Stuff You Should Know - How the Concorde Worked

Episode Date: October 2, 2018

The concorde was a wonderful thing, a super fast commerical airliner that got you across the pond in half the time. But it was small and cramped, noisy and a big money loser. Climb aboard and get ready for Mach 1.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

There's Jerry over there. Frank, the chair's in here. My thick tongue. Chuck's haircut. Chuck's beard, not Chuck's hat. Jerry's glasses. Jerry's on the phone, not knowing what's going on. Everything is right with the world.

Oh, I've been spelling this wrong all these years, by the way. You've been spelling it like Flight of the Concords? Between that and Concord with Noe. Okay. And all my writings on the Concord. Well, you have that blog Concord Days. Yeah, yeah.

And I noticed there's no E on it. And I spelled days, D-A-Z-E. Yes, you did. Chuck, we share a mind sometimes because I was about to, had I not been taking a sip of coffee, we would have said that at the same time. D-A-Z-E.

Yeah, well, I was waiting on you to take a sip so I could steal that. Thanks, dude. In fact, I tried to get a, and we're gonna talk a little bit later about the experience of flying on the famed and fabled Concord Jet Airliner. That's what we're talking about.

But I tried to get in touch, I know a person who made that trip. Who? Justin's mom. I don't know her. I know Justin, I've never met her as well. Well, imagine Justin, but a mother. Okay.

Yeah, Justin's mom, Carrie, is from England and she made a, like since I've known her, took I guess one of the last trips, early 2000s. Yeah, that would have been, I think it was 2003, October 2003 when it was decommissioned. Yeah, so I hit her up on Facebook and was like, Carrie, let me know what it was like. But she's in Hurricane Ravage, North Carolina.

So she's probably like, buzz off, Chuck. Everything all right with her? Yeah, yeah, they're good. They went inland. Shout out to all of our peeps who had to go through Florence. Yeah, my sister was there right in the middle of it. She okay?

Yeah, she's good. Trees down in the area, but like minimal house damage. And they're high on, they sit higher up, so it's not like they're not flooded. That's good, because a lot of the area is. Yeah, and she was also, I mean, she said it's bad, but she said the news is always just so sensationalized.

Dude. She's like, this is not like Hurricane Katrina or anything. Did you see that clip of the weather channel, dude? No, I didn't. So what was he just like making stuff up? No, leaning into the wind, like he was about to be blown over. And then in the background,

two guys just strolled by in like shorts and flip flops. Not even, I mean, like, I don't even think their hair was blowing. That's shameful. It is shameful, and I'm so glad that that made the rounds, which is, that's ridiculous. It is.

You know? Especially for a weather event where there's genuine fear and like, you could incite panic, like. I think that there's a lot wrong with that, so let's shake on it. Done. Okay.

All right, so concords. Oh yeah. So we're talking concords today. I never got to fly on one. You didn't. Because we're not rich. We're gonna go ahead and assume Jerry did, man. And I don't know anybody who did,

but I would have loved to have. And I think I've stepped on board one. There's one at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum by Dulles. Oh, I thought you meant you boarded a flight and they're like, sir, you're on the wrong plane. Right. Back when you could do that. Sir, you're asleep right now.

This is a dream. I can't remember if they actually let you step on it or not. Where was this? Dulles? Dulles Airport, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Is there one still there? Yes, it's called the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

I just call it the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum at Dulles. All right. And it's really nice. They have like a stealth Black Hawk. No, not Black Hawk, Blackbird. SR-71 Blackbird. Oh yeah, sure. Did you know that those things are built

so that when they're on the ground, the plates that hold them, like that make up the plane, they have gaps in between them. The reason is because that thing flies so fast and gets so hot that the plates expand. Wow. And it becomes solid when it really counts. But on the ground, apparently, when it's taking off,

it would just leak fuel everywhere because it doesn't have like a solid plate to speak of. That's like us. Basically. We become solid when it counts. Anyway, at the Sarin Space Museum at Dulles, which is frankly worth flying to Dulles just to go to, it's that good, is a Concorde.

I think it's an Air France Concorde, one of the last ones that was ever flown. Yeah, I'm a fan of air and space museums. You would love this one, ma'am. I wouldn't say I'm like an aviation hound, but I know people that are. Well, you don't have to be to appreciate this. It's made for everybody.

And there's a space shuttle there too. Yeah, I'm gonna have to check that out. For sure, I used to go to the one in Pensacola, the Naval Air Museum there growing up. And I just thought it was cool. Walk around looking at planes. You're gonna love this. Well, all right.

So let's go back in time to the swinging 60s in England. Yeah, which was pretty swinging. It was. In fact, very quickly, I wanna recommend that Michael Cain documentary, My Generation. I haven't seen it. It's not just about Michael Cain. He's sort of like the host of what London was like

in like the late 60s. Oh, cool. So pretty cool. That whole Alfie thing. Alfie and the Rolling Stones and Marianne Faithful and he and Albert Finney and just like saying to the class establishment. Yeah.

