Pictured is a 750 gallon tank and the concord had a fuel capacity of 31,500 gallons. Thats he equivalent of 42 of these tanks

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[–] 51 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Here's two pictures showing how the tanks were arranged:

There were actually 13 fuel tanks on board.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Just realized how many things have to work smoothly in an aircraft. So many fuel pumps and they all have to distribute the fuel correctly without failing.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago*

    By the way, those green "trim transfer tanks" were used to adjust the airplane's center of mass by pumping fuel forwards and aftwards.

    There's a phenomenon called "Mach tuck" that generates a large pitch-down torque as the plane passes through the transonic regime, Mach 0.8-1.5. The fuel had to move aft to compensate.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 week ago

    Funnily enough the volume of fuel is approx half the volume of the entire plane, and it uses fuel at double the rate of a 747.

    Engineering is awesome.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    Like most planes, the wings are mostly fuel tanks. https://www.heritageconcorde.com/fuelgeneral

    Your picture shows the scale quite well, actually. Imagine that girl sitting in the cockpit and then imagine the size of the barrel compared to that.

    Fuel is typically measured by weight in aircraft so "a full tank" might be different based on the density of the fuel.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago
    [–] 8 points 1 week ago
    [–] 4 points 1 week ago

    When flying this plane there must be a great moment where you've used up enough fuel that it feels insanely fast and light as a feather but not so much fuel that you're stressed about having enough to get home.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    Taking an absolute guess here..

    But could it be the difference between raw capacity (as shown in the tank image) vs compressed?

    My thinking here is from when F1 teams started chilling down the fuel to fit more in a tank.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    The gains from increased density were extremely marginal, but then again F1 is a marginal gains game. Maybe you could push a couple extra % more in some parts of the race to gain or secure track position but it wouldn't change overall performance. That's also why the FIA switched to fuel weight instead of volume.

    On a plane like this it wouldn't make a difference as weight is more important than volume.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    The FIA also added a temperature limit to reduce this effect that I was mentioning. I just did some slight research on it, looks like when it was at its most effective in the 80's, cars had a 195 litre tank, with fuel chilled to about -30c this allowed for an extra 10-12 litres, or about 6% increase.

    This change was huge in that era of racing, basically meant that drivers could stay at 100% pace for longer without nursing fuel. Coincidentally, when doing some reading on this I also found that apparently chilled fuel during the refuelling era of F1 also helped increase the flow.

    Anyway, that was my thinking originally lol, looks to be actually answered in the comments now though. Thanks for the reply!

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