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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."
able to power a supersonic jet just with grapes.
I've been wanting to ride the Concorde for as long as I can remember... With only a few years before I could afford it, they are no more. I guess I'll have to be happy with consumer-grade space travel. Now hurry up before my kids take my cash and waste it on an education!
Hopefully there is a concorde II with the following improvements:
1. A glass cockpit instead of the analog crap in the old concorde
2. More efficient turbofan engines instead of the gas-guzzling turbojets on the Concorde.
3. A more roomy cabin
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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...or pneumatic tubes. My personal favorite.
Yeah, combine that with the fact that the europeans don't want you there in the first place, and both continents are happy.
And Canadians are always welcome.
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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Mary Goldring sounds like a fun, upbeat person. I think I'll invite her to my Halloween party.
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When the Concord was being developed, the US did have a SST program. However, it was cancelled because it did NOT make economic sense. Read Mary Goldring's article. The problems she mentions are the same ones that killed the US program.
It figures that someone with a bible verse in thier sig would have a post titled "Right, get a woman to comment on engineering". Bastard.
Bigger than the Concorde even, but the hippies all rallied together (they must have been out of marijuana) and had enough protests that Boeing decided it wasn't a good business move.
A. Rightmann
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.
The retirement of the Concorde is a rare example of technological regression. If our children ask us why airplanes don't fly faster, we can tell them we used to have supersonic commercial jets, but now we don't.
This isn't necessarily bad since the Concordes lost money throughout their existence.
What are some other example of technology regression, I wonder?
The burning Concorde was not the reason for ending the service. They just took the opportunity. BA and Air France were contemplating for nearly a decade on grounding that elegant dinosaur.
But - without the Concorde the Airbus Consortium - and today Airbus Industries would never have come to the market. We would have no alternative to Boeing nowadays.
All people coming to Germany who are interested in Aircraft History should take a day at "Technik Museum" in Sinsheim near Speyer.
CU
The TU-144 was a direct copy of the Concorde, made from stolen plans of the UK/FR aeroplane. Unfortunately (for the Russians) the plans they stole had been "doctored" by the British to not work - hence the crash. That's why they had to add canards to the Tupolev.
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
Concorde passes over my house regularly, and it will be greatly missed after Friday. Hopefully the path taken for one of the three incoming concordes will be this way so I can bid it farewall.
It's a huge pity that I never managed to fly on it as it's possible I'll now ever get to move faster than the speed of sound (relative to the earth!).
It's pretty rare that any industry manages to combine such technical feats with such beauty (the only other airplane I can think of that managed it was the blackbird), and it will be a huge loss to the skies.
For the records, public safety worries were the least of it's problems. It's rarely, if ever been a profitable plane to fly for the two airlines, and as soon as Air France had an excuse they wanted to ground it.
yes, but without having built Concorde Europe wouldn't have the number one commercial aircraft builder that is Airbus today
Concorde was a necessary technological proving ground, it would have been built even if it wouldn't have flown commercially.
Plus, isn't it amazing what the French and Anglo-saxons can produce when they take time off from insulting each other ?
As soon as an American company builds one, the US will drop all objections to supersonic overflight.
Then we'll have supersonic travel again.
We could have had it first time around, but the Americans knifed the baby.
That was classic intercourse!
Last I saw it, some ten years ago, parts of the fuselage (NASA's version?) were sitting in a junkyard on route 50, just East of Orlando.
"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.
Documentary on BBC 2 last night..
40 of their frequent flyers where killed in the WTC. Not only that, those 40 also authorised Concorde flights for their company's staff, so in that single day they lost a huge number of customers.
It was one of my dreams to fly on Concorde, but by the time I had the cash to allow me a special trip I had a family to support, so my priorities are now elsewhere.
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This may interest some of you:
The Russian Tu-144 "Charger" was actually the first SST. It first flew in 1968 about a year before the Concorde. In its later revisions it had a longer range than Concorde and was more fuel economic. However, for various reasons, the Soviets never really used the Tupolev 144. Its interesting to also note that NASA picked this aircraft over Concorde for various tests done in the late '90s.
