Faster Than The Sun
(Syracuse, N.Y., October 14, 2002) ¿ It seems like everyone is in a hurry to get somewhere these days. When Carrier first air conditioned the Boeing Stratocruiser in 1949, a transatlantic flight would have taken nearly 12 hours! Today, that same trip has been reduced to as little as three and a half hours, thanks to the supersonic transport (SST), better known as "Concorde."
Supersonic airline research in Europe began as early as 1956. Six years later, the British and French governments signing an international treaty for the joint design, development and manufacture of a supersonic airliner. The Concorde made its first test flight from Toulouse, France in 1969.
When the original Concorde was being built, a heated problem arose. Rising temperatures inside the fuselage made conditions almost unbearable for workmen. Carrier came to the rescue. Alger Air Conditioning Ltd., a Carlyle distributor in Bristol, England, installed two Carlyle self-contained, packaged air conditioning units with a total cooling capacity of eight tons. The Carlyle units were mounted on outside platforms and connected to the plane's fuselage by ducts.
The Concorde measures 204 ft in length but stretches between six- and 10-inches in flight as a result of heating of the airframe. The white paint on its surface was specially developed to accommodate these changes and to dissipate the heat generated by supersonic flight. The wingspan of 83 ft 8 in. is much less than conventional subsonic aircraft since the two fly in completely different ways. The Concorde uses "vortex lift" to achieve its high level of performance.
The Concorde cruises at around 1,350 mph¿nearly twice the speed of sound! When traveling westwards, the Concorde effectively arrives before it has taken off as a result of the five-hour time difference. It can therefore be said that the Concorde travels "faster than the sun."
Since entering commercial service, Concordes operated by British Airways and Air France have operated almost 100,000 flights, totaling some 300 million miles.
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