
Originally Posted by
Ted Striker
To add to what summit said, you can't really do the math that way because the Concorde's fuel burn was constantly changing. Taxiing from the terminal burned ~1000-1500 Kg (pilots measure fuel by weight and time, not gallons or liters). That's a huge number for so few passengers.
The fuel consumption at take-off power was something like 80,000 kg/hr, and would increase to around 100,000 kg/hr by V2 (speed) -- to put that into perspective, if at that point the pilots decided not to bother climbing any more, and just joy-rided around at that altitude instead, they'd run out of fuel in about one hour. As summit said, reheat is a bitch for efficiency. It gave them ~20% more thrust for take-off with an ~80% fuel hit.
Long way of saying that you can't say fuel flow per hour times hours on that airplane.
I always wondered why they didn't just get a tow out to the runway, fire up the engines, and then go throttle up to save some gas. This also begs the question of why no catapult to get things started. I mean it doesn't need to be USN carrier G force type catapult thrust. I guess old biz jet fliers would probably end up dying of heart attacks at take off.
"We don't beat the reaper by living longer, we beat the reaper by living well and living fully." - Randy Pausch
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