British Airways Concorde Cockpit
I was fortunate enough to tour the Concorde on it's farewell trip in the fall of 2003 during a stopover in BOS. The aircraft, G-BOAD, spent a night and the following day on display in the United hanger. It has a remarkably small cockpit, with pilot positions harder to get into than a MD-80! The Flight Engineer's panel (below) seems to go one forever. That sure is a tiny table, one I assume retracts for storage on the ground. The gear handle was very small. (bottom left) The side windows had warnings not to open them in flight! (bottom right) I found it interesting that the N2 gauges were at the top of each instrument stack, rather than EPR or N1, as I'm used to. Each N2 gauge has a color painted on the lower right portion of the gauge, indicating which hydraulic pump(s) are powered by that engine. Controls to raise and lower the nose - I wonder if there's a procedure for failure of this mechanism? Not a Boeing cockpit, by any stretch of the imagination, but one I could be quite comfortable in. "Warp speed, Mr. Sulu!"
click here to see an image of the Concorde in the Airliners section of my web site.
Copyright © 2003, Ian A. Duncan
Revised - - 10/15/2003
URL http://www.flyian.net/cockpit/pits/conc.htm