Hello Spacehey!

Just like the title says, this blog post will be about airplanes ! ᯓ ✈︎

Passenger jets have been my interest for almost a month now, so it's a really recent obsession... I think I know enough about the topic to make blog posts about it though. Let's see if it lasts!
In the next blog posts I will be talking about some passenger jets, and only those I know more about ! :)
So fasten your seatbelts and let's begin!!

1. Concorde

Not my favorite model of airplane ever, but it needs to be mentioned ! This plane was one of the only two supersonic passenger jets to ever be built and used so far! Its only competitor was the Tupolev Tu-144, but despite it being operational earler than Concorde, it only performed 55 flights in total, while Concorde did around 50.000. Twenty have been built in total.

Created by the collaboration of two companies, one English and one French, Concorde was introduced in 1976 and stayed operational until 2003. In this period, it had only one major incident.

This plane could reach 2mach (more than 2000 km/h) in speed. This meant a flight from London to New York, which usually takes 8 hours with a regular airliner, would last only 3 hours!

The design is also the coolest ever I'm not gonna lie. It looks small for an aircraft that performs intercontinental flights, but it could transport around 100 passengers and it was extremely expensive. (over $10.000 on average in the 90s)

Its nose could be raised and lowered to let the pilots see the runway and it looked extremely cute in my opinion! It also was very loud because of its sonic boom. Overtime, ways to reduce the effects on the sonic boom while take-off and landing were developed, but the noise stayed.

Now it's retired, but there's a few airplanes still in museums and airports around the world. The biggest reason for its retirement was the cost for its mantainance and its fuel, which were also why the tickets were expensive. An astounding 17 liters of fuel was used per passenger!!! Following the Air France flight 4590 incident in the year 2000, the public's concerns about the safety of this kind of aircraft made it harder to keep it in service. Also, at the time it retired, almost all of the aircrafts were reaching 30 years of age.

It's last flight was performed on  the 26th of November 2003.

I'd like also to talk about Air France flight 4590 incident. I've watched some videos about it and done some research. This incident had 109 victims in the aircraft and 4 that were on the ground. All of the passengers and crew lost their life on this tragic incident.

I dont blame people that are scared to fly. I personally am not, despite being really curious about aircraft incidents. This specific incident is one that made me think a lot about the safety of airplanes and it's really chilling to think about.

It happened in France, specifically in the Charles De Gaulle Airport on 25 July 2000. Before concorde took off, another plane, a McDonnel Douglas DC-10 (it's an airplane I dont like huuuh) also took off from the same runway. It lost a small piece of metal, so small that it couldn't be seen by anyone in the large runway, but that didn't affect that aircraft at all and it was able to fly safely to destination.

When Concorde started speeding up for take-off, one of its wheels came to contact with the piece of metal and made the tire explode. The tire debris, due to the high speed of the wheel, hit and damaged part of the landing gear and caused the rupture of one of the fuel tanks. The fuel, leaking out, ignited and there was a fire. The plane was already too fast to abort the landing so it lifted off, but it soon lost control and, just two minutes after departing, it struck an hotel near the airport.

A small piece of metal. Not longer than your forearm. That's all it took for a huge plane to lose control.

Of course plane accidents are the scariest ever. I want to say they're really rare, but the end of 2024 and the start of 2025 isn't helping me convince you of their safety... sigh. 

Concorde remains one of my favorite planes though, it's really cool and kind of looks like a bird :>

first flight (despite the plane being on service since 1976, its first test flight was in 1969).

cockpit!

seen from underneath

Originally I was going to talk about more aircrafts but Concorde was already long to talk about so I'm going to make more posts in the next few days / weeks to talk about more aircrafts I like.

I hope you were able to read this far and you liked this blog post! See you next time :] - victor