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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

Or rather he doesn't. The entire article fails to explain what he did in any amount of detail.

IDK about the Concorde specifically, but the flight engineer mainly monitored a bunch of the aircraft systems, made sure they were all within normal parameters, monitored fuel usage and rebalanced the fuel in the tanks, in some aircraft they would operate the engine throttles/thrust levers on command from the captain.

Like the position of Navigator, they were made obsolete by greater automation, full authority digital engine control (FADEC), and similar technological advances.

I found it interesting that he described the job as requiring not only constant full attention, but constant adjustments. Like for the full 3 hour flight he has to be tweaking knobs and flipping switches without even enough free time to have a coffee. You would expect that once the aircraft is level and cruising the workload should be significantly reduced, but apparently not.

If you're around Bristol, UK, I recommend to visit Aerospace Bristol which has a Concorde museum and it explains the role of the flight engineers.

Rebalancing fuel tanks was a major thing in Concorde indeed. I don't remember details exactly, but to maintain the supersonic speed, Concorde needed to be in a certain position, and to maintain that position, fuel would have to be rebalanced regularly.

I'm pretty sympathetic to your case (I remember visiting Cape Canaveral and watching a replay of the countdown to a rocket launch in the control room, which was incredibly disappointing when they just flashed lights on the various consoles without explaining what happened at each). But to be fair, the article wasn't titled "what a flight engineer actually did on Concorde" and does give a flavour for the general feel of the role.

Concorde had 13 fuel tanks, but only four directly fed the engines, so they were constantly moving fuel between tanks. In addition, fuel was used to cool the aircraft structure because it got very hot from supersonic speeds. And fuel was also used to trim the aircraft pitch - if you were a little out, it increased fuel consumption, but if you were a lot out it would be uncontrollable. And of course all the changed constantly as fuel was consumed. So a key part of the flight engineer's role was managing fuel.

https://www.heritageconcorde.com/fuelgeneral

Due to the necessity of the article being intended for the "common public".

If you really want the technical details;

1) Flight Engineer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_engineer

2) Concorde specific (see Technical Section) - https://www.heritageconcorde.com/

3) Concorde Center Mid Engineer's Panel - https://www.heritageconcorde.com/mid-mid-engineers-panel

4) Concorde from the Engineer's seat (another Flight Engineer) - https://www.britairliners.org/airliners-article?title=from-t...

Half the article is listing out the flight engineer duties and why it was different on the Condorde versus other aircraft

There’s got to be a flight manual floating around for the Concorde that would outline each role.

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