Concorde At 50: Droop Snoop

In the late 1960s, Unexcelled, the parent company of Aero Spacelines (maker of the Boeing 377-based Guppy and Super Guppy outsize cargo aircraft) formed Tex Johnston Inc. (named for the Aero Spacelines president and former Boeing test pilot) to produce Total Inflight Simulation. One of the proposed concepts was a Concorde trainer with a cockpit section of the supersonic transport, along with the movable nose, mounted on a Convair 580 (AW&ST May 27, 1968, p. 93). The project was never completed.

An early mockup of the Concorde’s original variable-geometry nose and visor is pictured in the supersonic, subsonic and approach-to-land positions. The design was changed, largely at the direction of the FAA, to include a transparent visor—a design challenge, since the visor also protected the main windshield panels from the effects of kinetic heating.

In this classic image of the Concorde landing at the Farnborough Airshow in 1974, the nose is fully drooped by 17.5 deg. (AW&ST Sept. 9, 1974, p. 23). On a 3-deg. glideslope approach, this permitted an angle of vision 15 deg. below the horizon and gave the crew visibility of the ground about 420 ft. ahead of the main landing gear legs. The movable nose fairing and retractable glazed visor were developed by Marshall of Cambridge in England.

Powered by two hydraulic systems, the nose could be fully drooped in 12 sec. and raised in less than 19 sec. (AW&ST Sept. 27, 1971, p. 25) The aircraft normally would be flown with the visor up, but for takeoff the nose would be drooped 5 deg. and the visor lowered. Both would be raised for the start of acceleration to Mach 1 and beyond; for landing, the visor would be lowered again and the nose fully drooped.