afterburners as well but it only needed them for a couple of specific phases of flight they were used for takeoff to give the inefficient at low speeds DeltaWing the extra oomph needed to get off the ground and they were used again to pass through the sound barrier giving the plane the extra boost it needed to overcome the initial resistance at Mach one point out but once the plane was above Mach 1 pi 1.5 or so the engine intake Gramps did almost all of the work the doors you see at the front of the intakes were dangerous written in red swing down slightly to reduce the size of the opening and this does a couple of things number one it puts the supersonic shockwave exactly where it needs to be to optimize engine efficiency it slows the air down as it goes into the compressor so they can do their job number two it creates significant compression jet engines work on compression taking a huge scoop of air in the front compressing it down and sending it out in a narrow stream out the back much faster than it came in pushing the plane along if you've ever put your finger over the end of a water hose to spray water it's the exact same concept these ramps generate significant compression when the plane is flying supersonically reducing the work that the engine itself needs to do and reducing the amount of fuel that it uses in fact a conqueror was actually at its most efficient when flying mop 2.0 traveling further per gallon of fuel than any other phase of flight and super cruise was what gave Concorde its tremendous ability to cross the Atlantic it could cross the Atlantic from London to New York in three and a half hours three hours and fifteen minutes of a night of tail and that's about twice as fast as a conventional jetliner it's about seven hours on a conventional plan but at this point all this innovation was still just theoretical Concorde still hadn't flown the rollout ceremony celebrated completion of the first prototype but there was still a year of ground testing to do before conquer its first flight planned early in 1969 now you may have noticed that we haven't been talking very much about the Soviet effort the reason for that is that the Soviet Iron Curtain was very effective at keeping things secret until they were ready to reveal them so it was a big shock to the rest of the world when on December 31st 1968 news footage emerge from the Soviet you know the first flight of the tupolev tu-144 much to the world surprise they had the Concord off the ground Concord was the one that was in the news all the time so this was a huge surprise awkward wasn't far behind though taking to the skies for the first time a few months later on March 2nd 1969 be a short flight about 30 minutes 10,000 feet 300 miles per hour nothing fancy captain Andre turcotte never even raised the landing gear just to keep things simple the plane she flew beautifully with turcotte saying afterwards that it was even easier to fly than he expected much better than the simulator around this time though that things were not going so well in America in 1968 the American team had finally come to the realization that the 2707 was an unworkable design the weight of the hinge mechanism for the swing wing proved to be an unsurmountable obstacle one Boeing engineer quipped that if they wanted across the Atlantic they need to decide between the hinge or the passengers they couldn't take both and so that's exactly what they did they pivoted to a new design with a fixed double delta wing looked a lot like an overgrown Concorde actually still just as many passengers still almost as fast this point though they were even further behind their competitors have both already flown and they were going back to the drawing board the tupolev tu-144 would go supersonic for the first time on June 5th 1969 again beating Concorde to a major milestone Concorde would quickly follow though going supersonic itself on the 1st of October 1969 the two competitors going supersonic before they had even gotten a prototype together was enough to end the American program 1971 brought about the end of the road for the u.s. SST Congress threw in the towel and eliminated government funding for the project Boeing at this point had already spent more than the concorde program would spend in its entire existence and all they had to show for it was this full-size wooden mock-up that's it five years later Concorde had completed all of its required tests and trials and had received its certificate of airworthiness from European regulators it could enter service beating the tupolev tu-144 to the milestone that mattered the most and so Concorde was handed over to the first Concorde was handed over to British Airways on January in 1976 a week later in takeoffs coordinated to the second from London and Paris Concord entered commercial service the British Airways flight flew from London to Bahrain and the Air France flight through from Paris to Reda Rio de Janeiro why those destinations because in a move largely considered protectionist 'ok the US congress had banned concorde from entering US airspace for six months six months later though on May 24th 1976 Congress allowed the band to expire and British Airways and Air France celebrated with coordinated landings about 10 minutes apart at Washington Dulles Airport staging this publicity photo shortly after again though why not New York well because after the Congressional ban expired the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey banned the plane largely based on noise concerns it wasn't until October 22nd 1977 17 months later that the US Supreme Court declared that the Port Authority had overstepped its authority and Concorde was finally able to land at JFK initiating its iconic London in Paris to New York route the tupolev tu-144 would finally enter passenger service on November 1st 1977 nearly two years after Concorde but by all accounts it was not a very comfortable experience cabin noise was measured at 95 decibels about as loud as a lawnmower when you're the one pushing it passengers seated next to each other could only talk to each other by yelling and if you were a seat away from somebody forget about it you weren't gonna talk to him it also had an incredibly high failure rate Aeroflot didn't trust the plane at all and it was really only conducting passenger flights because the Soviet government said it had to so on days when there were scheduled to you 144 flights you would often see four or five of these planes at the stand at the airport in hopes