The Concorde

Intended for FS02 – flyable with minor restrictions in FS04 also

By Mario Coelho

Reviewed by The Rhythmosaur

This review is dedicated to the crew and passengers of the one and only Concorde crash flight in Paris. May they find peace.

Â Â ConcV3AF.zipÂ Â Â
Description:
FS2002 - Flight Simulator 2002 Aircraft Concorde V3 Air France - Full Package Based On Fs2k Concorde (needs Concorde 2000 Gauge) Include Full Cockpit Views, Panel And Sound By Mario Coelho
Version: Filesize: 12.14 MB
Added on: 19-Aug-2002 Downloads: 1891 Rating: 5.7 (3 Votes)
Rate this Add-on | Details (ZipDig) | Contents
Category: FS95 --> FS2002 Airliner Aircraft / Air France

Just show me the (sim) pilot that never dreamed of it: Flying the, well, second but most sucessful supersonic airliner this world has seen: The Concorde.

From London to the States in 3 ½ hours, landing there hours BEFORE you started! A totally new experience of jetlag! In other words, have two sunrises in a couple of hours!

History

Looking at its history, you cannot cope without writing a few lines about the Tupolev Tu-144.

This aircraft was the first commerial airliner who broke the sound barrier and was even a bit faster than the Concorde, performing its maiden flight a few months before the Concorde did.

Picture courtesy of

RUSSIAN SPLASHSCREENS FOR FS2004

by Chris and Jim Coarse, January 7, 2004

railrunner130@hotmail.com http://home.comcast.net/~ccoarse/index.html

Available at SurClaro, typing in “TU-144”

Seen from far, you could hardly tell if you see a Tu-144 or a Concorde. Amazingly, they look quite the same featuring the movable nose, double delta wings and the 4 engines power supply.

I recently read from a russian fellow simmer comparing the planes like this:

“The Tu-144 was faster and had the better aerodynamics, but the Concorde had better engines.”

The Tu-144 indeed served for 30 months and retired then from line service. Several crashes occurred along with permanent serious engine problems. From then on the Tu-144 faced a shadow existence – those who where not disassembled – as a plane for scientific research.

Picture courtesy of

RUSSIAN SPLASHSCREENS FOR FS2004

by Chris and Jim Coarse, January 7, 2004

railrunner130@hotmail.com http://home.comcast.net/~ccoarse/index.html

Available at SurClaro, typing in “TU-144”

Between 1950 and 1960, The United Kingdom and France independently worked on the idea of a supersonic airliner. Confronted with the immense costs of research and construction, they agreed on shouldering this task together in 1962, and as a result, SNECMA, Sud-Aviation, BAC (British aircraft Corporation) and Rolls-Royce faced the practical work of construction and assembly. To emphasize this, the aircraft was named from the roman godess, Concordia, which was the godess of unity and togetherness according to the ancient roman mythology, so its name was Concorde.

Poor russians, they had to shoulder it on their own, but here once again the mastership of russian constructors becomes apparent…

Two prototypes were built, one at BAC’s, one at Aerospatiale’s. This one landed safely after performing it’s maidon flight in 02. March, 1969, followed by the british in 09. April.

The next step were large PR tours and campaigns.

Though controverses among the people and airlines were high regarding high fuel and maintenance expenses, engine noise and sonic bang, the consort finally had 77 orders.

This huge amount of orders ment to generations of engineers to have a secure job.

Unfortunatelly, they wrote the bill without the OPEC: Suddenly the oil prices rose in unpredictable dimensions what ment all orders but NINE were cancelled.

Not so much the first and only crash of a Concorde in Paris but the continuation of this development broke the Concorde’s neck and resulted in them being retired recently. Air France and British Airways do no longer see a way of making profit with this amazing bird.

The legend dies due to high oil prices…

And that’s a reason to keep it alive at least as simulation were the OPEC does not earn a cent from…

The Model

A couple of months ago, Mr. Mario Coelho found the FS2000 Concorde no longer available for those who joined – like me – this amazing PC adventure with FS2002, so he decided to adapt the original file in a way that it could be used in FS2002. And when he succeded with this, he decided not to use the result just on his own but to do generations of armchair pilots a big favour by publishing it at SurClaro’s.

