Why did they stop Concorde flying

Originally Posted by Squadrone Rosso

One crash in all those years. A magnificent triumph of man over technology That was a sad day

My in laws are seeing it in a few weeks at Manchester.

They get a Vulcan flying, why not Concord just for shows

Imagine four RR Pegasus Engines on full re-heat over Biggin Hill (for example)

Simon,

Being Pedantic they were actually Rolls Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 engines each developing 38,050lbs of static thrust with reheat. And gorgeous it was too.

It was kept from the press but following the retrofit with fuel tank liners, an Air France Concorde had a fuel emergency and had to divert enroute and landed with below minimum fuel reserves (crew had incorrectly read/calculated fuel burn - albeit focusing on the quality of the fois gras in NY......). This led to Air France senior management, already having twitchy "ring-pieces" following the CDG crash together with poor post accident load factors (it was never that popular from Paris) contacting Airbus Industrie in Toulouse to pull the plug on manufacturer support. BA were apparently livid at "le stitch-up".

I think its a disgrace that the beast is out in the open at Ringway rotting in the elements, although I understand they are planning to build an enclosure for it.

Yet again the one of the UK's great achievements (and let's give the French their due) is consigned to a museum. It surely would not have taken much to keep one flying for displays (without pax) to remind us of our outstanding technical achievement.

Rant over.

Tim

Originally Posted by 156Chris

I believe it was because the airframes had run out of flying hours (they're only allowed to fly for a certain number of hours) ... whereas wasn't the Vulcan decommissioned because they just didn't want it anymore ...


... we're getting to a similar point with Tornado GR4's, which is why when the whole Alexander Litvinenko was kicking off the Russians would fly just outside our airspace, we had to launch our GR4's thus reducing there life ... the Russians knew this ...

The air frames had heaps of life left in them. They had done very few cycles due to maintenance regime.

My brother and sister inlaw are both pilots. They told me that they were just too expensive to keep flying. The costs to keep them flying were crazy. They also had to have a spare one on standby for every flight due to problems with the systems on board.