Do you remember when Concorde rudders kept breaking off?

On Wednesday, 12 April 1989 the people of Sydney, Australia were looking forward to a rare visitor. A supersonic Concorde was visiting on an around-the-world charter. Who knew this arrival would become infamous as the first of the Concorde rudders to break apart in flight.

After this first incident, an inspection and repair plan was put into place to prevent it happening again. Amazingly, it happened several more times after this, in spite of all the efforts to stop it occurring.

Concorde Rudders

Concorde’s rudder is in two pieces, one at the top and one at the bottom. According to pilots, the rudder is not really used all that much during flight, but is needed in any kind of asymmetric flight conditions, such as when one engine is shut down.

Other aircraft have a similar setup, so this configuration is not unique to Concorde by any means. It turns out it was a good thing to have this kind of design.

Rudder Failures

When Concorde G-BOAF arrived in Sydney, people were stunned to see the top part of the rudder missing. It had disintegrated during the flight from Christchurch. It had to visit a hangar Down Under for a couple of days until a replacement could be sourced, before continuing on its voyage.

A programme was put into place to repair the rudders after this incident. Amazingly, the rudder of G-BOAB failed in almost the exact same way on 21 March 1992. What was noteworthy about this was that this rudder had only been repaired and re-fitted in November of 1991, a mere four months earlier. Despite an in-depth investigation, the accident report was unable to come to a firm conclusion. It did note “the balance of evidence pointed to possible accidental ingress of preparation materials into the core during the course of the major repair performed 254 flight hours before the failure.” Luckily for British Airways, Air France had some spare Concorde rudders they could donate to help out a friend. Well, not so much – BA had to lease the part from the French – I wonder how much that cost!

More Rudder Failures

There were more instances of rudder failures. British Airways had incidents on G-BOAC on 8 October 1998 and G-BOAE on 27 November 2002. Air France experienced their first one on F-BVFA on 25 February 2003. This happened when the aircraft had a similar number of hours flown to the original BA failures.

Concorde finished its commercial service life that same year, so it seems the issue was never truly put to bed. Luckily it wasn’t really much of an issue, though countless hours were spent trying to solve the problem.

Overall Thoughts

As aircraft are manufactured by human beings, they all have niggles from time to time. The Concorde rudders failing, while not particularly dangerous or common, certainly gained a lot of attention at the time.

The supersonic jet was very high profile and the first instance was major news in Australia at the time. I remember it well! Did you know about these issues with Concorde? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

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Featured image by Harm Rutten on Airliners.net.
Split rudder via Heritage Concorde.