Quite right. I was thinking only of fighters. My error.
IIRC Concorde’s ability to cruise without reheat was a bit marginal. They’d use it to get to speed and altitude and then hang there at near max dry thrust. Turbulence or unusually hot temps at altitude would have them tapping reheat every few minutes to reboost speed.
As the Lightning, it did have reheat and used it. I don’t know whether it or couldn’t could break the Mach with dry thrust. In level flight of course. Even the lowly T-38 could exceed the Mach in dry thrust if you point it downhill a bit.
Adam Savage of the Mythbusters went up in one during an episode that ran a few months back. Not so much mythbusting (officially, the myth was that the U-2 is the hardest plane to land) as “Holy **#( this is so cool that the USAF is letting us do this.”
You may well be right, I’m no pilot. Is there much turbulence at the typical cruising height of a Concorde?
It could - the first prototype managed it in 1954. It was a mad thing in general though - shoot off on a crazy fast intercept course, attempt to fire something at incoming Russian bombers and presumably try to ram one as there’s no more fuel left to get back to Blighty.
At Concorde altitudes both turbulence and odd temps were rare. But when they occurred, it really hit 'em in the 'nads. The airplane was a remarkable achievement. Which also means it was pushed against the edge of what it could do rather more than more prosaic designs were/are.
Lightning: The late 50s and early 60s were a magic time in aviation. And I was a wide-eyed gradeschooler. An awful lot of amazing records were set. The Lightning was definitely a world leader in several performance categories. A side effect of the pell-mell race to the future was that an awful lot of one-trick ponies got built. By everybody. The design byword of the day was “Sacrifice everything to achieve maximum X” for whatever X.
The 70s were a time of realizing that as between blazing speed and crappy radar or awesome radar and pretty slow, the actual tactically best aircraft was mediocre at both. Machines with balanced capabilities are the real winner.
Then stealth was invented and the F-117 was back to “Sacrifice everything to achieve maximum X” for X=low RCS.
And what we’re seeing now is them driving back towards balance as advancing tech lets you get by with lesser collateral sacrifices (except of development time and taxpayer money).
I can’t remember where I read it but I saw an analysis comparing the U2 and the SR-71 and showed that due to the SR-71’s speed and capabilities compared to the U2 saying that the blackbird was too expensive was sort of misleading. It could cover so much more land so much faster that it really was the less expensive option.
Also have you ever seen how hard a plane the U2 is to fly on MythBusters? After seeing that I seriously doubt you’d ever have landed one on a carrier. You can’t even land it without a chase car telling you how.