Mario Coelho

mario.coelho@netcabo.pt

www.bluestarsim@hotmail.com

Having yet published an outstanding number of simulated aircraft, he this time credits Microsoft for this model as he left the major parts unchanged.

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OUTSIDE

The only thing I could say: It looks fine. Textures have a decent resolution, the gears and gearbays are fairly detailed and underline the plane’s kind of unconventional proportions when parked, especially when a B747 parks just next to it.

Night lighting could be a bit more intense for my taste.

There’s also an openable door, and all the moving stuff moves like it should, including the nose gear stearing when the plane turns in taxi.

Rating: 8 – It does not leave wishes open, but it is not extraordinary either.

INSIDE

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It seems one cannot stress this often enough: A plane using phototextures in cockpit view usually has no virtual cockpit. Not because the author was to lazy but because parts of the Vcock are visible if you look around in cockpit mode and therefore mess up the phototextures.

Lit and unlit.

Here you find again Microsofts handwriting. Your déjà vue comes certainly from the FS02 Lear45 (the 04 one has no phototextures and therefore a Vcock instead…)

Technic of the 70ties….

Rating: 9. You quite seldom find a special set of phototextures for night lighting.

PANEL

To my knowledge, there are 2 other panels available. Why do I say this here? No, not because the panel in this package is bad. But if you lack concorde gauges, you might feel a bit unconfortable, and since I know where to get a second one to get eventually missing concorde gauges, I also present you the other two panels. But first the one included:

The picture is a jpg file, so the gauges are indeed better readable than it seems here. I use a 1024x7?? resolution.

The viewpoint is the default one, but the real Concorde feeling you will have when you set it a bit more down – on the cost of outside visibility of course.

Extremely useful and unfortunatelly rarely seen in sim cockpits is the UTC clock.

The APU switch triggers a loud airconditioning sounds, that’s all it does. The cabin temp gauge is obviously not connected with it, and does some strange things like showing –20°C while cruising FL450 and then showing 10°C cruising FL510.

Some of the engine gauges seem to be mixed up what can be realized when you do the startup.

A very nice feature is the suspention of the front nose gear you can “feel” when you taxi over bad asphalt or brake for full stop. The plane will nod a bit then.

The fuel pump works and can be a vital part of your flight realism.

Rating: 9

Alternative panel (NOT included in the package)

It’s just my personal taste when I say I like this one more, but it has roughly the same features and would also get 9 rated by myself.

Â Â recopan3.zipÂ Â Â
Description:
Fs2002 Concorde Real Panel V3.0 (22th Of April, 2003) For Use With Projetmach2 From Fsfrance Accurate, High-resolution, Photoreal Panel Of The Concorde. Based On Technical Photographs Of Concorde. More Accurate And Better-looking Than The One Available At Projetmach2 Which Was An Original Of Adnane Bourja And Modified By Loïc Londinfer Of Fsfrance. Pedro Oliveira Pedro.a.tavares at sapo.pt

SOUND

The file includes a smooth soundset with the common question where Microsoft has it from…

I hate to say this, but an even better sound package is available at www.flightsim.com

Rating: 8

DOCUMENTATION:

The historical details seen above are a summary of facts that I could get my hands on, so besides the MS refs and checklists for the kneeboard, there’s no further information given.

Rating: 3 Sorry, I find this to be important!

Overall Rating: 8

Mario Coelho made the best he could out of the Microsoft model and made the dream of so much simmers come true.

FLIGHT CHARACTERISTICS

Flying this plane is a science by itself. Check out this tutorial written by SpectroPro:

Required takeoff is 9000ft and landing is 9000ft (2,743m)

Taxi and take off with the nost DOWN 5 degrees. Takeoff with full power and reheats ON. Always!!! Rotate at 13 nose up angle. At 190k start take off angle. hold at 10 degrees till wheels are off the ground.

Ok...climb out should be JUST under supersonic. As soon as cleared for supersonic jump to it. Climb to and fly at feet.

The only time you really need to worry about the CG is if you have settings on high for realism. Thus, you have to really pay attention to the movement of your fuel like you said. So either let the comp do it automatically, or PAY ATTENTION!!!!

