The End of the Concorde

true masked wabbit

I watched a very interesting documentary last night about the famous France and British Concorde on the Discovery Channel (ca.). The End of the Concorde. While watching the beauty, the thrill, the breaking of the sound barrier I knew I wanted to share this with you. Watching what caused the end of this majestic aviation wonder, the tragedy, I knew I had to share it with you.

At the first opportunity this morning I sat down with a pot of coffee and went to search and research what I could find about the famed Concorde.

The invention of Concorde ranks right up there alongside the Wright Flyer and Apollo 11. It was a huge step forward in aviation. At Mach2 it was quite literally ‘faster than a speeding bullet’. It could carry 100 passengers in style. Transatlantic passengers have routinely flown supersonically when they climbed on board one of British Airways or Air France’s Concorde’s. Its passengers were 80 percent business passengers and included film stars, royalty, rock icons and sports legends. Flying at more than twice the speed of sound they could travel form London or Paris to New York in little more than 3 hours.

Every pilot who has flown it thinks it was great - from the cockpit 11 miles above the ground, that’s 55-60,000 feet high, they could see the curvature of the Earth’s surface. Apart from spy planes no one flew higher.

By sheer luck I found two important video clips on YouTube, I had been searching for, one of where after having been denied passage over U.S.A. air/land travel, because of the sonic boom, after lengthy conferences and a captain’s ingenuity of how to take off and lift this gigantic bird without causing any interferences in the sound detectors measuring the Concorde’s safety sound, the USA granted air space to the Concorde. The video will show how the captain leaned the plane at take off in such a manner to not only avoid the sonic boom but make the lift into the skies even quieter than the USA’s new Boeing 747. I found myself smiling and my adrenalin climbing with the Concorde.

Concorde Take-off

I also found the video in its entirety of the final seconds from take off to crash of what caused the end of the Concorde. Ironically not from Discovery Channel but from National Geographic. With detailed explanations of what caused the crash and why the captain could not abort take off.

Seconds From Disaster - S01E01 - Crash of the Concorde

Excerpt from Discovery Cannel; “It took only 91 seconds to ground nearly three decades of leading-edge aviation engineering. On July 25, 2000, as an Air France Concorde carrying 109 passengers and crew begins its runway take off at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, something goes terribly wrong. Unaware of the flames engulfing the delta wing until alerted by the control tower, the pilot faces a no-win situation: Taxiing at 320kph and without the three-kilometre stretch of runway needed to stop safely, Flight 4590 is going too fast to abort take off. He has no choice but to try and get airborne.” End of excerpt.