They didn't agree, the original drawings were in French and English, measurements in centimeters and inches. :)
I believe that several companies are working on morphing wing designs which eliminate the sonic boom altogether, which was one of the nails in the coffin of the Concorde. According to this article Boeing might have a super sonic plane in service around 2008. Couple the new wing design with high effeciency engines and you'll have an environmentally (noise and pollution wise) and cost-effective means of breaking the sound barrier.
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Has Boeing got any alliances in the media industry? ;-)
I live in london and I can't say it bothers me so much. Yes its loud but no loader than a noise from a load truck passing by. Stop griping.
It was possible to buy a "one way on Concorde, one way on 747" return flight to New York (from London) for under 2000 pounds, even up to about July of this year (one of my friends did just that and got his flight a couple of weeks ago). Compare that with the usual first class fares from London to New York, which I just checked at www.ba.com, flying tomorrow and returning the day after would be 6,596.70 POUNDS (that's the better part of 10k dollars). When you compare first class fares, Concorde was moderately priced! And since it effectively gave an extra day of work during a trip, yes, some businesses decided it was worth while (my company is the other way around, cheapest possible flights but we can spend an extra day getting unjetlagged when we get there).
... sigh.
There were other destinations, just not many, as most countries wouldn't allow commercial airlines to produce sonic booms over land and the range was limited due to the amount of fuel used to reach the high speeds.
I'd have loved to have flown on Concorde but another milestone has passed me by
When the Concorde killed all of those people, you have to ask yourself who can afford a six thousand dollar ticket?
Rich... very, very rich people. Their families can hire very, very, very expensive lawyers to make a corporation pay very, very, dearly for their mistake. Think of the lawyers for the families that they can afford. Add that to the cost of running a supersonic, high-end aviation service. It just isn't possible anymore.
Yeah, if one of the regular world dies in a plane crash, we can probably get a class action settlement for burial expenses and some change from the airline. You can bet your sweet tail that when a group of people that wealthy die in a plane crash, that there will be an entire nation of lawyers after your corporation. The Concorde was getting expensive. I guarantee after all of the rich people died it got outrageously expensive to operate.
I was fortunate enough to experience a flight in one of these amazing planes several years ago.
:o(.
British Airways used to do a short 'experience concorde' flight that would take off from RAF Manston (South east coast of the UK), fly around the south coast and land again 45 mins later back at manston. The flight was subsonic due to the realitly short distance but even so, you could really feel the power of the plane, especially during take off.
The flight was fully commentated and some of the statistics about concorde are pretty incredible. The engine power rivals that of the entire Daytona starting grid and the plane has to be built to allow for a 6 inch+ stretch during flight.
I had always hope to take a supersonic flight on concorde when I was suitably rich, It is a sad thought to think that this will never happen now
Opposition to Concorde in the US also had a lot to do with it. The 'not-invented-here' lobby can be pretty powerful.
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" The Americans realized it before it was built."
Is that why both Boeing and Lockheed Martin built prototypes, then? The Boeing SST jet was an engineering fiasco - that's why the Americans never built one. The LM 'plane was, by all accounts, a very elegant design. Very much like Concorde, in fact...
That was classic intercourse!
her face on the screen is starting to sour this glass of fresh milk i have here....
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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.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
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.
They did (sort of). Look up XB-70. Then realize why there are none.
As well as Concorde government subsidies have bought us things like the Apollo programme, the Channel Tunnel, the trans-continental rail[way|road] in the US, the Internet, the world-wide-web, the first digital programmable computers, and the first inter-continental telegraph cables.
These are not only fantastic technological achievements, but have made people's lives better (with the exception of the trans-continental railway vis-a-vis the Indians).
I'd rather the UK spent its money on projects like the Chunnel and Concorde than subsidiing EU farmers or fighting American wars.
Everything the parent says is true. The only thing I have ever encountered that was noisier was in service with Aeroflot. And the only thing I have ever flown in that was more cramped was a sailplane, though that had better legroom. The windows are minute. If I want to travel in a cramped, noisy metal tube with no view, there's always the subway. It's like the Pyramids: we don't build things like that nowadays because we are no longer quite so stupid. We have even kind of got the idea that having an atmosphere makes it quite a good idea to fly subsonic safely, reliably, cheaply and reasonably quietly. I find Concord(e) going out of service an occasion for quiet optimism.
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It's a language difference: US "afterburner" and "supercruise" are UK "reheat" and "dry power". Try here for instance.