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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.
Damn. Considering it came out in 1977, and nothing has come out to replace it yet.
Shame.
Unlike the 737 and 747, which have been continuously upgraded, it's essentially unchanged. Almost as outdated as the 707.
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I live in Bristol in the UK which is considered the home of concorde at the airport called Filton.
There is nothing better than watching concorde coming home on those special occasions when it is taken off normal flying patterns, they close the road and it flies right over your head, amazing.
The only thing that comes close is being sat in my garden watching filton airport as the spitfire fly's around doing stunts that would put modern planes to shame..
sigh..
nostalgia-tastic
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
This mumbo jumbo was never going to fly from the beginning.(pardon the pun)
... err like some people.
Concorde (sunk-cost) fallacy
Now, it's unfortunte that the Hollywood stars are going to have to go down a level and fly first-class like the rest of
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
for a replacement. Developing Concord took two government backed companies 13 years (1963-1976?) to develop and put into service.
The process nearly bankrupt both companies and were heavilly bailed out by their respective governments (UK and France). As such I can't see a replacement happening for a long long time. There will have to be some serious incentive (money) for a replacement to be comissioned - until then its a case of what we have will do...
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"Things that you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden (via Diogenes of Sinope).
Concorde has had its day, Most vital comms can be done over the web/videoconferencing negating the need for fast travel to and from the USA. Most people are interested in cheap flights nowadays, which means packing as many bums on seats as possible. Thats why the 747s of this world are still going and the 100 seat concorde is being scrapped. :(
Still a shame tho.
Concorde has certainly had a long and illustrious history, especially considering the way it was looking as a complete failure when they were first built and marketed... until they upgraded it from general air travel to exclusive/expensive air travel.
I remember a couple of years ago there were special offers advertised in the national papers where you could phone the BA hotlines and get tickets for about £10 !!! A lot of people didn't bother because they could believe it, whereas those who did became pleasantly surprised (until everyone else caught on, but they'd sold out by then).
I wonder what the future will be for supersonic air travel, it seems most of the new Boeing/Airbus planes try and cram more people on them... funnily enough I flew to the US 4 months ago on one of Virgins new A600 Airbuses and they take off like a bloody rocket! They also had personal entertainment systems in each seat with video on demand, except in our compartment the media stations kept crashing (it was nice to see a Mandrake Linux reboot rather than an M$ bodge job) so they only worked for about an hour in the entire flight.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
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.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I personally never liked the design of the concord, but found that it fills a very large, very important niche. Long distance flights can takes many many hours to complete, and supersonic flight is the only way to improve the situation. I certainly hope one of the major commerical airline manufactures come up with a replacement. I certainly think they could come up with something far better, and more economical, with 30 years advancement in technology.
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Unfortunately after the last concorde disaster I don't think people's confidence was quite restored in it. Coupled with the other problem that the general public have become wary of flying after 9/11 and the current Iraq situation, Concorde was bound to suffer as a consequence.
Summation 2
Check with any of the big airlines - for example, Continental just finished retiring its prop planes at Continental Express because they weren't fuel-efficient. Flying is all about lower costs these days, not glamour. After all, do you think unions at United and other airlines would even consider pay cuts otherwise?
What's your damage, Heather?
I won't argue the 'cheaper' bit but, IIRC, Concorde does ~ mach 2.0. How is 0.95 almost as fast?! That's what a 747 does!
Concorde really was a status symbol for it's 30 years, just like sailing on the QE2 used to be also.
But with a few accidents, a lack of cache and the fact that it has *always* been a money looser, it's an environmental mess, and BA and AirFrance not wanting to get dragged deeper into debt, the time to retire them has come.
The fabulously wealthy who could easily plunk down the $15k per ticket are now buying or renting Gulfstreams. It's more a thing for tourists and the CEO's.
Still, it's a beautiful plane. Still remember looking out at the AirFrance Concordes at JFK airport with the view of lower Manhattan behind them across the river (now when you see both like that, it's more poignant that exhilerating).
