"me" wrote in message
m...
Chanchao wrote in message
. ..
[snip]
Things started to go really wrong on the $6,600-a-seat (£4,000) Concorde
with
a frightening backfire over the Atlantic Ocean. Before it was over, the
plane
had dropped from supersonic to subsonic speed, was running out of fuel
and
made an unscheduled landing in Wales.
[snip]

I'm a bit dubious about this expression. Without more info, I'd
suspect that they didn't want to run below fuel minimums and so
landed at Wales. I'm dubious that they were in any danger of
having to dead stick the thing in. Minimums probably state that
they are supposed to have 45 minutes to an hour of fuel left
when they land.

If Concorde loses an engine, it has to descend and fly subsonic for the rest
of the flight. It uses a lot more fuel flying subsonic than supersonic (it
does, really!!) partly because of angle of attack but also because of the
lower altitude and other factors, and therefore always has to divert
whenever an engine needs to be shut down (unless it lost an engine close to
its destination obviously).