How the Concorde Plans Were Secretly Given To the Russians (msn.com) 93
Today is the 20th anniversary of its last flight of the supersonic Concorde aircraft. It was faster than the speed of sound, travelling at speeds of 1,350 mph (2,170 km/h).
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared an article from the Telegraph: As the space race raged and dominated headlines, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were equally competitive about being the first post-war superpower to create a commercial jetliner that could travel faster than the speed of sound." Both started work on secret projects, at the same time that Britain and France — who were less hell-bent on imprinting their superiority on geopolitics, but blessed with many of the world's finest engineering minds — were in pursuit of the same goal.
It has been known for decades that the three-horse race wasn't run entirely fairly. While the Americans, with their colossal and largely pointless Boeing 2707, never got close to getting airborne (they scrapped the project in 1971), the Soviet-built Tupolev Tu-144 won the race in 1968. When it did, though, its design similarities to Concorde appeared to confirm suspicions that the blueprints might have been leaked by espionage. In the late 1990s, it was revealed that an aeronautical engineer codenamed Agent Ace was one such spy. Recruited in 1967, he allegedly handed over some 90,000 pages of detailed technical specifications on new aircraft — including Concorde, the Super VC-10 and Lockheed L-1011 — to the KGB, the foreign intelligence and domestic security agency of the Soviet Union.
The identity of Agent Ace is revealed in Concorde: The Race for Supersonic, a new two-part documentary by the UK public broadcasting station Channel 4.
The Telegraph adds: With the rich benefit of hindsight, John Britton isn't entirely surprised there was a Soviet mole in the factory. It was a long time ago, 1965, but something — or someone — at Filton Aerodrome seemed fishy. "We had dozens, maybe hundreds of people working on the project, and we didn't have enough permanent staff so we took on contractors, all sorts of characters," Britton says. At the time he was a 19-year-old apprentice engineer, working for British Aeroplane Company (BAC) in the design office for a supersonic, passenger-carrying aircraft. An aircraft that would, ideally, fly before the Soviet Union's competing effort did.
"There was one chap working there... He used to stay behind, he'd do a lot of overtime in the drawing library, taking prints off the microfilms of designs..." Britton, who is now 76, initially assumed the man — he thinks his name was George — was merely conscientious and needed copies for his work. He can titter at the memory now. "It was only afterwards, when the Soviet aircraft came out and it looked remarkably like Concorde, when we thought... 'Ah'."
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared an article from the Telegraph: As the space race raged and dominated headlines, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were equally competitive about being the first post-war superpower to create a commercial jetliner that could travel faster than the speed of sound." Both started work on secret projects, at the same time that Britain and France — who were less hell-bent on imprinting their superiority on geopolitics, but blessed with many of the world's finest engineering minds — were in pursuit of the same goal.
It has been known for decades that the three-horse race wasn't run entirely fairly. While the Americans, with their colossal and largely pointless Boeing 2707, never got close to getting airborne (they scrapped the project in 1971), the Soviet-built Tupolev Tu-144 won the race in 1968. When it did, though, its design similarities to Concorde appeared to confirm suspicions that the blueprints might have been leaked by espionage. In the late 1990s, it was revealed that an aeronautical engineer codenamed Agent Ace was one such spy. Recruited in 1967, he allegedly handed over some 90,000 pages of detailed technical specifications on new aircraft — including Concorde, the Super VC-10 and Lockheed L-1011 — to the KGB, the foreign intelligence and domestic security agency of the Soviet Union.
The identity of Agent Ace is revealed in Concorde: The Race for Supersonic, a new two-part documentary by the UK public broadcasting station Channel 4.
The Telegraph adds: With the rich benefit of hindsight, John Britton isn't entirely surprised there was a Soviet mole in the factory. It was a long time ago, 1965, but something — or someone — at Filton Aerodrome seemed fishy. "We had dozens, maybe hundreds of people working on the project, and we didn't have enough permanent staff so we took on contractors, all sorts of characters," Britton says. At the time he was a 19-year-old apprentice engineer, working for British Aeroplane Company (BAC) in the design office for a supersonic, passenger-carrying aircraft. An aircraft that would, ideally, fly before the Soviet Union's competing effort did.
"There was one chap working there... He used to stay behind, he'd do a lot of overtime in the drawing library, taking prints off the microfilms of designs..." Britton, who is now 76, initially assumed the man — he thinks his name was George — was merely conscientious and needed copies for his work. He can titter at the memory now. "It was only afterwards, when the Soviet aircraft came out and it looked remarkably like Concorde, when we thought... 'Ah'."