We're young. And also super rich. Well, eventually, sure. But anyway, in the 60s, this is the early 60s so it wasn't quite as swinging then. The British and the French governments got together and they say, hey, let's build a really fast plane together. Yeah, because it turned out that the British

and the French were both building what's called a supersonic transport plane. SSTs. And they weren't the only ones doing it either. It was the Soviets and the Americans, the British and the French were all working on their own supersonic transport plane at the same time, which is weird until you think about jet airliners

were really, really new. Yeah. And so everybody was all about jet airliners which made them think, well, what goes even faster than that supersonic planes that travel faster than the speed of sound. So everybody was working on them at the time. Yeah, I'm surprised that it was that early

in airline travel when they thought, hey, maybe we can go really fast. That seemed like it would be like a 30 years on development. I think there was a lot more like inspiration and enthusiasm and let's shoot for the stars. Money to burn. Sure, who cares about the environment kind of thing. But I really get that sentiment

because think about it, four different nations working on the same kind of pie in the sky project. It's impressive. So they built a couple of prototypes and then the very first flight of the Concorde was 1969. Together they made about 20 or they made 20, not about, this is actually something where they know the number. Although I did see 16 and 14 production models

but every place I've seen 16, 16 was in more places. So not 20. No production models. Oh, gotcha. So like I guess prototypes and stuff don't count. I see. Like 16 that actually flew commercially. Gosh, what did they do with the prototypes

and then just trash them or something? I don't know. Maybe that's at Dulles or no, that was probably a production model. Yeah, it definitely was. Cause you got, you want seat stains on display and all their glory. This one smells like Gerard Depardieu.

Oh God, not that guy. All right, so you talked about the Soviets. They built, and this is hysterical, but they built something called the TU-144, the Tupolev and they nicknamed it with a K, the Konkordski. Right. That seems like a joke. I think, well, I think the Brits and the French

nicknamed it that. Oh, okay. And kind of derisively too, because the Soviet, what the Soviets came up with looks an awful lot like what the Brits and the French came up with. Sure. And it makes you wonder, one of two things,

was there like espionage going on on one side or the other? One group was spying on the other group? I would say yes, probably. Or is it just that the Konkord follows these aerospace principles that any highly skilled, well-trained aerospace engineer would follow and come up with on their own?

Probably that too. I wonder. That makes more sense though, because Konkordski was so hysterical that it seems like something from like the Benny Hill Show or something. Right, so by this time, I can laugh just hearing Benny Hill Show.

By this time, the French and the British are coming up with their own Konkord. The Soviets have come up with their own. And the Americans are like, we're out. I think Congress funded a report saying like, how much is this thing gonna cost by the way? And got back the bill and we're like, no, we're not doing this anymore.

And they scrapped the Boeing, which is the 2707. Oh, is that what it was gonna be? Yeah. And I think they made hay about the sound and the noise of the sonic boom. That's supposedly why there aren't supersonic planes anymore. They're gonna be up there again though, I think.

Well, we would have to repeal a law in the United States that you can't have overland sonic booms from commercial airlines. And you get the same law in Europe. So there's two huge continental markets that are just, you can't service anymore because it's illegal to fly over them in a supersonic plane. That from what I understand is the true reason

why there's not Konkords any longer. Really, just the boom? Not just the boom. They're really expensive and money losers, but the boom killed it and it's kept it from coming back. Right. Have you ever heard of sonic boom? Yeah.

I don't think it's that bad. It depends on the sonic boom. I guess it depends on how big it is. I guess you wouldn't want one eight times a day over your neighborhood. Well, that's the thing. It's like, if everybody was flying supersonic, think about how many planes fly overhead of a place

where you live by the airport. Imagine each one having a sonic boom. No, that would get old, but I'm saying like if I'm at the beach and there's like an F-16 and I hear the boom, I'm kind of like, oh, that's awesome. Yeah, you like toast them with your beer. I love it when those guys buzz the beach.

Sure. Like send everything tumbling. It's fun stuff. Boy, should we take a break already? Sure. All right, let's do it. We'll describe what these things were right after this. Music

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles,

stuff you should know. Chuck, before we describe the Concorde, which I'm kind of excited about, we should say what happened to the Soviets' Concorde ski. So it very publicly flamed out and crashed at a Paris air show, killed everybody on board and killed several, I think, eight people on the ground at this air show, which air shows are super dangerous

to begin with. But apparently, and I saw footage of it, the Soviet pilot was basically flying a Concorde like a stunt plane and overstressed it, and it came apart in the air and just crashed. Yeah, that's not a good idea. No, it's not. It seems like, I mean, these things were definitely agile,

but they seemed the best use was to fly straight and fast and high. Right, and their performance at the air show followed the, I guess, the Air France Concorde, which just took off, did its thing, and then came back down like a normal flight. And the Soviets were trying to one up it, because again, this is the Cold War,

and France was friends with the US. Yeah, so look at me. This would get back to the Americans. Well, maybe we should talk about the other famous crash, too, because that had a lot to do with its ultimate demise. Like combined with many other factors that we'll get to, like you were saying,

the expense and the boom, but had it not been for the crash on July 25th, 2000, of an Air France Concorde flight from Paris to New York, it may not have been killed off as quickly. Right. So this one, it was flight 4590. It was a charter that, I think, had a bunch of mainly German tourists headed to a cruise

to depart from New York. And about five minutes before this thing hit the runway, there was a continental jet that took off, left behind a piece of metal that was about 16 inches long and about three inches wide, very small, no one caught it. And then this Concorde runs over this thing at like 370 miles an hour or something.

Yeah, which, I mean, we'll get to that, but those things were fast when they were taken off. Yeah, so who knows if it would have happened on a regular flight. And this thing popped up and it blew out a tire and disturbed the fuel tank. Yeah, well, the tire blew the debris into the engine and blew out one of the engines.

