Customer Reviews

Concorde: The Inside Story

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"Concorde" provides an engrossing and objective assessment of the famous program by Cpt Trubshaw, notwithstanding his close association with the entire project. In fact he was the Chief Test Pilot for the british side on the first joint-venture (Aerospatiale & British Aeronautical Corp.) in the european aviation history. His drive, energy and enthusiasm are widely recognized since he remained a key member of the Flight Test programme during development phase and even after the aircraft entered airline service.

His professionality and objectivity in the book are backed by his opinions about the flawed concepts that affected commercial success of the whole programme. Some of them are strictly technical, in fact an instance is given by the avionic layout: to stay in touch with the 50-50 responsability of design and production shares, the inertial navigation system was totally new and prone to fail during alignment phase(it was actively discouraged aircraft entry during the phase), while airlines wanted off-the-shelf equipment because they already had them in planes and spares. Another example is the moving map display debate that was engaged between french and british counterparts. Trubshaw points out the entire matter was nosense since most of flights were planned over oceans (avoiding sonic booms over populated territories) and the task of keeping it uptodate(over a featureless area)would have been enormous. Another nightmare was the autopilot-autothrust system that were unable to cope with unexpected large temperature shear aloft, inducing almost uncontrollable climb/descent, this behavior required a long testing phase, being unacceptable for airline service. The complexity of design is well explained, showing the long experimental trials to get powerplant reliable since the engine-intake matching was a real challenge(nice descriptions are reported in Seddon&Goldsmith'"Intake aerodynamic" for aeronautical engineer students). One of the greatest factor affecting the project was the lack of a firm customer from the outset. Since no airline was a player from the beginning, Aerospatiale&Bac went on to start afresh with everything, not employing proven equipment(just the opposite of Skunk Works' policy of off-the-shelf apparatus when innovation was not required), so they lenghtened the development phase and they forced airlines to reinvent crew training, raising development&operating costs to unbearable levels. Despite tecnical details, the book is amusing for the great human touch of the author. His typical british sense of humor is always ready to induce some smiles at the authoritative content, delighting readers' attention to events. It was real fun when the author delivers the story of one of top manager of Bac effusively welcoming the first gentleman joining in at a reception for a demonstration flight, just to discover that the poor chap was the piano player hired for the evening. Another story is related to the rapturous welcome occurred at Sidney although the airport fire brigade got rather excited when the tailbumper threw off some sparks at touchdown. Its final outcome prompted a design modification, encouraging a small wheel on bumper in production aircraft to avoid fire tracks' pursuings on runway during landing roll.

"Concorde" is really a deep insight in the project history. Vivid memories are supported by a fascinating selection of photographs of the aircraft, many taken from the author personal collection. A highly recommended portrait of political&industrial aeronautical endeavor in aviation litterature!

If you could only have two books about the Concorde, this must be one of them, the other being The Concorde Story by Orlebar. This book fills any gaps left by the other and presents the politics, design/developement, crews and actual operations involved with this beautiful vision of Man's desire to fly. If you are a fan of this aircraft, you'll want to sit down in your favorite chair and absorb the wealth of text, illustrations and pictures this book has to offer.

I was looking for a good introduction and foundation for understanding Concorde and I thought this book along with Orlebar's would do the trick.

I was very disappointed with this one, though. It devotes lots and lots of words to (from my point of view) arcane historical and political issues. After a couple chapters I just gave up and returned this book. I was very happy with the Orlebar and Calvert books.

If you're interested in the detailed very insider-oriented story of Concorde, this may be the book for you. (And it appears from a number of the reviewers that it was interesting for them.)

This is a good book. It describes the lineage of Concorde fairly well, demonstrating graphically, and textually the French and British designs providing development information for Concorde.

This book however TOTALLY neglects one of the most important sources of aerodynamic, structural, material, construction, economics, route analysis and other information necessary to produce the Concorde.

This source of course is the Hawker-Siddeley Group. Nowhere in Trubby's book are the SST designs Hawker's produced in cooperation with BAC. When Avro Canada folded in 1959 Jim Floyd moved to Britain to head Hawker's SST design effort, bringing with him 5 other engineers from the Arrow project. The Arrow was designed to the same performance as the Concorde using the same materials, milled structural components and other technologies, yet flew 11 years earlier. Avro Canada had also produced the first "credible" in the eyes of TWA, SST design FOR Howard Hughes and TWA. Their parametric studies, economic analysis etc. were rolled into the Hawker SST design(s) and then into Concorde.

Pity people cannot give credit where credit is due.