Espionage ain't what it used to be (Score:2)
Spies suck these days. You don't, for example, see the Chinese launching rockets based on the SpaceX's Raptor engine. During the Cold War, the Russians had exact duplicates of Intel chips and IBM computers. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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They were going to set up a first class only airliner with them, but the British and French governments said no.
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He sounds like a fun guy to have as an uncle!
The governments probably feared he would succeed where they failed.
It's far better for a bureaucrat to destroy a market than to encounter humility.
Look at today's SEC. SCOTUS is hearing a specific case this session where they did just that. One of many examples.
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The British and French Governments only failed with the investment. Concorde made buckets of money for BA before 9/11, Air France not so much as it wasn't flying on a lucrative route plus BA pulled out the stops to market, promo flights etc.
Air France/French Government decided to stop so Airbus duly fell into line and Maintenance Support was sunsetted. That meant BA could not fly anymore no matter what as Airbus inherited the maintenance support decades earlier.
Ironically Airbus and Rolls Royce still sit on
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I was cycling in the area 15-20 miles west of Heathrow Airport in summer 1986. At one point there was this really loud roar overhead, I looked a question at someone walking nearby and he replied "Concord, this happens twice a day here".
Noise regulations killed the VC 10 (slogan: "Swift, silent, serene"!) and I believed at the time that the only reason Concord was still flying was that two governments had an interest in the aircraft. I mention the VC 10 because I lived near Heathrow 45 years ago (nowhere n
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Re:Espionage ain't what it used to be - patents (Score:1)
Ironically Airbus and Rolls Royce still sit on lots of patents especially around the clever engine ramp door systems which was made Concorde really possible.
Since the Concorde stopped flying in 2003 and French patents are good for 20 years, you would think they're not sitting on many patents any more.
Re:Espionage ain't what it used to be (Score:4, Informative)
It was never going to happen - Airbus had given notice of maintenance support withdrawal so no Concorde anywhere was going to fly again after that no matter how much money was flying around. Air France and the French Government didn't want to fly them anymore and in BA there was a strong movement with the same opinion although Concorde also had it's vocal supporters.
It's the same story for Branson's stunt : he knew there was zero chance of it happening.
Plus you would need Concorde rated Pilots, Cabin Crew, maintenance engineers : you would need to headhunt from BA or Air France.
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Apparently the crews who flew the planes were keen as mustard to carry on though, so getting experienced staff wasn't the problem.
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True but being keen and then stepping away from BA/Air France and their [then] generous salaries, pensions etc would be a big step.
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I think there was more too it than that. BA and Air France are Virgin Atlantic's rivals, and VA has been trying to position itself as offering the kind of luxury service that BA and AF pride themselves on for years.
Anything that made Virgin look more like a serious, established, high end competitor would have hurt BA's business. Even if Virgin only did one supersonic flight a week, the fact that they were doing it would have been a big PR coup.
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So what you are saying is that the elites didn't find this service valuable enough to continue. Trying to sell it to the masses was a no-win situation as the masses don't have the kind of capital needed to keep such a plane flying.
Re:Espionage ain't what it used to be (Score:4, Informative)
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Recommended reading: history of that aircraft. The licence came as a result of extensive PRC spying and copying efforts, which lead Russian Federation to basically conclude that "either we licence it and get at least some money, or they just make it on their own in about five years and we get nothing".
Re: Espionage ain't what it used to be (Score:2)
And several uniquely Chinese artificial islands in the Pacific are sinking less than 8 years after they were built, partly because in order to build them they had to dredge the sea floor and destroy massive amounts of coral that was previously keeping it stable, not to mention killed off a vast ecosystem that sustained a lot of the fish in the area that they wanted it for, which they're going to kill off in a uniquely Chinese way.
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Still a right choice for them to make those though. They view it as an existential necessity to have the tools to finally break through the first island chain. Something that has historically constrained China from being able to trade with the world throughout the history of Middle Kingdom.
"Costs do keep some dredging going" and "oh noes the environment" are irrelevantly small prices to pay for having functional ports and bases that allow for pushing out into the first island chain.
Re: Espionage ain't what it used to be (Score:2)
Destroying their own EEZ in the process, which is the only thing they'll ever have guaranteed access to. More than that, nobody actually observes China's claim to the area.
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Most of international law is customary. Whatever you establish as a custom is what international law is.
In this regard, PRC is doing great. Almost all smaller nations in the region are slowly bending, with a couple already broken.
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Certain things aren't really complex enough to clone, someone merely needs to buy one and x-ray it.