Accellerate to 250k for climbout. Pitch up to maintain 250 (18-20 degrees.) Out of JFK, 1 minute and 18 seconds after you applied full power you MUST rotate nose down and kill the afterburners and keep it at 250. (this is sound sensitive area)

270k is the nose up / down number. Once the nose is up, kick it up to 300k or higher as desired. Lower your pitch attitude to about 3 degrees to increase speed. accell to about 400k by the time you hit 10,000 feet. (3,048m) you will be about 8 degrees up angle. continue your 400k climbing until you reach Mach .7 Move fuel afterwards NOW.

Take off is usually about 53.5- 54% aft CG. Start pumping fuel now to reach 55% aft CG. This takes a few minutes.

Level off at about FL280 and fly at mach 0.95. At the coast line, kick it by lighting the afterburners (remember a sonic boom moves forward NOT backward...)

JUST BEFORE you reach mach 1, start moving fuel forward. Watch the cg meter limits, keep the CG inside there.

At mach 1.1 the secondary engine nozzles are full open (0% on the % area guage.) at mach 1.3 the intake ramps start to function to slow down the engine intake air. (that's auto) At mach 1.4 drag starts to drop fast.

The CG is very very very important at mach 1.5. You MUST pay attention to your CG here as the spread needles are very close together.

Mach 1.7, turn off the afterburners. You should hit Mach 2 at about fl500, watch speed to not overspeed the AC. The time to get from 1.7 til 2 can take from 15 minutes to over 1 hour. Depends on the ISA (international standard atmosphere). If this flight day it is and ISA day, you will do it in 15 minutes. But, if the temp goes up +10F, it will take over an hour.

Standard supersonic flight is done with your CG now at about 59%. At about FL580, you'll start decelerating for landing.If your cg slips to 57.5% you will start to decellerate too early. You must keep the wing fuel replenished, but pay attention to that aft tank. You need to stay at 59% or a tad lower at most.

From mach 2 to mach 1, you will use about 120nm (222km). hint: leave the concorde on autopilot and make your adjustments to the VS hold or IAS hold to manage your airspeed during descent.

Reduce power in level flight to keep enough air going through the engines for airconditioning and cooling. IAS of 350k and your descent will begin. (about 1.55mach) Reduce power again. Descend at 350kias.

At 1.3 mach the intake ramps stop working and move back up (auto).

At mach 1, throttle back to idle (or just a tad above) to keep your speed at 350kias. Descend until mach .95 (level out if you need to) then continue to descend til mach .93 and 350-370kias is reached.

Move fuel forward to a CG of 52.5 to 53% All that must be done and you must be at 250knots before you reach 10,000 ft (3048m)

Aat 270k set 5 degrees nose down.you should be at about 190k when you are 12 miles out. Maintain speed. Pattern is flown at 190ias. Landing will be around 150 to 162k depending on your weight.

There is more info on landing however this should do. If not, I can post an entire step by step for flying this bad boy.

I hope that is what you were looking for. Credit my knowledge to the fs2000 Pilots handbook. If it were not for that book, I would never be able to fly that jet. Its a pure bear...but fun when you get the hang of it..

Issues while testing:

The sonic bang gauges producing a bang sound while braking the sound barrier will work, but for any reason you by then cannot move the nose (flap keys as well as special Concorde keys) once you installed it. This seems to be the case with other Concorde models, too. I therefore do not recomment to install those gauges into the Concorde.

Remarks to FS04 use:

I tested this bird with FS2004 and made the following observations:

The model itself is fully displayed, including gears and moving stuff..

However, when you select the model, you will have an UNUSUAL WINDOW STYLE window to tell you you’re about to use unsupported software. It is not the common FS style window you can kill by editing the [FrameCallNoWarn] section in the FS9.cfg. I found no way to kill this window and have to live with it.

Flight dynamics work slightly different. The important thing is to keep the pitch ancle under 5 degrees, once you left FL100 (250kt limit area). You will climb with 1200ft/min keeping about 5° on the anclometer (differs a bit from the artificial horizon!) and adjusting the pitch with the speed. It may be necessary to go supersonic in climb.

With ISA test, I found out FL510 to be most economic with a GS of about 1120kt at Mach 2.

After about 45 minutes cruising FL510, at least when you reach Canada coming from London, you will find the CG leaving the limits for an empty rear fuel tank. There’s no “legal” way to get home now, so ignore it. Even at full realism, the speed will just drop a few knots but the plane will remain stable to get you to JFK.

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