Flight Report Information

First attempt at a Concorde flight!

Wow... OK I feel like a little explanation is in order for this one! This was my first attempt flying with Concorde and it was interesting. I was using a freeware Concorde I downloaded and without disrespecting the creators of it, I think that the flight characteristics might be a bit suspect...The thing just does not want to slow down!! Now I know Concorde was designed to be slippery, but even with that in mind I wouldn't expect to be practically maintaining speed at a constant altitude and idle thrust. Needless to say I self positioned onto the ILS and found that I could not get the height off and so I had to do an orbit to get down which you can probably see on the map!

So after capturing the ILS the autopilot ended up maintaining 2500ft which meant I got high on the GS. Now in my trusty 737NG I would (most likely) have caught that because I would be keeping an eye on my FMAs which would have alerted me to "ALT HOLD". But no such system exists on Concorde (or at least the version I am using. So a quick dirty dive (I was never even close to being stable at 500 or even 1000 feet) meant I picked up some more speed which wouldn't disappear (see previous comment)! Of course I should have gone around and tried again which is what I would have done in real life, but I figured it to be a challenge and went for it...that was a mistake!

Approaching the end of the runway I was fast although my vertical profile was something like a 3 degree slope, I didn't know exactly when to flare or even how much, so I guessed and got it wrong, probably about 2 seconds too late. This caused a hard touchdown with what seemed like a huge bounce. OK, so now is the time to go around which I dutifully did and remembering my overspeed at the start of the flight I remembered to take off a huge chunk of power to avoid the same thing happening again. Again I think that the afterburners as they are modelled on this version of the aircraft are perhaps generous with the power they give out! So I managed to fly a visual circuit and actually land with a half decent vertical rate on the second attempt, but sadly the tracker only recorded the first "arrival".

All in all it was a messy flight which just proved to me how much planning and practise would be needed to operate this aircraft correctly. I didn't give any thought to my fuel burn (again this may be slightly under-estimated), my payload, my V speeds (I doubt any documents or websites out there would be relevant to this specific aircraft) or things like not flying supersonic over land. I did try and slow down before reaching Ireland, but managed to misjudge that as well! So I'm sorry to any Irish members who find they have some broken virtual windows. Anyway, I hope this report will be accepted even if I made a complete hash of things. If nothing else you may even get a laugh out of my woeful attempts at taking command of this wonderful aircraft! I think I'll stick to my good ol' 737NG and only come back to the Concorde for a little amusement every now and then!

Hi Stephen, a good try with the fligh,t we will call this one teething problems haha, il get the award sorted soon