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Old January 7th 06, 02:46 AM
clipclip clipclip is offline
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First recorded activity by AviationBanter: Nov 2005
Posts: 16
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Quote:
Originally Posted by aardvark
I sincerely hope that someone might be able to come to my aid in this very dark moment.

[...] for as long as the Concorde was in operation the RAF did not have a plane fast enough to catch it. [...] Has the Concorde ever, under any circumstances flown faster than 2333 km/hour?

Please understand that even a fraction would put me in the clear.
a tornado would have to be a LOT more speed than just a fraction of a klik to have any hope of catching it.

in a realistic intercept scenario, the tornado would have to be scrambled, climb to somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 feet and make up the time to climb which is at a much lower speed, and the time from alert to takeoff which is probably 3-5 minutes. in any case, by the time the tornado would be at the same altitude as the concorde, it might be as much as 10 minutes further from the concorde. that is about 400 kilometers further behind the passenger plane. even if the tornado flew 200 kph faster than the concorde it would take at least 1 hour to catch up to the plane.

i seriously doubt the tornado has enough fuel to fly for 2 hours at those speeds, and if it did, it probably wouldn't have enough to make it back to base since it would probably be over some ocean (since it probably wouldn't be authorised to chase it over eastern europe and asia). the only case where this wouldn't necessarily be true is when the concorde's projected track would be known well in advance. however aircraft that need to be intercepted rarely follow their intended flight plan.

the tornado would probably have to be 50% faster or more to have any hope of reliably intercepting the concorde. which it probably isn't.

so i' d say you win the bet.

cheers,

frank