On the lighter side, on the UK show "Absolutely Fabulous" when Edina is ticked off that there is only 1 class of service on Concorde, "I'll pay extra for that curtain!"
Now yes, there maybe some coolness lost to the Concorde, but come on... The grand stairway alone makes it all up for me... Finally, a plane suitable for tall people (under 6'6" need not apply :P)
I'm a little tea pot.
Wouldn't it be rather simple to crash a train?
And the modern trains have also 500 & more people on it.
I mean, there are no security checks etc. for you if you want to go by train. For me, it seems to be an easy target for the terrorists.
A 747 does mach 0.78, just like all of the commercial jets available today (B737, all Airbus, etc.).
&& aemula C. ab stirpe interiit
The idea is to take a handful of 990's (enough for daily JFK-Heathrow service), fit them with 4-across leather seats like what Midwest Express does with a DC-9, and run a Concorde-style first-class service with every amenity (free booze and gourmet food). These planes are Mach .95 capable (Whitcomb area-ruled fuselage, "shock pods" on the back of the wings), but since the speed of sound slows down in thinner air, I would fly them at around 20-25,000 feet, pedal-to-the-metal. Yes, this would burn fuel, but a whole lot less than Concorde, and while a 747 would make the trip in 6 hours, Concorde in 3, I think my service could turn in something like 4 hours and 45 minutes. Anyway, it was just an idea.
The aerospace industry has been dominated by various governments for half a century. We have gone from numerous companies developing practical air travel down to Boeing and Airbus dominating a stagnant market. And, I am told, Boeing doesn't seem to be that healthy.
What's the next thing to stop? Space travel? Possibly. NASA hasn't succeeded in developing a successor to the shuttle. Two attempts (NASP and X-33) have been failures. Young people are starting to avoid the industry -- it has a bad reputation. Dishonesty, abuse and failure seem to be its hallmarks today.
The computer industry has done better. There's still room for innovation and development. Although, one wonders how long that will last with Microsoft dominance.
Change is possible, though. Challenges to Microsoft (think Linux today) aren't going to go away. And these challengers are racking up real successes.
Change is also possible in the more established aerospace industry as well. Three decades ago the U.S. military was in rough shape. People -- both inside and outside the military -- recognized that. Various reforms were implemented -- not the least ending the draft (conscription to Slashdot's readers outside the U.S.). Today the U.S. military, while far from perfect, is a much healthier institution.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
This may sound very trollish on slashdot, but...
- Isn't flying in general, especially by a concorde extremly fuel-consuming?!
- As I remember my early physics courses, friction is roughly proportional to the square of speed, isn't it? And then calculate the energy/kilometer traveled...
- Isn't that another reason why flying should only be used for transcontinental travels?
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.
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
Scramjets are in their early stages, but the potential is absolutely amazing. London to Sydney in less than five hours. Probably London to New York in less than one. Cheap LEO... *takes sedative to calm down* OK we are still 10-20 years off, but it is defiantly one to watch.
> > perhaps the coolest commercial plane ever to fly
> I would take issue with that. Certainly a cool aircraft - but the coolest ever? Its only special quality was being safe enough for passengers.
Yep. The coolest commercial plane ever to fly.
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
The main thing I noticed in flight was that the curvature of the earth was much more visible due to the much higher cruise altitude. Also, it was a very smooth flight. No turbulence whatsoever.
Concorde is all first class essentially, and the fittings reflected this. Gray leather seats, 2 x 2 arrangement. The bulkhead was lower than in a conventional aircraft.
I was on British Airways. There were 6 cabin crew for only 100 max passengers. The service in the air was impeccable (you get treated like royalty), and they even welcomed visitors to the cockpit. (Not sure if they'd do that today though, since everyone's paranoid about terrorism.)
No movie inflight, but there were sterophonic headsets for music. Also, each passenger received a gift, (on this flight it was a 1994 date planner.) The seats are not at all wide; however. the armrests fold flat if there's no one next to you.
But as I said, en flight, you can see the curvature of the Earth. I was amazed.
