Condition is actually set to "Used". So this technically violates eBay policies, as the seller should have explicitly mentioned "For parts only". Whoever bought it can now file a SNAD case with eBay and likely get his half million pounds back.
Same, I'm using Firefox and unlock and didn't get this message either. Btw it reads even better in reading mode. Can you imagine needing a mode for reading for stuff that's actually meant to be read?
There's probably a lot covered by ITAR in a 78-year-old atomic bomb. For better or for worse, ITAR isn't specifically about new technology secrets, it's about information and material with military application. You can't sell a US WWII tank without rendering its main gun inoperable to a civilian, much less a foreigner. That's not because ITAR is worried about foreign governments reverse-engineering that gun.
Afaik, there's surprisingly little about the atomic bomb construction that's covered by export restrictions.
Fissile materials, ofc.
But the US government took the approach that "secret is better than banned" with the bomb, and just never stated any of the details (as they would have been required to, in order to prohibit them).
> You can't sell a US WWII tank without rendering its main gun inoperable to a civilian, much less a foreigner.
You actually can sell a tank with a working cannon (to a civilian in the US, foreign national or not) if you have at least a Type 09 license to deal in destructive devices and the buyer has a destructive device permit. To export it would be a lot harder (and getting the aforementioned permits is no joke either).
Hmm, seems like they missed licensing "Collector of 'Destructive Devices'." Maybe that's the invisible Type 9¾?
Types of FFL:
Type 01 – Firearm Dealer/Gunsmith
Type 02 – Pawnbroker
Type 03 – Collector
Type 06 – Manufacture of Ammunition
Type 07 – Manufacturer of Firearms
Type 08 – Importer of Firearms
Type 09 – Dealer of “Destructive Devices”
Type 10 – Manufacturer of “Destructive Devices”
Type 11 – Importer of “Destructive Devices”
There's basically two main classes of destructive devices: explosives and firearms with a bore over half an inch. The permits for the former are mostly issued to demolition and mining and it would be insane to allow anyone to "collect" explosives that degrade and become unstable.
You don't actually need either the FFL or the permit if you just decommission the main gun, which is how most tank and artillery collectors get theirs. DD permits are rarely issued for explosives without a good reason (like construction or mining) so even if you get the permit for the gun, you'll struggle to get one for the shells.
Sure, but one would expect that any country whose military was a credible threat wouldn't be 50 years behind on any technology, and therefore would have independently invented something equivalent, or at least have all the knowledge/technology to be able to.
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?
I 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... :-)
Yep, 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.
Because 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).
Because the exclusions are written around civil air certification, of which there are many subsonic examples but few (any?) supersonic examples.
Consequently, it's likely other clauses otherwise targeted to military-only powerplants might apply to the Olympus 593, despite being a civil certified engine, simply by virtue of also being supersonic.
> 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).
Each country has its own rules, but AFAIK they're all on a case per case basis. Which adds complexity in multi-national programmes, like the Eurofighter, which the UK wants to sell to whatever regime regardless of war crimes, but Germany opposes certain sales.
Fun 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).
American 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.
Spare parts for the Apollo Lunar Module get auctioned too. NASA apparently just sold the lot when they shut down the Apollo program. Put it in a museum? Nah, we can totally get a fiver for this thing.
I work in aerospace industry now. Trust me, the amount of hardware stored for decades ongoing projects is shocking. Storages are full, basements are full. Labs and offices slowly turn to storages too. Once you throw it away, there is no way to buy a replacement. So if one can get rid of parts for some finished/discontinued project everything gets disposed asap.
Reinstating the pipework caused the first major headache; most parts had been discarded and engineers had to scour scrap yards and museums to find them. One vital piece was discovered being used as an ashtray.
There are no better souvenirs than those! I have a part of a helicopter tail rotor as a very decorativr paper weight, titanium part sure look sexy if you ask me!
Nobody cares about spare parts in a museum unless they add up to a full replica of something recognizable. Selling to people who care is likely much better in the long term.
If they turn out to be valuable our grandkids can read about how someone donated them from their private collection.
Which is why 5000 year old shards of pottery dug up at some site displayed in a museum are so boring. Having the full thing (even a non-original mock up) with the authentic pieces presented as an exploded view of the individual parts would be more interesting.
This is what I like about USA. History? Who gives a damn. ;)
(I don't mean it in a demeaning way. It is just an observation and I think it has some advantages, too, if you do not preserve every building there is for example.)
