the concorde?

Question

i know that the concorde was thee best pl;ane of all times, queen of thesk. I have a couple of questions thoyugh, Why didn't the Concorde have winglets and still achieve so many NM. the strips yousee under the cockpit and on the vertical stabilizer, are those canards?? and why don't they have tailplanes?? And if the Copncorde had the complex curved wing design, why did it need the canards??

Answer 1

Concorde did not have canards - canards are "smaller" independently moving control surfaces that are ahead of the main wing, (i.e. as on the Typhoon). A aircraft with a "delta-canard" configuration tends to be highly unstable in flight, with reliance on Flight Control Computers to make continual adjustments to keep the thing on a straight and level heading.

Winglets tend to be installed on wings for economic reasons - but anyone should know that Concorde wasnt designed for economic reasons! Besides, winglets are not suitable for supersonic wings, and would most likely be torn off at that sort of speed due to the aerodynamic and structural interactions.

Answer 2

The concorde never had winglets because the airlines just werent outgoing enough to go out and upgrade the concordes. the winglets decrease fuel usage by about 6% or several million dollars a year.
Another upgrade that would have been worth it would have been to uprade the engines to modern turbofans.
A modern turbofan has a specific fuel usage of 1/4th that of the concorde. that means it would have 4 times the range at 1/4 the usage per hour. That would have saved almost $100,000 a trip.

I dont really consider the concorde the best plane of all time, even the best civilian plane.
The 747 is definately the best plane out there. It uses 1/16th the fuel as the concorde but carries 5 times as many people.
It has also been used to dump 200,000lbs of water on forest fires.
I have to say the best overall aircraft is the f-15. It has almost 200 kills for no loses. Some say its because its was only fighting mig-21's and other older aircraft, but even older planes like the mig-15 have killed f-4's and other much more modern jets in quite large numbers.

Answer 3

I remember when the Concorde was first being designed. I read all about it, and its Boeing competition, in my weekly reader when I was in grade school.

Boeing, since the project was not subsidized by a socialist government, dropped out of the SST race because they didn't believe they could make it profitable.

The Brits and the French forged ahead. The basic design was the best that could come from the 1960's technology. That accounts for the "canards" and wing design. Computer control for stabilization did not exist.

Unfortunately, the price of jet aviation fuel has grown faster than the need for a $6,000 ride, so it has been killed by its cost ineffectiveness.

Suffice to say, it worked very well and did long years of service.

If someone did it again, they'd probably borrow some ideas from the SR-71 and the B1-B, and stabilization would be provided by heavy-duty computers.

Now days, people are working on sub-orbital scram-jets as a replacement. I won't hold my breath. But yes, every time I've crossed the Atlantic I ended up joining a bunch of aching, thrombosis-ridden people who would mortgage their house to turn our jumbo-jets into a Concorde just to get back to Earth quickly.

Happy studies in aviation!

Answer 4

Why do people answer when they don't know.

In supersonic flight the center of pressure transfers aft, to compensate for this the aircraft needs to be balanced. Conventionally this is achieved by using up trim on the elevator. Concorde is much cleverer than that, Concorde has a rear trim tank, so she pumps a couple of tons of fuel down to the tail and thus moves the center of gravity back along the aircraft to match the center of pressure and thus trim out the aircraft without using the tail and thus adding drag and reducing efficiency. As she decelerates she pumps the fuel forward so that the aircraft is balanced again for subsonic flight.

The strips on the nose, known as Strakes, don't produce a huge amount of lift in themselves, what they do is modify the airflow over the wing roots slightly.

The ones on the tail house the tail actuators, the hydraulic rams that move the rudder.

The SR-71 handles the shifting center of pressure differently, they have a very broad fore-body so that the effect is less extreme and a small pitch change moves the center of pressure forward again.

Answer 5

Concorde looked great, I saw it most days coming into land at Heathrow but it was old technology. An aircraft's safety rating is based on the number of rotations or take-off/landings it does.

There are a great number of 737 and 747 planes taking off or landing at any one time all over the world and they have a high safety rating because there are very few accidents or incidents.

Unfortunately this cannot be said for Concorde, there were only 5 or 6 Concorde journeys each day and it regularly had minor incidents which resulted in a poor safety rating. It was very noisy and produced high pollution, it became very expensive to maintain and the Air France crash hastened its end

Answer 6

Winglets are not used for super sonic flight. They only increase effeciency at sub-sonic speeds.

Answer 7

Why don't you get you a book about the Concorde go to the library