An ordinary meeting of the Society was held on Wednesday 4th of November. The President was in the chair. He introduced the speaker, Mr Colin Hobbs, who spoke to the title: The SSTT: Supersonic Triumph and Tragedy – The story of supersonic flight up to Concorde..

The first time the sound barrier was broken the pilot died. The speed of sound is 770 mph. As the aeroplane gets faster the molecules of air are compressed and form a shock wave. He showed some impressive photos of this. There is kinetic heating and, for instance, Concorde generated a fuselage temperature of 174°C although the ambient temperature is -60°C at 60,000 feet.

Squadron Leader Martindale, a Spitfire test pilot, reached 9/10ths the speed of sound and described the plane shaking almost uncontrollably and noted that the controls reversed their action. The sound barrier was first broken in the USA in 1947. John Derry was the first British pilot to take off, break the sound barrier, and land again flying a DH 108 in 1948 [sadly he was killed when a DH110 broke up at Farnborough in 1952].

In 1956 a Government Super Sonic Air Transport Committee was formed and decided that Passenger SST was needed. This began the development of Concorde which eventually had its first commercial flight in 1971 seven years late. The escalating costs were such that Harold Wilson tried to cancel it in 1974 but relented under diplomatic pressure from the French. In today’s terms she would have cost over 1 billion pounds to develop. The main problem with SST was noise and fuel costs. Concorde uses 1 ton of fuel just to take off and her range was limited by heavy fuel consumption. The supersonic bang led to protests from many countries – including the USA, India and Malaysia - which severely limited the routes possibleand in particular prevented one to Australia. Concorde flew for 27 years and could have done another ten but her life was limited after the crash at Paris in 2000 and the fact that Air France was losing too much money and used this as an opportunity to stop flying Concorde. British Airways had always made a profit on her.

The future of air transport will be for suborbital flight which would mean reaching Australia in 3-5 hours.

There being no other business the meeting closed at 10.10pm.