Yeah, and it ruptured the fuel tank, too. So fuel just comes spewing out of it. Okay, so, and there's a very famous picture of that Concorde taking off with just a trail of flames coming out of it. And you see it and you're like, wow, the Concorde was cool looking. And then you realize it's not supposed

to look like that at all. Yeah, 200 feet of flames. So we'll talk in a minute here about the weird fuel distribution in this thing, but it was about 1,800 pounds overweight at time of takeoff. They said that didn't necessarily have anything to do with the wreck, but because it was overweight, they had one of the fuel tanks, 94% full,

where otherwise it might've been a little redistributed. So that was most of the fuel at the time. Again, it probably wouldn't have mattered. Like any fuel on fire is not good. But what struck me was that it was on fire before they took off. Like they told them, you're on fire and you're still on the ground.

But apparently they were going so fast that it was too dangerous, like you couldn't stop the plane. Well, the reason that I saw that the pilot tried to take off even though he knew he was on fire was because he figured he could put the fire out just from the thrust up in the air, starving it of oxygen and basically blowing the fire out from the engine.

See, I saw that he couldn't stop because he was going almost 400 miles an hour and they had to go somewhere. Right. I also saw that had they not had more fuel than what they should have had, or had they not been overweight, they probably could have gotten aloft.

Right. And I think the flight engineer also shut down one of the engines inexplicably. So now they were down two of their four engines and they just crashed into a hotel. Right, which is remarkable that more people in a hotel than die. Yeah.

But I think only one person in the hotel was critically injured and then everybody on board died, the plane. Yeah. Which I mean, did it blow up into a fireball or something like that? I don't think so. Or did it just go in that fast?

No, I think they just crashed. I mean, I'm sure there was a lot of fire involved, clearly from that photo. Yeah. So continental and one of continental's mechanics were actually found guilty of manslaughter, but then it was later overturned. Oh, because of their debris.

In 2010, yeah. Interesting. They were exonerated in 2010 that really, that yes, that piece of metal did start the series of events, but had it just been the piece of metal and nothing else, they probably would have survived. They would have taken off

and then been able to come back in for control. I wonder if the airport was sued. I don't know. Because it's not the continental plane's fault necessarily. From what I understand, France sues everybody when there's a plane crash that has to do with France. They might sue us. Maybe.

About this. Right. All right, so you wanna talk about, all right, that was a tragedy. Well, so that combined with the memory of what happened to the Soviet Concorde really shook people's faith. Right.

But as we'll see later on, there were a lot of people who were involved in this project who, if they canceled it, would lose a lot of face. That I think hopped on the opportunity to be like, yep, concords aren't safe. We tried, we'll just scrap it. How about that?

Interesting. Yeah. This is a movie. Totally. What do you think? The Concorde, the movie with any. All right, so let's just talk about the plane and what made it different and special.

A normal 747, Boeing 747 goes about 560 miles an hour at just cruising speed at about 35,000 feet. The Concorde, its cruising speed was about 1,350 miles an hour at almost twice the altitude between 60 and 70,000 feet. Which is faster than the speed of sound. Yeah, by a long shot. I think Mach 1 is the speed of sound. This thing would fly at Mach 2 at cruising speed.

And 60,000 feet, that's 18,300 meters above sea level. Yeah. That's ridiculously high. You're basically kissing the edge of space right there. Yeah, it's not quite suborbital, but you're flirting with it. Right, so I was like, gosh, I guess it's about where Felix Baumgartner jumped

for that one stratosphere jump. Yeah. And he did that. Oh yeah. He jumped at twice that height, a hundred and I think 28,000 feet. Yeah. That's insane.

That guy jumped out of a platform skydive from that height. Yeah, that's almost so high that it's like, what's the difference between that and 60,000? Yeah, maybe. You know. I don't know. And he lived. He did live.

And he really pulled it out because remember he started to spin. Yeah, yeah. And they were worried he'd blacked out and he was done for. I bet he's not finished. No, I'm surprised he hasn't done anything recently. It's been long enough.

Yeah. All right, so let's talk about the design of this thing because you can't just like soup up an engine on a 747 and say, all right, now you can fly faster and higher. Right. Like this plane had to be completely designed for this purpose. Yeah, because again, 747, which flies pretty fast,

would just totally break up if you could somehow get it to the speed of sound. Because the speed of sound itself is really, really fast and it's a different type of flying just from the friction and everything in the air. Sure. But also to get to the speed of sound requires a lot of effort on your plane's part.

Yeah. Did you ever read the right stuff? No, I never read that. Tom Wolf did a great explanation of Chuck Yeager being the first person to break the sound barrier. Like no one knew what happened beyond this wall of air that forms at the nose of the plane. And Yeager felt like the plane was just gonna break

the pieces, but he just knew that if he just got on the other side of it, it'd be smooth sailing. He was absolutely right. Supersonic sailing or supersonic flight is smoother than subsonic flight. And it's definitely smoother than flying just below the speed of sound,

but it's just this beautiful description of Yeager doing it. That's awesome. Yeah, but the point is is to fly at supersonic, faster than sound speeds, you have to have a specialized plane, I think is what you were trying to say like five minutes ago. Sure, so we're gonna go through

each one of these sort of design features and one by one, starting with the fact that it was streamlined to begin with and it's designed. So like you were talking about that wall of air, in order to help punch through that, you have to streamline your plane and the Concorde had very famously, it just looked cool,

but it had a very specific purpose that needle-like nose on the front. That's to punch through that wall of air. Yeah, it wasn't to look cool. No, but it did look pretty cool. That was just a side benefit. And the plane itself was very sleek and needle-like too. Yeah, for sure.

