8 minutes ago, DC1973 said:

ISA conditions allow for a 2 degree drop in temp every 1,000ft until FL 360, where it's supposed to stay at -57 degrees, which I think is where MSFS is getting its info from. It does make life easier for Concorde, but of course reduces realism a bit.

An outside temperature of -57°C sounds about right. The TAT of 124° also appears reasonable. It’s the ISA Dev value that appears wrong. I would expect -5 to +10 over the North Atlantic.

The very low temps only really occurred in the tropics where -15°C within 500nm of Barbados allowed the aircraft to reach FL600

It was rarely achieved on the JFK run as you’re probably aware.

16 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Back in the 1970s it was state of the art much like everything else on Concorde

as much as concorde was a marvel of its day (because she truly was!)

INS was already widely in use in ballistic missile guidance before it made its way into commercial aviation - and later to the Concorde.
In fact as Concorde was being launched, the INS was already entering "mature" status since both Honeywell and Litton started to leave the gimbaled platform design in favor of the strapdown inertial approach using laser gyros. A derivative of that development is still present today, namely the IRS.

What differed on the Concordes' three separate INS units was that two of them had the supersonic "software" while the third one was a default subsonic "version", which made it unable to steer the airplane.

Anyone got a SIM Brief Profile for this?

I think that the one criticism that I would have of the textures (based on screenshots that I have seen) is the window pillar. It may just be the angle at which a particular screenshot was taken, but the Captain's side forward pillar texture seemed to be a bit "fuzzy", and since I would be looking at that throughout a flight, it kinda matters Something else that I noticed was the "instant" light up of the afterburners on take off when viewed from behind. Whilst relatively quick on the real aircraft, the delay between "coming on" and "full reheat" (based on real world video footage that I have seen) is something that I would love to see simulated more accurately.

Edited March 30, 20224 yr by Christopher Low

2 hours ago, Espana Pete said:

Excuse my ignorance but what are INS?

It's the Inertial Navigation System - it essentially does the same thing a modern CDU/FMC does in a current airliner, but not in the same way. The 'inertial' bit of the name refers to the fact that it detects the inertia of movement and from this, works out where it is going. To use in INS, you start off by telling the system where it is in the world (by keying in lat/long coordinates), when it knows that, it spins up a bunch of very sensitive gyroscopes. Thereafter, the gyroscopes detect movement when the airliner sets off, and from this, the INS can surmise which way the aeroplane is going, how fast it is going etc, so it can update the reference of where it thinks it is. 

Here is a picture of what an INS typically looks like:

The INS systems of the type used in Concorde and other Sixties/Seventies airliners (stuff like Boeing 707s/727s/DC-8s etc) were able to let you punch in a number of lat/long coordinates, then the system could be slaved to the autopilot so the thing could fly a route automatically by sequencing the set of data. Since there was a limit on how many navigation data points you could put into an old INS system (often as few as ten or so), many airliners had more than one INS unit, but very often even this would not provide enough capacity for the amount of waypoints you'd want, so quite often, you would have to clear them and put another set of lat/long waypoints into the thing halfway through your flight. 

Obviously, such a system by its very nature could not be super-accurate, since there are problems with using mechanical gyroscopes to detect movement accurately (for example, the friction in the mechanisms), and unpredictable/unknown wind drift can throw them off, but INS units were invariably accurate enough to get you where you wanted to go, since you could usually use the navigation radios on your aeroplane to triangulate your position from two or three known land-based signal beacons, which would mean you could update the INS manually to help it out a bit. This meant that on a transatlantic flight, it wouldn't really matter too much if you were 'a bit off' (especially in Concorde up at well above the altitude everything else was flying at, so no danger of any collisions at all) because by the time you were getting near to your destination, you'd be close enough in range to some land-based transmitters to be able to make a course correction, but it was one of the main reasons why older airliners had more than two crew members and it was also why there used to be a number of ships anchored in the Atlantic at known positions with radio beacons on them so that airliners (and ships) well out of range of land could figure out where they were.

If you see some pictures of airports in the 1950s/60s/70s, you might notice that at the head of the stands where the airliners park, painted on the buildings in big letters that the pilots can see from the cockpit, there are the lat/long coordinates for that exact location, so the crew can type that into their airliner's INS.

The idea of using gyroscopes for navigation wasn't really new even back when Concorde first flew in the late 1960s. Long before that, WW2 submarines were using INS systems so you could sail them around underwater to avoid detection but still have a pretty good idea where you were, and things such as the German WW2 V1 flying bombs and V2 ballistic missiles used these kind of systems too, as in fact did the torpedoes on a lot of submarines. But as you probably know, those V1 and V2 bombs were flying several hundred miles, so they were really only good enough in terms of accuracy to be aimed at a major city and still have a good chance of hitting the target; they weren't like modern missiles today which can be aimed at a specific building and have a very good chance of hitting it.