Like skydiving, flying on the Concorde is something you don't have to do a second time...but once was fantastic.
I know it's expensive and inefficient, but we're going to lose a real treasure when the Concorde stops flying.
It's a tight vision to consider the UK as being the home of the Concorde: Concorde has been created as a cooperating project between France and the UK. It's been a difficult achievement but it was also the biggest recent proof that English people and French people can actually understand each others and do something valuable together (they would certainly benefit from doing the same thing for building Europe in the political area...).
But the first Concorde to fly was in Toulouse, France, with a French pilot which became famous for that. He took off the plane without any issue, did a loop, and grounded sooner than expected because of a heat problem.
There are two interesting things to notice about Concorde, in addition to the fact that it certainly is the most beautiful plane ever built: 1) the cooling system is using the plane's fuel! 2) the onboard computers are really really old design, with tubes instead of transistors!
A Concorde pilot also said that piloting a Concorde was exactly the same feeling as piloting a jet-fighter, that he could do exactly the same things with this plane, with hundreds passengers in the plane!
I'm sad to hear that the Concorde will stop to fly, especially without a similar plane to replace it.
There are great pictures of Concorde on:
http://benoit.rajau.free.fr/concorde.html
I would suggest that the design and the economics of flying the thing go hand in hand. It has a very small passenger complement, requires extra-long runways and loads of fuel.
A newer design might have solved some of these problems. The Sonic Cruiser, which now looks like it won't ever be built, seated more than twice as many people.
Concorde: Im not quite dead sir
I've been watching Foxnews and they told me how simple this world is :
France = bad
UK = good
The concord is a french and british invention, so it's hard to decide if it's good or bad.
Help !
ATrollWhoNeedsHelp.
Hmm, it may be sensible from a commercial point of view.
But it is another dream lost.
Why is it, that one flying dream after another is put into museums without a proper "flying dream" replacement. The next dream gone, will probably be the space shuttle.
Next they will make private aviation a crime. And then all sensations of the actual "flying" feeling will be made unavailable. Oh yeah, I know: people dont look up to the sky anymore nowadays. They are afraid of it. Except, when the things in the sky are wearing Air Force markings of the country you are currently living in.
Flying? They want to be transported, not flown.
Concorde gone? Most dont care.
Just continue your miserable lifes without dreams.
Have you ever really gone flying?
Next you factor in the time it takes to travel. It would seem that more and more the time to prepare and wait for the flight plus waiting on the plane, and the plane waiting on various taxyways you begin to approach or surpass the actual flight time with the exception of intercontinental flights (or coast to coast in the US). Now we see that some are recommending that you arrive at the airport 3 hours before a flight. Hmmm, I think I will drive. Take the bus? Well I suppose I could except those are notorious for being uncomfortable... but cheap rules that out so horray for bus travel. Some say, take the train. Haha, what a joke Amtrak is. They just can't seem to figure out that if you must pay the same or more than a flight but yet be more restricted on location and take MUCH longer then I am doubting many will view that as worthwhile. Trains have been in operation how long now?
"it's also a death trap. Statistically, it took one wreck to send it from the top of the safety list to the bottom."
Which just goes to show that you shouldn't trust small sample sizes (i.e. many fewer flights and passengers than other aircraft) when declaring the Concord a 'death trap'. Just like any thoughtful person wouldn't avoid a small town that happens to have an astronomical murder rate due to one killing...
A story here about the Russian Concorde.
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
Is it just me, or does this sound like the collapse of civilisation?
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Do all our dreams have to focus on big metal thingies that soar up in the sky? It's not like Captain Kirk is explaining how poverty was eliminated on earth in the 21st (?) century. Many of you are romanticizing air travel. There are some people whose dreams consist of three squares a day and a bath.
Personally, I don't think air travel is all that. As someone who for a while took a few trips to Asia each year, I can say that being able to get there in 14 hours devalued the experience. I would have preferred a week on an ocean liner.
And business travel pre-9/11 was totally out of control. It's wasteful and a distraction in many cases.
