With British Airways well on its way to completing Concorde's modification programme, BA Engineering technical and quality director Jim O'Sullivan is already turning his attention to the next Concorde issue - its life-extension programme. BA's current limit is 8,500 reference flights (calculated using a combination of factors including take-off weight and length of flight), while Air France, which has a much lower utilisation, has a ceiling of 6,700. BA's high-cycle Concorde has completed nearly 7,000 reference flights, and both airlines will have to look to extend these limits if they want to operate the bulk of their fleets beyond around 2006-08.
The study into the requirements for the first life-extension programme was completed by the manufacturers in 1995/96, and took the limit from 6,700 to 8,500 reference flights. That study cost BA around £6 million, and required a further £5-10 million investment in components, says O'Sullivan. "We tend to bite it off in 5-6 year chunks," says O'Sullivan, "so we need to start looking now at what's needed for the next extension."
O'Sullivan envisages an extension to around 11,000 flights, which would keep the aircraft flying until 2010-2015, depending on the utilisation the fleet achieves. He expects that the next phase, and the ensuing obsolescence programme, will require a bigger investment than the last one.
Unlike the 8,500 flight clearance, which only required an increased level of inspections, some "structural reworking" is likely, he says. An upgrade of Concorde's antiquated flightdeck instrumentation is not an option, adds O'Sullivan, as the certification issues would be "huge".
So passengers can again cross the Atlantic at Mach 2, and, if all goes well, continue doing so for at least another decade. But the likelihood that there will be a new design on the market offering comparable performance to replace Concorde by then still seems as remote as ever.
Source: Flight International