Firearm auctions are pretty common. High bids are definitely often about person/legend/myth, like being at a famous battle, but many others are pretty much just the gun. I think that's because they're relatively common, affordable, usable, and easy to preserve. There's one Girl with a Pearl Earring made of canvas but millions of wood and metal Lee-Enfield rifles.
Cars seem like they'd be similar but I don't know any car collectors. I've also heard of antique furniture auctions, very curious what those collectors are like.
Not preserving buildings is typically developers thinking their new shiny would be better (mainly because they get paid for it) are always keen to getting rid of the existing building. If the building is lost to a fire, probably an insurance thing. It gets really intriguing when a building owner really really wants a new building but the existing vacant building has been marked historic and cannot be demolished suddenly is lost in a fire.
My cousin worked on the Apollo 13 movie in the prop department. All that extra hardware made his life much easier. He said they didn’t really track what happened to non-flown equipment. A couple things from the Smithsonian had guards.
I used to live out at Reading (about 30 miles away) and we still had to pause conversations and phone calls when it went past. It was VERY LOUD.
I also worked at BA for a while. Everyone who worked for BA would glance at their watch when they heard it take off - the BA001 flight to NYC at 10am (I think? Or was it 11am?) was a good indicator of how smoothly our systems & the airport's were running - if it was late we probably had a problem.
Finally... coming in to land at the north runway you could see it directly overhead from the staff car park for Viscount House (where most of IT was based). The noise of it usually set off half the car alarms and you could see a huuuuge trail of dirty brown imperfectly burnt fuel with the engines throttled back.
I lived there too. When I was at school, our morning break was timed so Concorde would take off while we were out of lessons. Every now and then we'd have an extended playtime because of delays at Heathrow.
And I lived on the other end, about 5 miles from the approach end of runways 22R and 22L at JFK. I always ran to the window when it came by. Big planes would sometimes rattle the dishes in the kitchen.
I now live ~10 miles from a relatively busy airport with business/charter jet traffic, and its barely noticeable to me. But lots of noise complaints in my town and neighboring towns.
Also 10 miles from a main airport and on flight path. Sometimes get plane shadows! Not too bad noise wise as they are at 3000ft I think. And either I got used to it but swear they have got quieter over time.
> I now live ~10 miles from a relatively busy airport with business/charter jet traffic, and its barely noticeable to me. But lots of noise complaints in my town and neighboring towns.
Direction of the runways matters a lot. I live fairly close to an airport, but was paying attention to the relevant info when house-hunting. The map for my city (Calgary): https://maps.calgary.ca/AVPA/
It's probably a clause to protect the seller so the buyer can't try to return it (or refuse to pay) on the grounds that "I planned on buying this as an investment, but found out nobody in the industry will buy the parts and you didn't tell me about this first". edit: or cuts their finger off trying to play around with it.
The ebay listing is for collection only. But you can just hire DHL or whoever to ship it, even if a 5 ton pallet (once you include the stand) is a bit heavier than normal.
The late Jacques Littlefield used to tell visitors that, in some cases, transporting a given armored vehicle from the dock up to his barns in Portola Valley was the most expensive part of the vehicle's acquisition process.
One of the strangest sightings in Kansas City, MO is a Concorde nose cone encased in glass in someone's back yard easily seen when driving down the street.
Article says the plane it came from flew 16,239 hours so I'm guessing the photo was from initial certification if it was actually used.
Now that the plane is in Seattle and the engine is in the UK, does that mean it was shipped back after the plane landed? What is on display in a Seattle, dummy engines? So many questions.
The logbook says "at commencement" (i.e. at the time this logbook starts from, the engine has 0 hours). It's because there might be multiple logbooks for an engine, so if you reached the end of logbook1 and it had 5000 hours accounted for, logbook2 would say 5000 hours at commencement.
The intake and variable exhaust system are together responsible for a good deal of Concorde’s thrust development: about half of the thrust at Mach 2 is due to their combined effect.
Interesting from that link that concorde could use in-flight reverse thrust to achieve an increased rate of descent. I wonder if this was regularly used, or only so concorde could descend rapidly enough from cruise altitude if they lost cabin pressure? The oxygen masks aren't effective at cruise altitude, which is one reason the windows are so small - if one fails, they needed to descend quickly before cabin pressure was fully lost.
I grew up in northern Virginia and very fondly remember going to Dulles with my dad as a kid to watch the Concorde take off for the last time. That this is the engine off the same plane I saw 20 years ago is really cool. Our old house was directly under the approach path; the windows would shake at 2:30PM almost every day.
