Concorde - First Look

[Andrew Wilson]

I had promised some previews before the year end – so allow me to share a few details on some of the features you can expect to see:

Here’s a shot of G-BOAA flying in the British Airways Negus livery. We’ve painted all the liveries the aircraft flew in – even the hybrids that operated between livery transitions. Not only that – but each airframe (fourteen production aircraft) has been configured with its retrospective weight and balance properties; resulting in unique handling characteristics. Any of the fourteen airframes can be repainted – and will automatically inherit British or French configurations depending on its MSN. The external model has been reworked using the latest PBR technologies offered in P3Dv5 – which are used extensively to render the correct lighting characteristics around the airframe.

 

This shot of the famous Pepsi livery worn by ‘Sierra Delta’ gives me an opportunity to mention another feature we’ve implemented; this livery was restricted to twenty minutes at Mach 2 – as the darker paint on the fuselage caused the skin to retain more heat (the speed at which Concorde flew would heat the nose to just under 127C). We thought it would be a neat feature to implement this – so our simulation checks the colour of the fuselage/wings and heats the airframe appropriately. Of course, this will then lead to significant consequences – and with the help of ex-Concorde flight and ground crews, we’ve devised a probable chain of failures that will result from exposing the airframe to excess heat. It means that any custom repaint will need to give this careful consideration – just as was done in real life – as it was the primary reason why most of the liveries designed for Concorde in its lifetime were white.

 

Here we have a shot of ‘Alpha Echo’, on what I presume is a 27R departure from London Heathrow given the early left turn with the reheats still lit. As with all of our titles – we include a whole range of special effects – and the reheat system designed for this title utilises our latest technologies. The reheats are completely dynamic, reacting to ambient lighting conditions to vary their appearance. In daylight you’ll see the reheat spray rings and pre-ignition sequence as each reheat lights up in stages. At night – the diamond cone effect extends to illuminate the aircraft and its surroundings, throwing sparks as the aircraft thunders down the runway. The Olympus 593’s MkII’s weren’t the cleanest of engines, so we’ve included various special effects for engine smoke that also varies with atmospheric conditions and engine power.

 

This one is my #BeaconShot – landing in reduced visibility, where our volumetric lighting effects can be seen. As with our other titles, each light carries a whole range of special effects, including volumetric properties that can be seen during inclement weather operations, custom warm-up and cool-down times, in addition to custom lighting properties that integrate with the surrounding ambient conditions. The main landing lights situated at the forward wing root were seldom used in daylight operations due to the buffeting they created – something we have also simulated.

 

Onto our brand-new virtual cockpit, designed from the ground up especially for P3Dv5 and MSFS. Each instrument has been built using high-definition texturing and includes dynamic lighting that reacts to both ambient lighting and any of the various lighting systems on the aircraft. In this shot you’ll note the rather inconsistent instrument lighting – each instrument is rendered with its own individual lighting characteristics. This shot was taken shortly into a supercruise on a Barbados return to London; you can see the aircraft is climbing initially at a healthy rate given the very cold troposphere around the equator and will ‘settle’ into a cruise climb which is simulated so precisely that, for any given weight and ambient temperature, the aircraft is never more than 50ft from the calculated profile.

Most of our efforts with this new virtual cockpit have been on modelling the new flight engineer station. Every single switch, dial, rotary selector is simulated. The task of the flight engineer can be left to our new ‘virtual flight crew system’ and our virtual Flight Engineer (and First Officer) will carry out their duties exactly as per real world procedures. In fact, one of my favourite areas of this simulation is triggering this process on a cold and dark aircraft and then watching the systems come to life and witnessing the various warnings flashing and sounding as the Safety and Cockpit Preparation flows are executed; a process that goes on for a good twenty minutes or more which is enough time to plan your route using our new planning utilities.

 

Here we have two external devices. The left showing a remote connection to any of the three INS CDU’s which can be used to operate and monitor the INS system throughout the flight. The device on the right is showing a page from the tactical part of the generated flight briefing. In this instance, the Concorde EROPS chart. This chart, rendered and generated automatically for any given route, depicts the diversion commit points. The blue flags signify the viable alternates for a 3-engine diversion and the red flags for a 2-engine diversion. Each point is calculated meticulously using weather and aircraft performance data, accompanied by a two page digital printout of tactical data that formed part of the British Airways crew flight briefing. Any time a flight plan is generated, a tactical plan is calculated and provides all the data required to make a comprehensive decision for a diversion field. You’ll also note the current NAT tracks are rendered on the chart, although Concorde operated above the North Atlantic Track system, the crews needed to be aware of where these were for any given flight over the North Atlantic, in the event of an emergency descent.

 

I hope this has provided a small glimpse of what you can expect from our new Concorde title. I’ve hardly scratched the surface of what’s included – and we’ll be excited to reveal more details in the coming weeks as we progress towards a release.

From all of us at Flight Sim Labs – thank you for your continued support and we wish you a Happy New Year.

(Reposted from our Concorde General forum - head over there to discuss!)