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Farewell To The Concorde
mstamat writes "BBC has a number of features on the Concorde airplanes, the timeline of their existence and their retirement. Among else, there is a virtual tour of Concorde's cockpit and a few words from journalist Mary Goldring who was opposing Concordes from the start."
The Concorde really wasn't ready for prime time. With tickets starting at around $6000, fast travel to Europe was only affordable by the rich and by those whose employers would pay for it. Not to mention that you could only fly out of New York and Washington, DC to London and Paris. The technology was impressive for its time though, and I hope another attempt is made at high-speed air travel, knowing the problems with the Concorde.
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The Concorde is a beautiful thing, both aesthetically pleasing and impressive in its use of (for the time) advanced technology. It's a shame to see it go, even if the likes of me couldn't afford it.
I don't know which is more impressive: that it was done with slide rules, or that the English and French stopped squabbling long enough to agree on which units of measurement to use :-)
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That was the problem, the Concorde did not fare well. One problem with it is that early on in its career, it was determined that supersonic travel over populated land could shatter windows, upset livestock and generally annoy people. Thus limiting travel to continent to continent travel. If only it could have made a space in the New York to LA slot, London to Moscow (over land) or even LA to Montreal it could have allowed more funding to be developed into making the travel more efficient, cleaner environmentally, and lower prices. They introduced a Supersonic Limo into a world that wanted a Supersonic Bus. That being said, the Concorde is still a breathtaking aircraft to behold and 30 some odd years later still looks more modern than anything current from Boeing or Airbus. It is sad to see it gone.
America got to the wooden model stage at a cost of $400million.
The UK & France got a fleet of Concordes for 1.4billion.
How they claim it made more economic sense to create one wooden model for $400m than a fleet of awe inspiring planes for 1.4b I can't work out.
It's less than 100m per plane for a fleet of 15.
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You have a similar situation with the SR-71. It's still probably the one of the most amazing and fastest planes ever built, but it required a support staff similar to that of an aircraft carrier.
It's possible the Space Shuttle may be replaced by cheap, simple capsules. Technological advancement isn't always about faster and more complicated. It's also about discovering what's the most efficent and practical way to do something. They've done a lot of work on advanced space planes, but there's a lot of hurdles there, and the space plane could easily become another boondoggle like the Shuttle.
In the early years, cars got faster and faster. Now we're looking to more safety and fuel efficiency. And some days I think we might have been better off when our car engines didn't have 57 computers all over the place increasing the rate of failure. Most people I know who were into working on their own cars have just given up. There's just too much crap under the hood now, some of it requiring specialized and expensive equipment just to test. The manuals are multivolume.
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"I guess the sole reason for shutting the concorde down were these pictures burned in the public memory."
I guess you`re right - and all those pictures of 747s, crashed trains, crushed cars etc must be the reason no-one uses those methods of transport either.
But, in terms of crashes per flying hour, that one crash took Concorde from the worlds safest airliner to the wqorlds most dangerous. Boeing has about 10,000 aircraft which probably have an average utilisation over 12hr/day. Concorde had about 12 aircraft with an average utilisation about 2 hr/day. It is not surprising if Boeing have three or four crashes per year - they are piling theo hours on 100,000 times faster.
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I noted the comments earlier about old-fashioned cockpits and non-turbofan engines - well, just remember that Concorde was essentially designed with slide-rules. Computer simulations just were not up to it in those days. Certainly, computing was not at the stage where a glass-cockpit was even conceivable. Let alone practical. As for turbo-fan engines, do they really work at 60,000 feet?
As for being cost effective, for the airlines BA and Air France, it actually was. It only becomes a loss maker if you insist on taking into account all the R&D. That loss was picked up by the consortium that built the planes, not BA or Air France.
The thing that killed the aircraft was purely and simply American sour grapes when Boeing finally admitted that their own late entry into supersonic air travel was over budget, overdue and over weight and would never fly. There were plenty of American airline with options to buy, but they all pulled out when the American government then decided to ban overland commercial supersonic flight, making the aircraft practically useless to American airlines. Of course, many military aircraft continue to fly supersonic over the American mainland, and cows still give uncurdled milk, children are not thrown from their beds by the sonic shock-wave, and there are not hoards of angry sleep-deprived and shell-shocked American citizens beating at the doors of congress to limit this evil.
As far as reliability goes, one fatal crash in 30 years of operation is actually pretty good. Admittedly, the somewhat spectacular film of the doomed flight didn't help.
I was actually lucky enough to make a concorde flight once, London to Washington DC. That really IS the way to make that trip, and it could have been commonplace now... Unfortunately, Boeing had its way, and its failure to be able to copy the Concorde was mitigated by its friends in Congress making it a moot point.
Remember to thank those people who represent you next time you are sitting on an 11 hour flight from London to LA.