The wings, it had what's called a swept back delta wings. So the wings were triangular and connected to the fuselage all along. So it wasn't just like a rectangular wing coming off. You've seen pictures, it's just like a big folded napkin, like a big triangle. Yeah, kinda. And for those of you not in the know,

a fuselage is like the main body of the plane. Right. Where the passengers go. That's right. And not many of them in the case of the Concorde. No, because it was much smaller width-wise than a 747. 747 is like 20 feet across. This was half that.

And so it would fit about 100 passengers in two rows of two with an aisle going down the middle. It was not a big plane, it was small. No, and apparently there was a bathroom in the middle. So it was sort of divided into two sections, but they weren't different. Like one wasn't first class and one was business. They were all identical,

but I had pulled some quotes from riders and one of the guys was like, but you still felt better if you were in the front, like you were a better person. Right. I guess, which is crazy. Yeah. Because you will die sooner.

Did we determine that at one point? Yeah. You're slightly more likely to survive in the rear of a plane crash. I think in the middle? Oh, the middle. In the rear of one of the two. Definitely not the front though.

No. So take that first class, snobs. Yeah, so nine and a half feet wide, 202 feet long, so it's a little shorter than a 747, but not much. No, not much. So it's just narrower and more streamlined. It's like a little dart,

just punching right through the air. Yeah. The other thing is the fuselage, like you said, the body and the wing, there was no space, like I mentioned. It was all just attached and the engine mounted, not on struts, but directly to the wing. So that was very different.

Yeah, that's one of the things that's like so iconic about the Concord's design is that it appeared to be like all one piece. Like the body just kind of moved out into the wing. The wings like dropped down to produce the engines and then dropped back or then went back up into the wing. It just looked super cool. And I'm sure a lot of it was aesthetics,

but even more so it was this thing has to have as few separate pieces as possible because more pieces means they could break up. You want to just basically be one solid plane. Yeah, and because of that wing design, it meant not only did you have reduced drag and better lift for takeoff and landing, but there was no horizontal stabilizer on the tail.

So when you look at a regular jumbo jet, you see like the horizontal piece of the tail goes up, then you have the two little tiny wings on that. They didn't have those tiny wings. So again, just kind of streamlined. Right, exactly. The nose itself too. So the wing, that's a pretty significant aerospace design.

I didn't realize that until it started popping up like in researching this again and again. That like, it's one thing to design a wing that can cut through the air at supersonic speeds, but you aren't gonna land or take off at supersonic speeds. So that wing has to do double duty. It has to be able to keep you aloft at supersonic speeds. It also has to keep you aloft at subsonic speeds.

So from what I understand, the wing on the Concorde was like a triumph of engineering. Yeah, I don't know about you, but I don't get scared to fly, but sometimes still when I look out and I see the wing wobbling and kind of flapping, I think, man, I wish more of that was connected to the plane. It just looks like more stable.

It looks like it's trying to flap its wing. Yeah, that always is disconcerting to me. I have to say, I have come so far with fear of flying. And I've thanked her before, and I'm gonna thank her again. Thank you to Yumi for getting me over my fear of flying because my life would be so much worse if I were still scared to fly. Well, yeah, and she was probably like,

dude, I wanna go places with you. You're gonna have to get over this, buddy. Yeah, I remember the days when you were the, what was it, the dark night of the sky or the black ghost in the sky? Oh, I'm glad you brought that up. Josh would wear a blanket completely over his head while you flew.

So it could be the black ghost or the red ghost or the gray ghost. It depended on the color of the blanket. Chuck, to my greatest may, I found recently that they washed those blankets maybe once every four flights, maybe once every eight flights. Did you think they washed them between every flight?

I thought it was new every time. I wouldn't have put it over my head if I'd known that God knows who did what into that blanket. Yeah. Did you know? I thought they were either single serve and then they like donated them. Or if they did rewash them,

then it certainly was not every flight. I wish you would have brought this up because I can still like taste old blankets in my mouth now. I think I'm hallucinating, but I can still taste it. It's the same, it's real to me. All right, so I believe before we got sidetracked a minute ago, you were about to say something about the nose tilting and moving.

Yes. So what's the deal there? Oh, okay. So the angle of attack? Yeah. If a plane's flying straight, we'll call that a horizontal angle of attack. Sure, call it getting there.

What is this, 90 degrees? What are you talking about? So what angle is this, 90 degree? Well, you're not saying an angle, you just have your arm out straight. Okay, so let's say a plane is flying completely horizontal parallel to the ground. Okay.

But it's flying forward. So if we pop it up, so the nose is up, it's flying at a steep angle of attack. Okay. I think if it's coming down really fast, it's also a steep angle of attack, but the concord is meant to come in so that its nose is popped up way higher

than like a 747 when it lands. Right. The angle of attack. The problem is, is because of that long needle-like nose, if you're a pilot, you can't see past that when you're flying or taking off because the angle of attack is so steep. So they actually designed the nose

to basically elevate downward to get out of their view when the plane was taking off or landing. And then before it went into supersonic speeds, it would pop into place so that it was a pointy needle. Yeah, so it actually, yeah, it moved in flight. And it also had a little visor on it because you're going so fast to, I guess just to break that wind over the window.

Or that bird. God, can you imagine what that thing did to birds it ran into? Yeah, no bird. No. Like a Randy Johnson fastball. Yeah. Do you ever see that?

Big unit. Wow, look at you. Sure. That's like, it's almost like when Emily throws out a sports fact every now and then. I was alive in America in the 90s. Everybody knew who the big unit was. No, that's true.

