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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."
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!
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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Concorde's engines are actually the most efficient of their type in the world.
And although you think of all the analogue crap in Concorde it had fly by wire when designed, the bulk of it's instrumentation was digital and the brake design is only now being adopted by other larger aircraft.
Concorde, despite being 26 years old in full service and even older by design, is still leading the way in terms of aircraft design.
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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.
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?
2. More efficient turbofan engines instead of the gas-guzzling turbojets on the Concorde.
Ummm...
A low bypass turbofan (read lower efficiency) or a turbojet would do better than a high bypass (modern) engine at those speeds.
You have competing effects that you have to optimize. Fuel spent because engine is inefficient (to varying degrees), and fuel spent overcoming drag. High bypass turbofans, the efficient ones, have HUGE frontal areas, and the induced drag because of this at supersonic speeds severely outweighs the efficiency benefits gained.
From memory the bypass on the 777 varies from about 5-9 (depends on engine manufacturer, and version of aircraft), the only supersonic jet in the world that doesn't need an afterburner to go supersonic is the F-22, it's bypass ratio is under 2 (again from memory). If I had my way, a future supersonic transport would have a low bypass turbofan or turbojet (same as a bypass 1 turbofan) sized such that an augmenter is not needed.
BTW, the Concorde engines aren't guzzlers because they are turbojets, it is because it is augmented for the duration of supersonic flight.
(yes I am an aerospace engineer at a jet engine company...)
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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.
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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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.