114 comments
[ 6.7 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadHmmmm
Yeah, nah.
[It's either something in Firefox + uBlock Origin, or because I'm in the EU.]
Yes, because only in a discussion a few days ago on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38681437
... someone was excited because the new web allows them to deliver 'experiences' instead of information. Gives some insight into some mindsets.
ITAR/DDTC works fast.
Congrats to the lucky winner!
Fissile materials, ofc.
But the US government took the approach that "secret is better than banned" with the bomb, and just never stated any of the details (as they would have been required to, in order to prohibit them).
MAD trade secrets, I guess.
You actually can sell a tank with a working cannon (to a civilian in the US, foreign national or not) if you have at least a Type 09 license to deal in destructive devices and the buyer has a destructive device permit. To export it would be a lot harder (and getting the aforementioned permits is no joke either).
You don't actually need either the FFL or the permit if you just decommission the main gun, which is how most tank and artillery collectors get theirs. DD permits are rarely issued for explosives without a good reason (like construction or mining) so even if you get the permit for the gun, you'll struggle to get one for the shells.
Why would it be covered under American export restrictions?
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... :-)
> 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.
I have no idea what the aircrew were doing, apart from having some fun, possibly waiting to land at Lossiemouth or Kinloss...
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).
As far as I'm aware of UK laws there is nothing preventing the export this engine.
Dual Use List / Annex I, CATEGORY 9 – AEROSPACE AND PROPULSION
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Never said I didn't do the combing.
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?
Consequently, it's likely other clauses otherwise targeted to military-only powerplants might apply to the Olympus 593, despite being a civil certified engine, simply by virtue of also being supersonic.
Each country has its own rules, but AFAIK they're all on a case per case basis. Which adds complexity in multi-national programmes, like the Eurofighter, which the UK wants to sell to whatever regime regardless of war crimes, but Germany opposes certain sales.
The "why" is because they can.
I mean ... what a tragedy if that will be it's end result!
https://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/9664538.the-falklands-raid-...
There may or may not be six pelican cases full of junk, I mean totally useful equipment, next to me in my office right now.
If they turn out to be valuable our grandkids can read about how someone donated them from their private collection.
(I don't mean it in a demeaning way. It is just an observation and I think it has some advantages, too, if you do not preserve every building there is for example.)
Cars seem like they'd be similar but I don't know any car collectors. I've also heard of antique furniture auctions, very curious what those collectors are like.
Why isn't it being auctioned by British Airways themselves?
I also worked at BA for a while. Everyone who worked for BA would glance at their watch when they heard it take off - the BA001 flight to NYC at 10am (I think? Or was it 11am?) was a good indicator of how smoothly our systems & the airport's were running - if it was late we probably had a problem.
Finally... coming in to land at the north runway you could see it directly overhead from the staff car park for Viscount House (where most of IT was based). The noise of it usually set off half the car alarms and you could see a huuuuge trail of dirty brown imperfectly burnt fuel with the engines throttled back.
Good times!
I now live ~10 miles from a relatively busy airport with business/charter jet traffic, and its barely noticeable to me. But lots of noise complaints in my town and neighboring towns.
Direction of the runways matters a lot. I live fairly close to an airport, but was paying attention to the relevant info when house-hunting. The map for my city (Calgary): https://maps.calgary.ca/AVPA/
Specialty haulers charge a pretty penny.
https://flatlandkc.org/curiouskc/question-everything/questio...
> “People come and look at it all the time,” Azima said. “They ask me, ‘Why’d you buy this?’ [I say] ‘I want to be buried in it.’”
Now that the plane is in Seattle and the engine is in the UK, does that mean it was shipped back after the plane landed? What is on display in a Seattle, dummy engines? So many questions.
As for the plane, engines 3 and 4 are visible in a 2010 photo.¹ By 2015 the ducts had all been covered.², albeit № 3 haphazardly in the rear.³
¹ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Concorde_(British_AW...
² https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Concorde_2015-06_673...
³ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Concorde_2015-06_692...
There's lots more information on the nozzles here: https://www.heritageconcorde.com/variable-exhaust-nozzles
Takeaway quote:
The intake and variable exhaust system are together responsible for a good deal of Concorde’s thrust development: about half of the thrust at Mach 2 is due to their combined effect.
So I think it's clear that the information presented by you is hallucinated by a recent large language model.
Just wanted to clear that up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsR8pCkSFW4
The future is fading away quickly.