She was talking one time about, she said something about Ely Manning. It's like, how do you know Ely Manning? She's like, I know the Manning guys. She's like, one of them wears the orange outfit and one wears the blue outfit. At least she didn't say costume. I may have said costume.

Outfit, that's pretty good. You know who's got me and Emily combined beat is Hodgman. Oh, for sports? Yeah. Yeah. He's just willfully ignorant of sports. Yeah, although he has gotten into a thing here in his middle age where he will go to a sporting event

if someone offers him the chance. Oh, really? Because he just was almost more like a sociological experiment. Not like, ooh, I want to go root for the giants or whatever. Just like, oh, well, this is fascinating to observe. I want to count the number of hot dogs that are eaten. By Hodgman? No, just by everyone around him.

Oh, yeah, sure. All right, where were we? The visor and killing birds. So now let's talk about the engines. Okay. So those engines on a Concorde were, there were four engines, two on each wing. Rolls Royce's.

Yeah, Rolls Royce. How about that? How do you say the other company? You want to take a stab at it? I would say the S is silent. So I'm just going to go the Nekma Olympus or SNECMA. I would have gone with SNECMA. All right, maybe it's SNECMA.

It sounds like a skin condition. It does. So the Rolls Royce SNECMA engine were capable of 18.7 tons of thrust each, which I have no frame of reference for that. That just sounds like a lot. It does sound like a lot. And if it doesn't sound like a lot to prepare for this,

the four engines aboard the Concorde combined burned 6,771 gallons of fuel per hour. And not only that. Yeah, that sounds like a ton. It was, well, supposedly it took a ton of fuel per seat. That was the rule of thumb for the Concorde. Oh, like literally a ton of fuel per passenger. That's what I read.

Wow. And the fuel they used was kerosene, which is so redneck for like a British Airways, Air France joint thing. They were burning kerosene. Like Hank Hill City. Yeah. Well, that was propane, but still.

That's right. All right, so like we said before though, these engines were attached directly to the underside of the wing. There were no struts. I know when you're in a plane now and you just look at a normal jumbo jet, it looks like that engine is attached to the wing,

but it's part of the wing, but it actually is attached with these metal poles called struts. Right, which is fine for subsonic flight. Sure. Again, though, the engines for the Concorde, basically part of the wing. Right.

So that they wouldn't come off. And then the after burning, that is probably the coolest part of this whole thing to me. Yeah. The Brits called it reheating or having a wet engine. Yeah.

Really? I mean, it's like what an F-16 will do. If you want extra juice, you mix raw fuel, you know how you see like the red flame coming out of the back of an engine? Yeah. You actually mix raw fuel with that

after it's been burned once, just to juice you even more. Yeah, like the whole reason they have tests of your car's emission systems is because you don't burn all of the gas that you're trying to burn in your engine. Some of it escapes unburned or partially burned. What an after burner engine does

is it captures that exhaust and puts it through a second burner to get as much of that that what would have been lost energy from being lost and just giving it that extra boost. That is how it would reach supersonic speeds. And it would be so loud in there. Apparently when the after burners were on,

but in the British-French Concorde, you didn't have to have the after burners on all the time. In the Soviet Concorde ski, you had to have the after burners on the whole time. So it was like ungodly loud in the cabin the entire flight. That was another mark against it. Well, that's crazy because after burners are for like, even in fighter jets, it's like for minimal use.

But when you're like on the highway to the danger zone, that's when you kick in the after burners. Yeah. But it's just like every now and then to get more thrust. That is crazy. It's only meant to be for short bursts. From what I saw, they had to have the after burners on the whole time

to maintain supersonic flight in the TU-144. Is that right? Yeah, the Concorde ski. That is nuts. Well, no wonder it didn't work. Should we take another break? Sure. All right, we'll talk more about fuel and paint

right after this. Letting things with chug and chug. Chugging all the things that you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. All right, fuel and paint. What's the deal with the fuel? 17 fuel tanks, almost 32,000 gallons. Yeah. That's a lot of fuel. Yeah, and I think it does. I did see a ton of seat, which we'll find

made the Concorde really expensive to operate. Yeah. So that fuel, again, it's kerosene, which just blows me away. They had it designed really ingeniously. Because again, when you fly supersonic, all sorts of different things happen. And one of the things that happens is the balance of the plane that what you would call

like the center of gravity shifts backwards. And when that happens, it's tough to imagine because you think the opposite's going to happen. But imagine you have like a little dowel, a little stick balanced on your finger. If you move your finger further back along the dowel, you'll notice that the front of the dowel goes down. Because the center of gravity is further back,

its balance is further back. So that would happen when you hit supersonic speeds in the Concorde. Yeah, so in motion, that's called the aerodynamic center. I like center of balance, but that's fine. Well, I think that's the same thing, but in motion. Right, okay. I might be wrong.

And aerodynamically speaking. Yeah, so they had what they called, they had three auxiliary or trim fuel tanks. If you've ever been on a boat, a boat has a way to trim the motor. You might have trim tabs on it, or you might have a little button that makes your boat motor go up and down.

And that's to keep, you know, that's so you don't, you're not cruising along through the water with your nose way out of the water. You trim that thing and then it'll lower the nose a little bit. I had no idea that's what that was. Yeah, trim. So it's the same thing in this plane,

but they used fuel that they would shift backward and forward to level this thing out to find its aerodynamic center balance. Right, they would, if the aerodynamic balance, center of balance, was that what it was? Aerodynamic center, yeah. Like they could pump just as much fuel as it took to these empty tanks to balance the plane out

and make it fly perpendicular or horizontal parallel to the ground again, like they wanted to. And then when it was coming out of subsonic speeds, the opposite would happen. The center would move toward the front and the back would go up. So they would pump gas back to the other tank and level it out again, really ingenious stuff.