Things must have improved since the late 60's in terms of aerodynamics, CAD, engine power etc etc. There are few military jets built these days that can't achieve supersonic flight, and the latest can cruise above Mach 1 without afterburners.
So the technology must be there, so why is it so hard to make it commercial?
Maybe this is an opportunity. There are people who will pay for the convenience of fast travel, and in the 21st century we must be able to make something more efficient, quieter and more viable. Hell its been 40years since concorde was designed, someone tell me we've made progress since then.
Then again 30 years ago people were still walking on the moon.
Maybe we've all lost our spirit of adventure?
Two years ago, I was bumped from a cancelled BA business class trip onto a Concorde flight from New York to London. This was just after the Paris crash, when I guess they had to bump people onto the Concorde just to have some warm bodies aboard.
At first I couldn't believe my luck, and was phoning everyone I knew from the Concorde lounge ("Hey, guess where I am...?") but once on the plane, it was a thoroughly unpleasant experience. It was almost empty, but it was still unbearably cramped. If it had been full, it would have felt claustrophobic in the extreme. By the time we were an hour into the trip, my wife and I were both agreeing that even if we were rolling in stupid cash, we'd never, ever fly it again. Give me first or business class any time. Hell, coach would have been more comfortable.
And apart watching an LED display tick up to Mach 2, there is no particular experience of "speed"; you just feel like you're in a cramped, uncomfortable airplane, flying a little higher than normal.
The food and tchotchkes were nice, though.
Sadly, it isn't a superior technology. It's noisy, uneconomic and not very safe.
And, actually, we are seeing something similar in other fields. For a long time we had no speed limits, then a mixture of road deaths, increasing traffic, and the 70s fuel crisis brought them in just about everywhere. Now we expect cars to be comfortable, safe, economical (even SUVs are actually more economical than midsize cars of 30 years ago) and to provide us with in-vehicle entertainment that we can hear above engine noise. Most of the journeys I do are now slower than they were 10 years ago, but actually less stressful. That's progress.
Also, improved network technology has made many journeys less urgent. Twenty years ago it took me 3 days just to set up an international telephone call in Mexico. Ten years ago in Brazil I had to dial an international number an average of 200 times to get through. When Concord was designed, a 2 hour phone call from London to NY probably cost as much as a round air trip. Fax machines were a joke. And a portable telephone occupied the entire car trunk.
Now, you could videoconference several people all day for less than the cost of a round trip between the UK and the US.
So I'd say, Concord has actually been wiped out by progress. It's just that, as usual, progress came from a different direction from what people expected.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Anybody remember the Tupolev TU-144? Came out much the same sort of time (i.e. sometime in the early 14th century, when I was a kid :-) ) There weren't many commercial flights, but I remember thinking that given the similarities between the two aircraft, it was kind of sad that the Russians never really got it together.
Yeah, but its quanti-sonic architecture makes it do more work per mach-cycle, making mach .95 seem more like mach 2.2
$ make love
make: don't know how to make love. Stop
Actually, the 747 typically cruises at Mach 0.85. It is in fact quite a bit faster than other subsonic aircraft in service, most of which have been optimized for economy rather than speed.
While the Condorde is indeed an attractive plane, in terms of beauty, I don't think it can hold a candle to the SR-71 Blackbird. And, of course, the Blackbird was (or is, if the redesignated ones in NASA's fleet still fly) much faster...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
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I have news for you. If we are ever going to make transportation advances, we need fuels with greater energy to weight ratios. If you can think of any fuel that acheives the same amount of energy to the amount of mass used (fuel only, not counting the actual engine) that's also production ready, i'd like to hear it.
People thinking that fallout will land in their yards have stifled innovation of nuclear propulsion (esp. in manned space travel) for a long time. I'm not saying you/they don't have a good arguement, but if we are to move forward as a society we need to at least try.
Yeah we'll probably fuck up somewhere, and we tend to learn only from our mistakes. But like any experimental advance we need to trust that we will try to learn from our mistakes, control the damage, (and yes, it will be greater damage than we may have ever seen as a people) and keep moving on.
