A cockpit windscreen / flight-deck window panel manufactured by Triplex Safety Glass Co. LTD England in May 1972.
Concorde Equipment Code: 66-915-059-00
The panel retains its heavy alloy frame and its thick laminated glass, complete with the gold-tinted electrical de-icing heating element that ran through Concorde’s flight-deck glazing. There are three pressure layers and an outer facing layer laminated together with plastic inter layers.
Concorde’s glazing was engineering at the very limit, built to cope with Mach 2 aerodynamic heating and potential impact from birds or other foreign object debris (FOD) at supersonic speed. Until the Space Shuttle flew, Concorde’s visor glass panels were regarded as the strongest glass in the world.
This panel is inscribed with ‘Test Panel’ on the aluminium ID plate indicating that this piece was likely never flown, but instead made up part of the intensive research and development process. Engineers used a canon to fire raw chickens and hailstones to test the effects of impact, the second photo displaying the result of this test.