Yeah, just think of a seesaw. Yeah. And however many little kids you would need to put on there to equalize me. Yeah, because you're moving the fulcrum from different places. Yeah. That's just great.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. Way better than my stupid dowel on your finger idea. Well, imagine me on that dowel, same thing, broken dowel. Yeah. And that's when I mentioned earlier when it had that famous crash in 2000, 94% of its fuel because of, you know, they had to have it in a certain place for takeoff.

Right. It was all concentrated right there where that fire was. Wow. So bad news. Yeah. That's just bad luck. And then the paint was special paint even because crazily enough, this thing got super hot.

Right. They came up with a white, a shade of white that's like four times more reflective than the white you see on normal planes. Parisian white. Which apparently you look at the concrete and blind you on the spot. Yeah.

Yeah, Parisian white sounds pretty nice, man. It does. But they would do this to reflect heat and they wanted to reflect heat because they needed to get rid of as much heat as they possibly could. Because this thing would get really hot at the speeds it was going just because of the friction.

It's going through the air, air molecules in the air and the faster you go, the harder you run into these air molecules, the hotter things get. And the Concorde would actually, you could touch the windows from what I saw and they would be warm to the touch in flight. Whereas if you touch a window on a 747, you're freezing because it's like negative 60 degrees Fahrenheit out there.

It would get up to like positive 260 degrees Fahrenheit on the outside of the nose in particular of the Concorde. And that's despite the air temperature. Yeah. Which would be even lower or higher up, right? Right. Yeah, like negative 60. Yeah.

So in the end, the paint was about double, twice as reflective as any other jet. So that solved that problem. Yeah. Pretty well. All right, so I guess let's talk about flying on this thing. Like we said, it can only hold 100 people. Right, 100 wealthy, wealthy people.

Yeah, like round trip was 10 to 12 grand. And I don't know if we said this, like the allure of the Concorde was not just that it looked cool and it went like really fast. It cut the time to get from London to New York or Paris to New York, virtually in half. Yeah. Which is huge, like if you've ever made that trip,

it's just long enough to be, we started to get pretty uncomfortable. Yeah. So half the time, like three and a half hours basically from London to New York, that was a really valuable thing that people would be willing to pay for. And you had to pay a lot to get on the Concorde. I saw upwards of $12,000 round trip.

Yeah. Which, correct me if I'm wrong, but if that's like 1980 money, that's like 32 grand today. Yeah, and that's for sitting in what amounts to like a bucket seat. Yeah. Apparently the meals were very nice.

And the service was impeccable. Sure, and you felt special and- The lounges were, mwah. Did they have lounges? Yeah, they had special Concorde lounges. Oh, see, I didn't see anything but seats in a bathroom. Well, no, no, I'm sorry, at the airports. Oh, oh, oh, oh.

They had special lounges just for Concorde passengers. Yeah, they had to gussie it up, I guess. Yeah. They had a foot massage. Yeah. But I mean, if you're talking $32,000 round trip tickets, like you were sitting there rubbing elbows with like the world's elite and celebrities.

Yeah. And on one particular day in 1985, one of the people you might have been sitting next to was none other than Phil Collins. That's right. You wanna tell them about Phil Collins in the Concorde? Yeah, all right. I remember because I was watching Live Aid at the time.

And as if Live Aid wasn't a big enough, awesome thing to do on a, I can't remember if it was Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Tell the kids what Live Aid was. Oh, geez. We should do a Live Aid episode. Yeah, we should. Live Aid was a benefit concert

and not the first benefit concert, but the first huge multi-continental benefit concert. There was a Led Zeppelin reunion. It was that big, the first ever. Back when they hadn't been broken up for that long. Right. Which is crazy. Yeah.

USA for Africa, wasn't that what it was called? I don't know if it was, if Live Aid, I'm not sure if USA for Africa was different, but it was, they were basically trying to alleviate the droughts and the famines in Western Africa. Right, headed up by Bob Geldoff. For Eastern Africa, I'm sorry, yeah. Who very famously portrayed Pink in the wall,

the movie, The Wall. Oh, okay. You've seen that, right? Yeah, but I didn't know that was Bob Geldoff. Yeah, that's Bob Geldoff. Okay. In the movie, the character's name is Pink. Right.

Not in real life. Yeah. Everyone, I know that. Right. And he was the singer for, he had the big hit for the Boomtown Rats. No idea. I don't know why I don't like Mondays.

No. Yeah, it was Bob Geldoff. I thought that was an Elvis Costello song. No, Boomtown Rats. It sounds just like Elvis Costello, doesn't it? It sort of does. I never thought about that. I always thought that too, it was.

Yeah. All right, so we got Bob Geldoff. Okay. He put on this huge concert to help fund this charity for Africa, which we've mentioned before, was actually like a terrible move. It went straight to the warlords, remember? Yeah, it did.

I think in our famines episode, we talked about this. Good one. But it was such a huge concert that it took place at the same time in Europe and North America. Yeah. Like this concert spanned the Atlantic. Wasn't it in Philly? Yes.