Like cloning the 8080/8088/8086/80286, or 68000, or the 6502 was always a guarandeed thing, and in fact the cloning of the 6502 by Russia or China is why all the NES and Apple 2 clones exist in the first place. This is pretty much why "microcode" exists now, because without the microcode, the chip's bugs will be exposed, and a clone is never going to fix the bugs, and won't be fixed by microcode firmware, sinc
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I thought one of the reasons behind Microcode use was the Pentium FDIV bug [techradar.com]. (btw, that article I've linked reads like a P.R. piece for Intel).
Re: Espionage ain't what it used to be (Score:2)
Microcode is actually very old and existed in the 8086 already: http://www.righto.com/2022/11/... [righto.com]
"I think his name was George" (Score:1)
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What isn't that guy into?
How the Concorde Plans Were STOLEN By Russians... (Score:3, Insightful)
You misspelled the title.
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In the context of everyone was doing it. The French caused the Russian supersonic passenger aircraft Tu-144 to crash at the Paris Airshow, by flying a military jet equipped with a camera too close to it. In an effort to obtain details of the Soviet design, they caused the Soviet pilot to take evasive action and lose control.
Like Concorde, the Tu-144 was not a very stable aircraft at lower speeds.
As is always the case, everyone spies on everyone else, industrial espionage is rampant. France and the UK are ju
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Marking your work to prevent copying (Score:2)
Re:Marking your work to prevent copying (Score:5, Interesting)
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Even legitimate clones of products have to be bug-compatible, because in any sufficiently large installed base, there's going to be some use that (usually inadvertently) depends on a bug being there.
Related: When I worked at HP, every now and then a customer would get tripped up by upgrading to a new CPU that had a bugfix that broke their code. All we could do was tell them to pay more attention to the release notes. The same thing happened with software upgrades, but it was much easier for customers to fin
Re:Marking your work to prevent copying (Score:5, Informative)
You might find this message amusing:
https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/c... [fsu.edu]
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Where does it say that?
EMT64T was Intel’s implementation of AMD’s AMD64 architecture. [stanford.edu]
Intel to Introduce CSI to Counter AMD’s HyperTransport [osnews.com]
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Some mappers did the same, introducing fictitious roads in areas where only locals drove and they didn't need maps anyway. I fell foul of one of those once, it was in the mountains on the NC / GA border and my Rand McNally told me there was a road there, a road which turned out only to exist on paper. There were some unpaved forest tracks and one of them went more-or-less the same way. That road was no longer there in their edition one or two years later.
The worst example I have been exposed to was in th
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In the 70s and 80s this kind of thing was rife, and it was usually Intel being copied.
Much of it was legal too. AMD licenced Intel's designs, as did NEC. Intel actually sued NEC, but lost. NEC had been producing better versions of Intel's CPUs, with more efficient designs (fewer cycles per instruction) with the "V" series, starting with the V20. The V30 made a popular upgrade for 8086 owners, as it was 100% compatible and could be simply dropped in for a nice 20-30% speed boost.
The Zilog Z80 was also ripped
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AMD clarifies cross-license with Intel [kitguru.net]
The TU-144 was just incredible (Score:5, Informative)
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If you've ever been inside a Concorde (I have) you'll realize how unfathomably small it is. Anyone around 6' tall would have to bend over just to walk down the middle aisle. If you had a window seat the bulkhead was inches from your head.
The only thing big about the Concorde was the cockpit, and that was plastered with banks of switches and dials.
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you'll realize how unfathomably small it is.
Yep. I never flew on one, but I've stepped inside the one at the Seattle Museum of Flight. I'm 6'2 and it's a tight squeeze.
Re: The TU-144 was just incredible (Score:1)
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The data they got about Concorde likely came too late to have much influence on the design of the Tu-144. The main issue it had was the lack of good engines - it had to use afterburners to sustain Mach 2.2, which made it extremely loud in the cabin. Concorde didn't need them.
Another issue was that the USSR couldn't buy a suitable avionics package, so had to develop their own. They couldn't buy the same one that Concorde used due to export restrictions on the technology, as it could also be used for military
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For how bad it was. The soviets got handed tens of thousands of detailed plans for this airplane. The TU-144 should have been a leap over the Concorde; they didn't have to invest R&D dollars into the basic design so they ought to have been able to have invested in significant improvements. Instead, it was perhaps the most hilariously awful airplane in commercial aviation history. The Wikipedia article about this shitshow of an airframe reads like a dark comedy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Russian Aviation, particularly their commercial aviation was one long story about how bad it was. They weren't even flying jets with high-bypass turbofans until the 1980s (the B747 was flying them in 1967), the IL86 was akin to an Airbus or Boing from 20 years previous, not just with the engines but aerodynamics and avionics. There was some wisdom keeping the T-Tail design on the old Tupolevs because of the number of poorly built/maintained airports in the Soviet Union but they were still antiquated designs
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I liked this tidbit:
" ...
