Concorde to be Grounded

Goonie writes "This BBC article reports that Concorde flights are to come to an end in October. It may be a noisy and costly anachronism, but it's sad to see the end of perhaps the coolest commercial plane ever to fly." The financial wires carried a story the other day showing how much jet fuel demand has dropped recently.

Comments

Shame

[mejh]

Damn. Considering it came out in 1977, and nothing has come out to replace it yet.

Shame.

Where are the Concorde replacements?

[operagost]

It's truly sad that the industry cannot come up with a better supersonic (or even near-Mach) commercial aircraft. Instead, they seem to be obsessed with cranking out either bigger, more luxurious craft, or sardine cans like the 757 where as many people are crammed in as possible without enough overhead space for your carry-on. To me, the best flight is the one I can get off as soon as possible. If I wanted to take my time and enjoy the trip, I'd take the train. Coupling these slow air barges with the ever lengthening delays and poor customer service is the reason why the big carriers are losing business to Southwest. Southwest has the best rates and they don't pretend to coddle you, or offer more comfortable seats and preferential treatment for outrageous prices.

Re:It's a 30 year old design

[Zocalo]

And what's age of design got to do with anything? Take the the B52 bomber, that first flew in 1955, twenty years before Concorde, and is expected to remain in service for perhaps another thirty years. That's an active service life of nearly seventy years! Sometimes you just hit on a design that gets almost everything so right the cost of replacing it just doesn't justify the benefits that would be gained.

Unreplaced

[WebfishUK]

The mothballing of Concorde represents an relatively unusual situation. In terms of flight time Concorde represents the most advanced way to travel. No aircraft built since, not even military, can sustain a mach 2 flight speed for over 3 hours. Yet this aircraft is to be decommissioned. Can anyone think of a parallel situation in the computing field?. Where an outdated technology is made redundant, yet whose performance has not be exceeded.