Right. Philly and I believe London. Right, so that's the stage. It's the hugest thing ever. That's where Queen very famously just brought down the house at Wembley Stadium and one of the great performances of all time, many, many performers did so. And Phil Collins, as if that wasn't big enough,

was like, here's what I wanna do. I wanna play on both continents. I wanna do both of these shows. So he did. He did a show at Wembley Stadium. From what I understand, it went pretty well. Sure. And then he went to the, I think Heathrow

and hopped on a British Airways Concorde and flew from London to New York, took a helicopter from New York to Philadelphia. And I think he went on stage at one or 2 p.m. in London and he made it to Philadelphia on time to take the stage at I think 2 p.m. in Philadelphia. He time traveled? Yes.

Because that was the thing. The Concorde got you there so fast that it was less than the time difference between the East Coast of the United States and London or Paris. And so it was actually like a four-hour trip but there's a five-hour time difference. So you could actually travel back in time,

figuratively speaking, with the Concorde. And that's what Phil Collins did. So he went off a stage in London and then came on stage in Philadelphia. It was pretty great. Thanks to the Concorde. It was amazing. And they had a camera crew following them and stuff.

I remember seeing like, he's at the airport now and he's getting on the helicopter. It was a big deal. Yeah, and apparently Cher was on the Concorde. Who was? Cher with Phil Collins and he's like, hey, what's going on? And Phil Collins is like, oh, we've got this live aid thing.

She's like, what is that? And he told me. Really? She was like, you think I could come? He's like, yeah, sure, just show up. I don't know if she did show up or not, but she didn't know about live aid. Maybe she joined him.

Cher was probably like, why wasn't I invited? I would say that if I were Cher. Well, it's wrong with me. Yeah, she would have been like snap out of it to Bob Gelda. All right, so Phil Collins is on this plane. Through his eyes, this is what it looks like. You take off nose down, 38,000 pounds of thrust to get you going from zero to 225 miles per hour

in three seconds. That is mind boggling. Yeah, like you feel a little bit of like push you back in your seat on a regular plane, but not much. This is like you're sitting normally, you're back in your seat, like at the snap of a finger from what I gather. Okay, so Phil Collins' face is like smashed off

under the seat behind him. And he's like, what have I done? I should have never left Genesis. Yeah, I don't know about that. I don't know that he left Genesis. Now he just did his own thing. Yeah, that's right. Great solo career.

That's a good documentary too. That was a Genesis doc out a couple of years ago, yeah. Like it covers starts with the Peter Gabriel years? All of it. Yeah, it's good stuff. All right, so you're back in your seat. Phil Collins is drinking his vodka cranberry, sloshing all over his face.

They reached cruising altitude very fast and passed the sound barrier. The nose is up now and inside this is very clever. They had a display sign on what mock you were flying so everyone could see. Yeah, mock and altitude. Pretty cool. Yeah, and again, like the in-flight service was just bar none.

Like the cutlery was amazing. The food was amazing. The wine on board was amazing. The service was amazing. When you were on the Concorde, apparently, they would, you would leave with a signed certificate saying that you had been on the Concorde. That's pretty cool.

Like that's how important it was even to like the super rich and famous. And the whole presumption was is that the super rich and famous would pay to go on this flight and everybody else would just fly subsonic. But it was just too expensive even for the super rich and famous.

Yeah, and we didn't mention, even before you took off, I think the pilots made a bit of a show of it and they told everyone like prepare yourself. What you're about to experience is not like a regular flight. You're gonna be pushed back into your seats. We're gonna be going this fast, this soon

and everyone's getting all jazzed up. Because like, hey, this is awesome. We're all super rich and we're all going super fast. Then once you get up there and you look out the window, what do you see? Apparently you can see the curvature of earth. That's crazy. There would not be any flat earthers

had everybody ridden on the Concorde. If they were still around, you'd be like, no, it's round. And apparently you don't really feel the speed even when you're hitting. Like when you're cruising? Yeah, like even when you hit the speed of sound, it doesn't feel much different.

Although I did see it was very noisy in the plane. Because of the afterburners. Yeah, I mean this one dude, I got a bunch of quotes from people. He said it was more like office chairs, bucket seats, very small windows, very noisy, extremely noisy. But I challenged anybody that didn't have a smile

from ear to ear when they got on it. It looked like the seats looked like the bucket seats of a Ferrari. Yeah. Like an expensive sports car. They were a pollster that way. They looked like a sports car, very nice sports car seats.

But it was a plane full of them. It was really cool looking. Yeah, this one guy Fred Finn, international businessman apparently took 718 flights on the Concorde. I saw that. He holds the record, right? He's got to.

Yeah. He has 718 sign certificates that he was on the Concorde. So they definitely made it special for that price tag. About two and a half million people flew flights on the Concords. That's a lot for how expensive it was and the fact that it really just ran from 1970 to 2003. Yeah.

That's a lot of people. But it just, like you said, it wasn't affordable, right? No. So from the outset, apparently the Brits were like, oh my God, what have we gotten ourselves into? And I saw it compared to the Brexit of the time. That the politicians all knew that this was a terrible idea. It was just a huge money pit.

Right. But they pretended in public like it was going to do great things for Britain. And I think this was right before the European Union started. And I believe the Concorde actually was probably one of those projects that helped foster the European Union at the time. Because Europe was not that many decades away

from being ravaged by World War II. Oh, sure. And again, the Marshall Plan came along. And by the way, I have to say in the think tanks episode, apparently I said that the Marshall Plan was based on the New Deal, which is totally wrong. And I know it's wrong, but some listener wrote in and said, you were really wrong.

