SST Flight Planning and Navigation: the first year's experience

Extract

Concorde has now been operating on routes both east and west of Europe for over a year and has become an accepted part of the international air transport scene. This paper examines these operations in the light of experience, with emphasis on navigation and operational planning. Of special interest is the way in which the triple inertial navigation system on the aircraft has been used to ensure accurate and reliable track keeping on complex routes. Concorde routes are constrained as much by political as by operational considerations and long term planning was necessary to obtain route profiles which gave the shortest distances and optimum acceleration/deceleration points.