Where Next For Speed? A Final Successor To Concorde? - 7 September 2019
It's hard to believe Concorde, manufactured by BAC (later BAe and BAE Systems) and Sud Aviation (later Aérospatiale and Airbus), first took flight 50 years ago and was designed with slide rules and wind tunnels. Ricky Bastin, former senior Concorde engineer and aviation historian, presented an interesting talk on the development of supersonic flight and Concorde at the IEEE building in Irvine, California on September 7th, 2019. He also discussed ongoing developments in supersonic passenger aircraft and potential successors to Concorde. Of great interest was the discussion of the advanced nature of the Concorde design, a British-French turbojet-powered supersonic passenger airliner that was operated from 1976 until 2003. It had a maximum speed over twice the speed of sound at Mach 2.04 (1,354…