And I was like, I didn't say that and apparently I did. But I know that that's not the case. But the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe. And at the same time, it brought Europe together and helped foster the EU. But I think the Concorde was a project that helped bring the EU along. But it was a money losing project.

And the reason the Brits stayed in it was because they were afraid the French were going to sue them for even more money if they backed out. I love history, man. Yeah, and I think that was a money suck even at full capacity. But when you start having half full flights, you only have 50 people on a plane,

it was just blowing through money. Plus also, nowadays, if the Concorde were still around, there would be huge issues with it because it burned so much gas. Kerosene, sure. But it just burned through so much and created so much greenhouse gas and was just a polluting monster that if we had gone just to supersonic planes,

that would be an issue by now. Yeah, for sure. But yes, expense, the sound, the sonic boom, definitely got rid of it. But I think also, British Airways and Air France, the only reason they took these planes on is because they got them for free from their governments. Right.

Yeah, they bought them for a dollar or something. And there was this point where in the 70s, and I think again in the early 90s, where it really seemed like supersonic passenger travel was this nut that we were gonna crack. And it just went away. And the reason why Reagan actually wanted NASA to work on a transport plane that basically went suborbital

and could get you to Tokyo in two hours. That's crazy. It is crazy, but it's basically what Elon Musk is talking about with SpaceX. I think he says he could get you from New York to Tokyo in 39 minutes. But again, the environmental impacts, just the wastefulness of the fuel,

it's just mind boggling how inefficient it actually is. Yeah, and there's something about building something just for the super rich, that it's not like, it's not a great time for that. I think he said he could do it for about 20% more than an economy class ticket on a plane though. Really? Yeah, which would be pretty amazing.

Because he's a magician. Did you see the Dear Moon announcement last night? No. Oh, dude. What's this? He's building a rocket that, it's a transport like passenger rocket that will go past the moon.

Like it's a tourist trip past the moon. And this Japanese artist, no, he's a Japanese entrepreneur. Can't remember his name. He bought the whole, he bought all the seats. And he is going to over the next like five years, I think, before the flight, invite an artist from like nine different fields

to come with them, just on the premise that they go back and make something that they were inspired to make from the trip. It's like his gift to humanity, this art project that he's basically kind of clomping on to Elon Musk's BFR rocket. Well, sir, I think a podcast eloquently describing

that trip would be a great contribution. Yeah. Podcasting is an art. Yeah. Why not choose the most downloaded podcast in iTunes history to do that. Yeah. He'll be like, okay, sure,

but you guys have to choose which one goes. Oh, you could go. Oh, we'd flip a coin. We'd leave it to Javier Bardem to decide. Who gets the plug through the head? Yeah. So we had the famous wreck in 2000 and then finally in April, 2003,

Air France president, Jean Cyril Spineda, said, May 31st, we're shutting it down. And then I think on June 12th, they delivered to Dulles. That one, Air and Space Museum. That very first production Concorde that was delivered to Air France. Yep.

I believe October 24th, 2003 must've been the last British Airways flight then. Yeah, I guess they stuck around a little bit longer. You know, the Brits. You can also go to the Aerospace Bristol Museum. That one you can definitely get on board and wander around. Yeah, I saw a video of that.

In France, the Museum, Air and Space, Paris, Le Borgé, Intrepid Sea Air and Space Museum in New York apparently has one. That has a space shuttle too. Auto and Technic Museum, Cinshine in Germany and the Museum of Flight in Seattle, I think has one. Nice. All worth visiting.

For sure. It's neat. And you don't have to be like an aviation buff. You can just be inspired by that kind of thing. Yeah, can't wait to hear back from Carrie and see her first hand insight. Maybe I'll read that as a listener mail. Oh, that's a good idea.

She'll probably say the same thing, which is like so loud. So loud and cramped and there were a bunch of snobs on board. Bill Collins was crying. He was so, so scared. Okay, well that's Concords and it's done for now. Who knows, maybe they'll make a comeback

and we'll do a follow up. Agreed. If you want to know more about Concords, type that word in the search bar at howstuffworks.com and since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this one one I found in a stack that I meant to read a while ago. So sorry to Stefan if you've been waiting on this.

Hello, my name is Stefan. I'm 23 years old and I'm from Stuttgart, Germany. I started listening to your podcast because I want to improve my English for my bachelor's degree. That is a, that's hats off to you, Stefan. I love it. So I searched at Spotify for English podcasts

and I found a playlist with some of your podcasts. I found out that they were from 2009. It was so much fun to listen to these. They were about castles, ninjas and hiccup. And after listening to these episodes, I thought, hmm, they are from 2009. I don't think Josh and Chuck do these podcasts still today. Wrong.

But I searched and I saw that you still make podcasts and I was very happy. Right. That's the story, how I started to listen to you two guys and I found nothing that changed from 2009 to today. You make the same podcast the same way, so great. The greatest, it's true. I really like this guy.

Hope you read my email. Would be very glad with the best regards, Stefan. Stefan from Stuttgart. I love it, man. Thank you, Stefan, that's really awesome. That was great. That was really well written. Yeah, you're doing great with your English.

Coherent, everything about it. Couldn't have done any better myself. Yep, we understood that more than we understand Jerry on most days. If you want to get in touch with us like Stefan did and let us know how great we are and how good we're teaching you English, is that correct? Sure.

You can write to us. Well, you can hang out with us on social media. Go to our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com and you'll find all the links there. And you can send us an email directly. Just send it off to stuffpodcastandhowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say.

Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.