Concorde

The book I read to research this post was Flying Concorde by Brian Calvert which is a very good book that I bought from a local secondhand bookstore.This book is written by a pilot who was involved in concorde at the development stage as well as being a commercial pilot. For many years British aviation ruled the world with the developing the first jet airliner the Comet, the first mach 2 fighter plane the General Electric Lightning as well as the first supersonic airliner. It was an exciting time around 1970 with also the dawn of the Jumbo Jet the Boeing 747 being bigger than anything before for passenger transport. It typically takes 5 months to train to be a concorde pilot with at least half of that being in a classroom learning theory. The English tend to use electronic models to teach it but the French prefer self assessment style tests on a computer. It was a English – French coproduction. Only quick learners are catered for such is the prohibitive cost of the course. Many pilots upgrading from planes like the 707 that don’t have auto-pilot struggle in particular with the multiple auto-pilot modes. The windows heat up such is the friction of the air flow at mach 2 speeds.  You can see the curvature of the Earth it flies so high up. It also has to mantain mach 2 for upto 3 hours no mean feat. Most fly from Paris or London to New York. There was flights operated to Dallas and Singapore operated by Banff Airlines and Singapore Airlines respectively but these fell victim to the energy crisis in the 70’s and were discontinued in 1980. This book is around 260 pages so is a decent length. I did enjoy reading this and do recommend it.