Tu-144 pilot Aleksandr Larin remembers a troublesome flight around 25 January 1978. The flight with passengers suffered the failure of 22 to 24 onboard systems. Seven to eight systems failed before takeoff, but given the large number of foreign TV and radio journalists and also other foreign notables aboard the flight, it was decided to proceed with the flight to avoid the embarrassment of cancellation.
With the accumulated failures, an alarm siren went off immediately after takeoff,
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You've no doubt heard the saying that adding more engineers to a late project just makes it later. I imagine that this must have been similar, but without the benefit of the original engineers who understood the design.
It's actually incredible that the TU-144 got off the ground at all.
Imagine what being on that team must have been like. The senior engineers are pissed off because they're using someone else's design. They are probably trying to influence it at every opportunity they can to satisfy their eg
It Didn't Work Out Too Well For Them (Score:5, Informative)
While they might have stolen the plans, they were unable to gain any real advantage from that. The Tupolev Tu-144 [wikipedia.org] had serious reliability problems and that, coupled with some well publicised [wikipedia.org] and fatal [wikipedia.org] crashes, led to it being withdrawn from passenger service in 1978.
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More realistically, there just wasn't much demand for what it offered. There was no high value in flying Communist Party apparatchiks a little bit faster across the huge nation at a massive added cost of not just the aircraft, but much higher quality runways it required. Soviet transport aircraft kept the oil and gas industry expansion into northern Siberia, and those missions had to be flown from austere airfields, so almost all of their pasenger and transport aircraft were designed to be able to operate i
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To be fair, Concorde was never a commercial success and a waste of money for France and the UK. There was some prestige in developing it, somewhat marred by the fact that the Tu-144 went supersonic 4 months before Concorde did, but it ended up just doing trans-Atlantic crossings and offered very little benefit to either country.
In other words, the basic concept of a supersonic passenger airliner was flawed. Perhaps now, with reduced noise and better fuel efficiency, it could be made to work. Back in the lat
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Back in the late 60s/early 70s though, it was never going to be anything more than flag waving for the countries developing it.
Hindsight is 20/20.
The concorde was in development concurrently with the 747.
Broadly speaking the plane both were looking to supersede was the 707. For that and the related generation of planes, efficiency was a problem. There were multiple solutions, one was to push up the thermodynamic efficiency of the engines by raising the overall pressure ratio, the other was to extract more e
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Perhaps, although I think the high cost of supersonic flight was well understood at the time. The expectation was that some people would pay more for the shorter travel times, but then it got banned from many of the routes they were expecting to serve.
The bans and fuel price increases are not foreseen.
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Weren't London-New York and Paris-New York routes profitable in their heyday? I recall that it was the tail end of the Concorde's life cycle where profitability fell off, as higher bypass higher reliability engines came online, allowing the same crossing subsonically much cheaper than previous generations of subsonic aircraft allowed for.
I.e. subsonic aircraft got so much better while supersonic Concord stayed mostly the same so the difference in route servicing cost through subsonic and supersonic means go
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Neither BA nor Air France will say, but it's generally thought that Concorde never made any money.
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Are you citing modern high bypass engines, or original low bypass ones? Because modern 747 engines have no real commonalities with original ones beyond both being turbofans.
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More realistically, there just wasn't much demand for what it offered.
Well, that wasn't just the Soviets, though. The 50's and and the 60's was an era where people on both sides of the Iron Curtain had incredibly high hopes for technology giving us "space age" improvements in life. In JFK's Camelot, everyone thought we'd be flying at Mach 3 and vacationing in space station hotels in 10 years. Instead, the 70's became the decade of disappointment, as we learned that we COULD be supersonic airliners and space station hotels, but that they'd be a pain in the ass to use and too e
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This isn't really new. We're in the middle of the same excitement about "greentech" which is currently running into the wall of cost yet again as seen increasingly at the polling booths across the West.
