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This is the story of Concorde 102. We had it.For about 26 years we had a passenger plane that shattered the sound barrier. No longer was the supersonic realm only for the military jets. The general flying public was now able to zoom past the sound barrier. Albeit the rich and famous flying public. The concorde was revolutionary, the plane was built in the 1970s but to this day it looks like something straight out of the future.
The last concorde ever built, the concorde with the tail number G-BOAF was chartered to fly 100 people around the world visiting cities like new york london, sydney christchurch honolulu oakland and the list goes on.On the 12th of august at about 1 pm local time the plane lifted off from christchurch for sydney. The climb was uneventful, the copilot was the one at the controls.
The plane departed Christchurch and then it climbed to about 28000 feet. It maintained 28000 feet till it entered the supersonic corridor that was about 100 NM west of christchurch. The Concorde had special supersonic corridors that it had to use to minimise the effects of the sonic boom. Once in these supersonic corridors the concorde was allowed to stretch its legs.
The plane in question entered the corridor at about .95 mach or about 600 knots. Once in the corridor the plane started its climb to its cruising altitude of about 57000 feet.
The concorde turned on her afterburners and she gained speed, they were aiming to hit mach 2 or 1200 knots. Can we take a moment to appreciate the insanity of that sentence? The concorde, a passenger plane, was capable of hitting 1200 knots that is just insane.
As they pushed through mach 1.7 the afterburners were turned off and a thud was heard. The thud felt like a surge or a bird strike. Their cockpit instrumentation showed nothing was out of the ordinary. The plane even felt normal to fly. Thinking that they just had the surge the captain elected to fly onto sydney. Returning to christchurch would mean that they had to drop out of supersonic speeds and turn back and stay subsonic till they reached christchurch. It was easier to get to Sydney and Sydney had better maintenance facilities.
So they pushed onto Sydney as they approached Sydney, they had to slow down and as they passed through 1.3 Mach and 40000 feet the whole plane began to vibrate. Something was indeed wrong with the plane. The vibration was a lot worse in the back of the plane. They turned off engine number 4 to see if it had any effect on the vibrations. it didn't. They idled all four engines to slow down and the plane slipped below mach 1. But this made no difference,
The vibrations continued as the plane passed throught 20000 feet.
As the plane approached sydney they were cleared in for an ILS approach onto runway 34 and at 2:34 pm the plane made a safe landing, on the ground the controllers in the tower saw what had happened, the plane was missing a significant chunk of its upper rudder. The rudder had disintegrated over the ocean.
But first let's talk a bit about the rudders, rudders help control the Yaw of the plane. Rudders usually are made with a honeycomb structure in the core and then it is layered with other
9 май 2020