that one of them could actually make the trip the tupolev tu-144 would make only 55 passenger flights in total before it was withdrawn from service so what was it that made concorde successful why did the anglo-french consortium succeed in delivering a plane where they Americans and Soviets didn't or at least that's what I thought this talk was gonna be about when I proposed it but the answer that question is actually pretty simple compared to the American effort the Concord team made much more pragmatic choices Boeing design was much more complicated and it need to be both out of significantly more complicated materials because of the higher speed that it went it this overreach was its downfall and because of that the project was cancelled the applications of software are pretty obvious the Soviet comparison is a little more interesting in that the thing that did the tu-144 end was partial understanding you've probably already noticed the similarity of this design to Concorde and this is for good reason significant portions of the tu-144 design were indeed derived from concord by way of the KGB but they didn't apply all of the concepts quite right the wing shape was similar but the tupolev was missing some of the 3d sculpting that makes Conchords wings so effective at producing vortex meaning the tu-144 needed to be moving faster to takeoff and came in for landing faster as well burning more fuel in the process they also borrowed a lot of components from the propulsion system but didn't manage to get the tu-144 to supercruise and that meant that it didn't have the range to cross an ocean it could fly supersonic Li but not all that far and so lesson here is to be careful of what your team adopts from others if you don't deeply understand the things that you're adopting you're likely not going to get the effect that you want out of the things that you adopt so don't cargo cult and those are both important lessons but as I got deeper into writing this talk I realized that those lessons were pretty surface and there was a much more interesting question for us to ask was Concorde actually successful let's look at some numbers the estimated development cost for Concorde was 70 million pounds about 160 868 million dollars at historic exchange rates the actual development cost for Concorde came in at one point one three four billion pounds a sixteen hundred percent cost overrun give you some context that's about 20 billion dollars in current current money and that cost was paid by the British and French governments let's talk about sales at its peak Concord had more than a hundred outstanding options and options are essentially reservations for a delivery slot that an airline would make for a new plane British overseas Air France and Pan Am we're going to be its launch customers taking six planes apiece in the end though only fourteen Conchords were actually ever sold seven each to British Airways and Air France there are a couple of reasons for that one was fuel economy Concorde could fly 17 ply passenger 70 miles on a gallon of fuel well compare that to a Boeing 707 at 33 passenger miles per gallon Conchords about half as efficient but that was an acceptable trade-off given how much faster could cross the Atlantic and the Boeing 707 was Conchords a design target that was the plane I was designed to compete with and that was all well and good until the new Boeing 747-400 came along with its new turbofan engines the Boeing 747 could crank out 73 passenger miles per gallon Conchords engines were actually so inefficient that it would burn two tons of fuel about two percent of its full load just taxing down the runway before it ever even took off another problem with Concorde was sonic booms remember the shock wave that's produced by the compression and then decompression of the air in front of the plane that shockwave goes all the way to the ground and creates a sonic boom the same way lightning creates thunder only much more concentrated and it's not just one boom when the plane crosses the sound barrier it's continuous under the flight path so the supersonic plane flies over you you're going to hear a sonic boom in the spring of 1964 the FAA conducted an experiment over Oklahoma City Oklahoma appropriately enough called Project Longo they subjected the citizens of Oklahoma City to sonic booms eight per day starting at 7:00 in the morning to see how people would react this test would last for six months 1253 sonic booms and all over the first fourteen weeks of testing alone a hundred and forty seven windows were broken at Oklahoma City's two tallest buildings and the FAA would receive nearly 10,000 complaints and so the obvious conclusion was that scheduled supersonic flight over land was a complete non-starter in fact it was made illegal in the United States in 1973 largely as a result of these tests Concord would be restricted to overwater routes and Conchords range meant that London and Paris to New York was really the only natural fit only British Airways and Air France followed through on their commitments to buy Concorde so was Concorde successful massive cost overruns terrible fuel economy almost non-existent sales seems like a clear no right but if Concorde was such a failure why do we have pictures like this that's a British Airways Concorde flying in formation with the Royal Air Force red arrows the UK's version of the Blue Angels at the Royal International Air Tattoo in 1985 for this a 1986 photo of an Air France Concorde leading the Petrolia to France the French Air Force demonstration team at LeFort LA airshow or this 2002 photo that I just love of a British Airways Concorde leading the red arrows past Westminster Abbey as part of the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebration a year before the Concorde fleet retired this is late into its lifespan but this one this one's from this year's edition of the Royal International Air Tattoo of the red arrows and the Petrolia to France flying together in Concorde formation sixteen years after Conchords last commercial flight the list goes on if concorde was such a failure why are the UK and France so proud of it well it turns out this question of was Concorde successful is a very nuanced question it always is I got real in a hurry didn't it you probably had a pretty visceral reaction to that question when it popped on screen so let's go back to something a little bit more comfortable let's go back to our first question because it turns out the way that we answered this question