Additionally, as we advance, we will have things of even higher enegry-to-mass ratios than nuclear power. You think these will be safer to work with? They have more energy contained in them. As such, they'll be that much more dangerous!
The only thing that can protect us from this danger, really, is distance. And to move out to greater distances takes greater energy. So if we don't use our high energy tools at hand, we'll stagnate as a society and never be able to truly distance ourselves from whatever we impose on ourselves anyway.
(Sorry, this is kinda scatterbrained... hope it makes sense)
- Sig
Concorde still represents a pinnacle in civil aviation design in terms of speed.
Let me repeat... Still a Pinnacle. A top acheivement. There are no incredible leaps in technology since its inception with which to top it. Only some incremetal improovements that might be made.
More efficient engines could be produced but the cost of development versus the improovemnt would not be very economical.
Flight control systems could be updated to modern electronics. might Eliminate a few hundred, perhaps even a few thousand pounds. But its about like the difference between a 30 year old power steering system and a new one. Not much end user difference. Perhaps easier to maintain... more likely the biggest change there would be in reducing easing the pilots workload with modern display systems and computerized system monitoring.
The materials breakthroughs which made the design possible in the first place have only incrementally advanced. Mostly in the area of fabrication, not in terms of strength and thermal tollerences or most importantly in terms of cost which is the biggest issue.
All in all you could could perhaps make a more efficient Concorde. But in terms of pure performance you couldn't really make a better Concorde.
As I said, its design is still a Pinnacle of civil aviation design. Its also noteable in the military realm where supersonic designs have proliferated. Very few Military designs could keep up with a Concorde. The B-1 and Badger being the only two obvious designs currently in service that could keep up with it over the same range. There is also the XB-70 Valkarie mach 3 capable Bomber design that was never adopted which contributed a great deal of knowldege to Concordes Design, and of course the Retired A-12, and SR-71 Blackbird designs which still know no peer in the annals of aviation design.
We have reffined the knowledge pioneered in the late 50's and 60's which make planes like the Concorde, SR-71/A-12, XB-70 and B-1 possible but we have not made any new breathroughs that allow us to go beyond them as yet. We also have never acheived any kind of economy of scale with regards to their production either. I don't belive combining the total production numebrs of all the above listed long range multiple Mach capable designs would reach half the number of Boeing 747's produced.
As much economic sense retiring the Concorde makes... I still hate to see it go. Its one example of a big budget white elephant program I wouldn't mind having my tax dollars go towards. Of course living in the states I have never had my tax dollars go towards this particular white elephant. However, it is at least its something beautiful and tangible which theoretically anyone can get to have "hands on experience" with unlike so many other programs. Its hard to put a price tag on symbols and the Concorde has been a symbolic acheivment since its inception. Its retirment without a replacement is symbolic as well, one which represents something I don't much care to ponder.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson said on Thursday his airline was interested in buying British Airways' doomed Concorde fleet, but would offer just £1 (1.5, $1.6).
Here's the article.
I read a story once: on April 18th, 1981, Bouygues (a French construction group) received a 343 373 480 dollars cheque (as a payment to a huge contract in Ryiad, Saudi Arabia) at 10:30 AM in Paris, France. But in order not to lose the day's interests, the cheque had to get to the Morgan Bank in N.Y.C., before 10 AM (NYC time).
Bouygues sent 2 persons carrying the cheque with the Concorde, to New York City. The plane took off at 11 AM (Paris local time), and landed at 8:25 AM (New York local time). The cheque was deposited the bank in New York minutes later (around 9 am), therefore allowing Bouygues to deposit the cheque roughly one hour "before" it was delivered to them. With a 16% (!) interest rate, this "extra time" allowed Bouygues to earn 160000 US dollars.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
Also, the XB-70 only crashed because an F-104 chase place got caught in it's wake turbulance and collided with the Valkyrie, snapping off one of it's vertical stabilizers, and damaging the other one. The resulting crash was blamed on the F-104 pilot. Now, I happen to think that the B-1 is the most beautiful airplane ever built.