MachineBuilding.North: Concorde fun fact No 6

Firstly, the speed at which the aircraft lifted off, which was considerably higher that contemporary airliners - by around 100kt. So new tyres were developed to cope with the speed.

Further, because of its high angle of attack on landing and to protect the airframe and engines in the event of an over-rotation, the undercarriage legs needed to be extra long for Concorde. This presented another challenge for the design team - such long legs wouldn't fit into the available space for the undercarriage bays, so a simple yet effective solution was found. As part of the retraction process, the legs used a clever mechanical design that saw them shortened before being folded away into the bays.

Come to MachineBuilding.North on April 10th and inspect Concorde G-BOAC at first hand. As well as taking in all the latest developments in machinery safety and advances in machine building and factory automation innovation, you can take a free of charge guided tour of Concorde.

And if you can tear yourself away from the interesting factory automation and machine building components being shown and demonstrated by more than 100 of the UK's top suppliers at MachineBuilding.North, you can also take a free of charge ride in the Concorde simulator.

To find out more and register for your VIP Visitor pass visit www.machinebuildingnorth.co.uk