is the same way we should answer that other one Jonathan referenced this book earlier I'm gonna bring it up as well Daniel Kahneman wrote a fantastic book about understanding how our brains work called Thinking Fast and Slow it's well worth your time to read if you haven't but there's a couple of concepts that he introduces that'll be especially helpful for us here one is the law of least effort the law says that when we use our brains we tend to use the minimum amount of energy possible for each task in other words our brains are lazy and they're constantly looking for shortcuts one of the shortcuts our brains use all the time also discussed in the book is the availability heuristic this is a cognitive bias that causes us to rely on an over value the information that's easiest for us to recall and a big chunk of what's easiest for us to recall is the stuff we've heard the most recently these two effects together or why after I spent 30 minutes telling you how amazing Concorde was and all the innovation that it represented it only took me six slides to get your brain flip to declaring it a failure turns out we do this all the time so what happens when we slow down we pull our brains out of shortcut mode and we think about Concorde first we might consider the perspective of the folks at aérospatiale and BAC who designed and built concorde they were given the task of building a plane that could carry a hundred passengers across the Atlantic faster than the speed of sound and they came up with a machine that was purpose-built to do exactly that a plane that was beautiful not because they wanted it to be but because it had to be to fly that far that fast a plane that was so innovative that it felt plucked from the future even when it was 25 years old and being forced into an early retirement the designers and builders of Concorde must have considered it very successful indeed but what about the British and French governments that fitted the 1.1 billion pound development cost it had to a stung the plane didn't sell any better there did right well let's consider what the governments of Britain and France were actually it wasn't profit certainly they were hoping to see that money pay back they didn't want to just flush it down the drain but they weren't trying to make money what they were actually paying for was this a point of national pride multiple commentators have referred to Concord is Europe's moon landing its biggest technological triumph it was also a demonstration of aviation capability British and French entrants into the commercial aviation market market hadn't sold widely for a variety of reasons and the American Boeing 707 was dominating the skies across the world the governments of the two countries saw a supersonic transport is their path back to relevancy in the commercial aviation market and it took a while maybe a little longer than they expected but they got what they paid for Airbus is a direct descendant of the anglo-french consortium that built concorde this plane in particularly the Airbus a320 is the second most widely produced commercial aircraft in history behind only the Boeing 737 it's actually been the best-selling plane in the world the last two decades so back to our question was Concorde successful if we focus on the 60s and 70s the years the Concorde was being produced and we look at the short term facts we can make a strong case that it wasn't that it was way behind schedule but it was losing a ton of money if they had okay ours back then you can bet that most of them would have been red but when we look at Congress full impact the prestige it brought to the UK and France the foundational role it served in the European commercial aviation industry the sheer amount of economic activity that descended from this plane it's hard to see it as anything but an incredible success so we've sort of the first one but what about the rest of these questions the same rules apply though we don't often have the luxury of looking back on 40 years of history the way we can with Concorde we usually do have more information than we take advantage of we often ask questions like these in the heat of the moment sometimes in the middle of a crisis and because of the short cuts our brains take we answer them through the myopic lens right now that's what makes am i successful such a scary question why we have such a visceral reaction to it but it's a question we unconsciously answer all the time right without even being asked this project is so hard it's way beyond my ability I am such a failure this incident is all my fault I can't believe I did that I'm such a terrible engineer I'm so far behind I'm letting everyone down or such a horrible manager I have said every one of those things to myself at some point in my career some of them pretty recently and I bet you have as well but when we do that we take a short-term evaluation that's likely not even true or fair and we extrapolate it to the entirety of our being we tear ourselves down because our brains are lazy by nature so here's my challenge to you zoom out think about the impact that you want to have in life the things you actually care deeply about rather you respond to that email today or deliver that project this quarter may be important but it's likely not enduring some of the relationships you build along the way will be your brain will stay in shortcut mode if you let it just going with the flow of events around you so you have to choose to live intentionally to remember that there's far more to life than what you're feeling right this moment because this is lead developer many of us in this room have the added privilege of helping the folks on our teams to do this as well helping them realize that today's failure is not a forever failure helping them understand the long term successes they don't even realize they're having helping them make plans for even bigger things in the future so in your brain or some jerk speaker stop showing your tracks with this question take a breath refuse to accept your immediate answer looks like guarantee you if you just zoom out the answer to this question will be just as undeniable for you as it is for Concord thanks [Applause] [Music]

Channel: LeadDev

Views: 292,199

Rating: 4.8838897 out of 5

Keywords: White October Events, engineering leadership, tech conference, developer conference, technical leader, lead developer, tech lead

Id: 2sIzfGzf_50

Length: 41min 43sec (2503 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 15 2019