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The engines on the Concorde were Anglo-French Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593, based on Bristol B.E.10 Olympus, an entirely British project, the second jet engin
by sofixa 3y ago
The engines on the Concorde were Anglo-French Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593, based on Bristol B.E.10 Olympus, an entirely British project, the second jet engine of its type in the world (preceded by a Pratt and Whitney).
Why would it be covered under American export restrictions?
- arethuza 3y agoI think that was the same engine as the Vulcan bomber - I can remember when I was 12 or so watching a Vulcan doing aerobatics above the small Scottish village where I grew up. A Vulcan being thrown about the sky is quite an impressive sight, but what I really remember was the noise.... Many years later I was sitting in the BA lounge at Heathrow waiting for a flight to Edinburgh and pretty much the whole room started shaking and a loud rumbling could be heard. Someone commented it was Concorde taking off... :-)
- sofixa 3y agoYep, it was the original use case, the Vulcan bomber's engine. > Many years later I was sitting in the BA lounge at Heathrow waiting for a flight to Edinburgh and pretty much the whole room started shaking and a loud rumbling could be heard. Someone commented it was Concorde taking off... :-) Unfortunately there was a v2 revision/refresh of the Concorde that implemented many small improvements, including reduced noise, but it never got off the drawing board due to poor sales of the original model, which itself was in part due to the Concorde world wide tour to prop up sales, which used an even louder pre-production model and left a bad impression.
- arethuza 3y agoThere was also the ear splitting noise of the engines but also what I have since learned was the Vulcan's characteristic "howl"... I have no idea what the aircrew were doing, apart from having some fun, possibly waiting to land at Lossiemouth or Kinloss...
- ethbr1 3y agoThis seems to be a decent approximation, absent the bone shaking that mics can't capture: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xJlsDiC9TBI&t=12s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xJlsDiC9TBI&t=12s
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ethbr1 3y agoBecause I'm still having my morning coffee and was too lazy to thresh through the morass of (EU + national + whatever the UK falls under now) regulations to see what the ITAR-equivalent would be. And so used it as a shorthand. Mea culpa. But I understand that the UK, France, and EU as a whole do regulate arms exports to some degree (at the very least, with sanctions).
- MichaelZuo 3y agoCan you link the regulation then? As far as I'm aware of UK laws there is nothing preventing the export this engine.
- ethbr1 3y agoYou'd have to go through it with a fine toothed comb and technical spec sheet on the engine, but the consolidated UK Strategic Export Control Lists. Dual Use List / Annex I, CATEGORY 9 – AEROSPACE AND PROPULSION https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1181396/uk-strategic-export-control-lists.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
- MichaelZuo 3y agoWhy do you believe there is one, if you haven't done the 'fine toothed combing' yet?
- ethbr1 3y agoBecause supersonic jet engines are on the list. Never said I didn't do the combing.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIt's unclear what your reason is for believing there's an actual, specific, restriction, in force against these specific engines. If you haven't read many of these types of regulations before, a general category that matches means very little. So is there some reason why you believe there is one?
- qubex 3y agoFun fact my mother was a teen in the 1860s and lived on a farm adjacent to the BAC facility where they were assembling and/or testing components and fondly remembers the time they powered up one of the Olympus engines “and blew out chicken hutch to smithereens and spread parts of it all over the field”. Apparently apologetic staff then helped collect the wreckage and round up the scattered birds (which, as I understand it, were unhurt by the event).
- creer 3y agoAmerican export restrictions rarely care about source and rarely care about how old something is. See for example shenanigans between Japanese and German machine makers and exporters about equipment useful to make submarine propellers. Technically it might not be "ITAR" - same result. The "why" is because they can.