Great photos Steve
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I’ll second that & some, beauty’s ….
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Great set of photos - brings back many fond memories of the Vulcan flying test bed at Rolls Royce Bristol
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I remember that Vulcan, with the prototype engine for Concorde.
That used to appear at events, and I particularly remember it flying over the British GP at Brands Hatch back in the 70s.
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I used to live on the flight path, as they came into land. Used to wave at the pilots and they were that low they used to wave back.
Awesome piece of engineering.
Always wanted to drone it, this is one off the bucket list
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Spent a number of happy hours working on that aircraft as you say with the Olympus 593-602 on it initially then fitted with the eventual production standard Olympus 593-610. After the Concorde program was completed it was subsequently fitted with the RB199 engine which ended up in the Tornado
I believe the Rolls Royce A/C XA903 was the last B1 Vulcan to fly whilst XH588 in these photos was the last B2 Vulcan to fly.
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XH588’s last flying day I was “flying” around the country to intercept its final flight for some pics. I think that’s also the last time I ever had a speeding ticket, too.
Whatever happened to “British Engineering?”
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Thatcher
A good question - but in all fairness, both Concorde and the Tornado were multi national efforts. Aerospatiale (partners to BAes on Concorde) ended up as Airbus - so I guess we just didn’t keep up - but it was Tony Benn that played a major role in crippling Concorde making sure only 16 were ever made.
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Nice pics. Just out of interest, how did you get the OK to fly at Doncaster?
Excellent photos. BTW with Doncaster closing down (or is it?) what will happen to the Vulcan - does anyone know?
Its a secret
As I recall, the bigger issue was Boeing totally screwing up their SST and, as a result, and in a fit if pique, banning overland civil supersonic flights, instantly killing off the main Concorde money-maker route - London/Paris to the USA West Coast.
Then middle eastern wars of the 70s screwed the fuel prices and hammered in the final nail.
It was only because the USA west coast routes were still-born that the route to Rio was instigated.
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Why?
After all, it was you who posted the pic
Tony Benn stuck the knife in before Concorde even went into service. If he’d had his way Concorde would have been cancelled after the first 4 pre production aircraft were complete and long before the FAA threw theirs toys out of the cot and banned Concorde flying to JFK on noise related issues. The only reason Tony Benn backed down was the penalty fees payable to Aerospatiale and SNECMA were rather large to say the least. It was then agreed to build 16 production aircraft and it was then the good old US of A banned the flights to JFK. That was seen as a delaying tactic to allow Boeing to complete their SST program - and we all know what happened to that
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