Modern IRS systems in current airliners (Inertial Reference System) which send their data to the CDU/FMC, basically use the same principle as the old INS, but they rely on frictionless ring laser gyros combined with the continuous reception of satellite signals and radio beacons to automatically keep them aware of exactly where they are, which they cross-reference with an internal database (that's the R bit in IRS), which means they are typically super-accurate. But even these systems do have to initially be told where they are, like you used to do with the old INS systems. They are sensitive enough to actually detect the rotation of the Earth and work out where they are on their own, but this can take up to fifteen minutes or so for them to calculate this, and they cannot do it whilst they are moving, so the data for their start point is frequently put into them manually in order to speed that alignment process up. 

Air crews had to really earn their pay back in those days, there was none of that press the autopilot button and sit back for two hours doing the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle until you get fifty miles away from your destination malarkey back then. 😮

 

Edited March 30, 20224 yr by Chock

For those of you wanting to fly all the way to JFK here’s the decel/ descent procedure.

Landing on 31R is assumed as the prevailing wind is from the west.

The final altitude you reached makes very little difference to this procedure. Let’s assume by the time you’re 70nm from KENDA you’re between FL570-600.

At 60DME from KENDA disengage AT1 and set ALT HOLD on the AFCS. Dial 14000 on Altitude Select dial.

At 57DME from KENDA slowly reduce throttles to 94% N2. Speed will slowly bleed off.

At 360kts IAS engage ALT ACQ on the right end of the AFCS. A slow descent will commence.

At 350Kts set IAS HOLD (again, over on the right of the AFCS). The aircraft will pitch down to hold 350Kts.

Monitor the Mach Speed. At Mach 1.5 further reduce thrust to 77% N2. In order to maintain 350Kts the nose will pitch down further. Descent rate 4000-5000fpm.

When passing Mach 1 reduce thrust to idle. The descent rate will increase to 6000-8000fpm.

As you get close to 14000ft you should be reasonably close to OWENZ. Engage AT1/2 to maintain 350Kts.

After passing OWENZ continue west for 15 miles before turning to a heading of 020°. Descend to 11,000ft at which point reduce to 250kts. Visor down.

Turn towards the JFK VOR (115.9 from memory) and tune the ILS for 31R. Continue to descend to 3,000ft.

At 10 miles out reduce speed to 190kts, nose down 5°.

At 7 miles gear down, nose fully down and continue on the glide slope / localiser.

Autothrottles should remain on until 50ft. Landing speed 160kts.

After nose wheel touches down full reverse thrust for all four engines. Don’t engage reverse thrust until then or the nose may pitch up causing a crash. Push the yoke all the way forward.

Cancel inner pair at 100kts; outer pair at 70kts. Full manual braking thereafter.

As you leave the runway nose up to 5° and turn off engines 2 and 3. It was too powerful to taxi with four.

Pat yourself on the back on a job well done. Anyone who departed Heathrow in a Boeing or Airbus at the same time isn’t even half-way across. 😁

If it has the capability save your flight at regular intervals.

30 minutes ago, SAS443 said:

as much as concorde was a marvel of its day (because she truly was!)

INS was already widely in use in ballistic missile guidance before it made its way into commercial aviation - and later to the Concorde.

I’m happy to be corrected. 😉

"Air crews had to really earn their pay back in those days, there was none of that press the autopilot button and sit back for two hours doing the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle until you get fifty miles away from your destination malarkey back then. 😮"

I thought only simmers did that on a long flight Chuck. I often go and make a bacon sandwich, the telegraph crossword is beyond me lol. 😁

 

5 hours ago, Twenty6 said:

from the website:

"This add-on is NOT compatible with the Xbox edition of MSFS."

so why are the textures dumbed down? Haven't bought it, just going by the pix on product page.

All that means is that the version we sell (Just Flight) will be PC only.  When this lands on the marketplace assuming there are no major issues at the other end then it will be compatible with Xbox.   We have to include the above disclaimer otherwise we'd have hundreds of folk buying it and expecting to be flying on their Xbox instantly. 

4 hours ago, eslader said:

I'm sure I remember seeing that it *was* going to be compatible with Xbox. Wonder what happened. 

 

 

It will be but that will be the version that gets sent to Microsoft for placement on the marketplace.  Here at Just Flight we're not able to sell a version that is Xbox compatible, ours is for PC users only.  Hence the disclaimer on the site.  Hope that helps clear that up.

Thanks for all the detailed departure and arrival posts Ray, I’m going to copy these into a word document to have on hand for my flights.

@regis9, you’re welcome Dave. Hopefully others will do the same.

Concorde had fixed routes so the only deviation would be the SID and STAR depending on wind for the JFK run.

But Woodley NDB to OWENZ is fixed.

I Will pass, not for me I will wait for  PMDG and the Maddog.

I dont need to go supersonic.

I will not buy it either, as I'm too dumb for properly piloting such a kind of bird. But the amount of profound wisdom collected here makes reading this thread fun despite.

The Concorde was a true icon indeed. I am already happy having seen one landing at an air show in Germany (the one being killed a few weeks later).

Kind regards, Michael

Edited March 30, 20224 yr by pmb

I will pass on this one to, I will not going back to FS2004 graphics, but cool aircraft though.