I think it's necessary though. If you don't dream big, you can't explore potential paths forward for the realistic small gains. The biggest thing that needs to be done during the dreaming is limiting the damage of investing too much into "the dream" to the point where it becomes counterproductive. We need to
Strange tone (Score:4, Insightful)
Britain and France — who were less hell-bent on imprinting their superiority on geopolitics, but blessed with many of the world's finest engineering minds
I'm not sure what's with the snarky tone here, or almost apologetic that Britain and France produced a supersonic passenger jet while the United States did not. The reason the Boeing 2707 was wisely canceled is because there was no large scale commercial market for supersonic passenger jets. They were incredibly fuel inefficient, generated much more pollution, and the real deal-breaker was the sonic booms when flying supersonic. There's a reason there never was a massive fleet of Concords flying all over the globe - there wasn't a market for it, and it wasn't practical or economical.
Regarding the United States, they produced the first supersonic aircraft, and had a wide variety of supersonic aircraft prior to the Concorde, including the XB-70 Valkyrie [wikipedia.org]. That bomber flew 5 years before the Concorde, and was a similar size, although it could fly much faster than the Concorde (exceeding Mach 3). It certainly was not lack of technical prowess that Boeing did not produce the 2707. That was apparently an era when Boeing had more responsible leadership that could make good financial decisions.
Re: Strange tone (Score:2)
Maybe there is room for a companion article entitled How the Miles M.52 Plans Were Openly Given To the Americans?
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Your comment is mostly right, but it wasn't Boeing's responsible leadership which cancelled the 2707. It was the US Congress which responsibly pulled the plug on taxpayer funding of the project. The whole thing was a taxpayer funded boondoggle with a design competition between aircraft manufacturers and everything, just like a regular military acquisition program. I don't know if Boeing had any of its own funds in the project or not, but it was over when federal funding ended.
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Maybe, maybe not. [theaviationgeekclub.com]
Re: Strange tone (Score:2)
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The tone is a function of the necessity of various Europeans to downplay and degrade US technological and cultural superiority, to make themselves feel better. Same thing they did with the Concorde- a vanity project that made them feel better about not being able to compete in space technology.
Note the toss-off sentence about "world's finest engineering minds" which hasn't been true in any practical sense since the death of James Watt.
Give Russians anything, they'll still fuck it up. (Score:3)
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The Soviet "space shuttle" Buran ("blizzard/snow storm") was a successful implementation, that added automated takeoff-to-landing.
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"Give Russians anything, they'll still fuck it up"
Like Sputnik. And Vostok. And the first space station. Not to mention, going back even further inventing minor things like, oh, the periodic table of elements.
We know you hate the Russians. A lot. You've made that explicitly clear in post after post after post. But this bullshit is just petty.
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Yes, exactly like that. Both sides of the Cold War received the same German rocket technology. How's the Russian space industry doing these days? How about the American one? Interesting how the results have been Night and Day.
So.... (Score:2)
Let's figure out who it was....and execute him.
Pretty sure espionage for an overtly hostile foreign power is still a capital offense?
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Death sentence for all offences in the UK was removed some decades ago including Treason.
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Start with this guy. https://abcnews.go.com/US/afte... [go.com]
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Read your own story:
"While Pratt told investigators he couldnâ(TM)t tell if what Trump said about U.S. submarines was real or just bluster, investigators nevertheless asked Pratt not to repeat the numbers that Trump allegedly told him, suggesting the information could be too sensitive to relay further, ABC News was told."
1) hearsay
2) it could have ENTIRELY been lies. Even the target couldn't identify as true or not.
3) if it's true, the idea that the investigators essentially confirmed it would implica
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Pretty sure espionage for an overtly hostile foreign power is still a capital offense?
You can check here https://assets.publishing.serv... [service.gov.uk] that Britain ratified protocol 13 of the European Convention of Human Rights abolishing death penalty in ALL circumstances.
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As noted above, the Soviet version was a vanity project with no real commercial use - flying people around Soviet countries just wasn't much of a thing, and they didn't have the runways to do it either. The commercial case wasn't exactly rock solid in the west - and we had a lot of people travelling over a large body of water on a regular basis.
We'll never know, but this whole thing _could_ have been orchestrated - hand the Soviets the plans, let them make it, let them spend the money and then realise it's
The story is even juicier than that (Score:1)
Also the other way: Lucas Aerospace. (Score:2)
Lucas Aerospace worked on the engine control system for the TU-144, which meant getting a lot of information about the Russian engines, which, like Concorde's, were very similar to engines used in military applications (the Vulcan bomber in the case of Concorde).
since when Telegraph became so goofy? (Score:1)
KGB, the foreign intelligence and domestic security agency of the Soviet Union.
Thanks for clarification.