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Flight 4590 Didn't Kill the Concorde; Costs Did
pigrabbitbear writes "If the plane were around today — which some still fantasize about — it'd be like powering a stretch Hummer with dolphin blood. The airlines couldn't sell enough tickets on the small plane to even make up for the amount of fuel it needed to guzzle on its journeys, let alone cover maintenance for the technological marvel. (A Concorde's taxi to the end of a runway used as much fuel as a 737's flight from London to Amsterdam.) Customers were fine with ordinary travel times for a fraction of the airfare and the plane only took transatlantic journeys, because going over land was too disturbing. Too much noise."
Really? How is this news?
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Total waste of dolphin's blood.
You get first post!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Stop that right now. The "Too noisy" meme was started by Boeing to hurt sales of the Concorde, and it worked. You're still repeating it to this day.
A Concorde going overhead at around 1000 feet and normal cruising speed is no more noisy than a normal jet. It's the afterburners that are loud (REALLY VERY LOUD) and those are only used at take-off.
...sounds like something a B-movie villain would have. With seats covered in Baby Seal Leather.
The Concorde was designed in the late 1950s. We have made rather substantial improvements in technology in the past half century that would allow an aircraft designed today to achieve substantially better fuel efficiency, not to mention the additional efficiencies we can gain via higher altitudes. The stigma of its failure will probably prevent anybody from trying again any time soon, but just because an aircraft designed in the 1950s wasn't cost effective doesn't mean an aircraft designed in the 2010s couldn't be.
I wasn't aware this was news. The same concerns killed Boeing's plans for a supersonic jet (but not before the basketball team was named after the doomed project.) I thought it was a well known case of the "good enough" being the enemy of the perfect. It's also why there's not a lot of research into hypersonic or suborbital flights except for military purposes. The increase in cost is, er, astronomical, while the reduction in time is comparatively insignificant. The number of people who are willing to pay an order more (or possibly multiple orders more) in order to reduce the time by a single digit number of hours is pretty darn small.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
You cannot help but wonder if the advent of the powerful laptop also helped to expedite the end if the Concorde, starting in the late 90s laptops were powerful enough that you could actually do some serious work(and/or play) on a plane, especially in business class where you had room and an outlet. All of a sudden the few hours you saved by taking the Concorde became comparatively less valuable.
Monstar L
Tyre explosions and damage were quite common, due to the high takeoff and landing speed of the plane, and the unfortunately placed landing gear location in the wing. Pieces of tyre would damage the wing.
The Russians noticed this was a serious problem so they completely redesigned their Tu-144 and relocated the wheel wells in the engine nacelles. The engines were much harder to damage because of all the titanium, so a tire explosion wouldn't cause a disastrous failure.
4 hours via concorde or 6 via normal plane is not a huge difference, so people choose the cheaper route.
Same on the ground. I compared the "speedy" Amtrak Acela versus the normal train, and from Philly to Boston it only saves 15-20 minutes..... but costs $250! (For that cost you could take a train across the whole country.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Let's get one thing straight. It's customary to refer to Concorde as "Concorde." Not "the Concorde", just "Concorde."
Carry on.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
*it'd be like powering a stretch Hummer with dolphin blood*
Kinda sounds like The Oatmeal...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
...powering a stretch Hummer with dolphin blood
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
still don't care, but i learned something.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
The vast majority of business meetings are now held virtually anyhow -- networked computers, adobe connect, PCanywhere, yadda yadda, a zillion software solutions now exist so that people with laptops just activate the built-in webcam and boom, they are part of a meeting taking place in no particular location.
Less people need to fly overnight now to shake hands and sign documents. FEDEX and the internet have changed the way we do business.
That said, I used to live a few miles from JFK airport in Queens, and loved to watch it fly in. It came in VERY regular times, it could never be in a holding pattern, so, at 8:15 exactly it would be flying over your head.
Standing on Hook Creek blvd in Rosedale, you'd see it come in at a high angle of attack, with the nose pointed down and the landing gear extended, it looked like some kind of bird of prey about to swoop down and grab a rodent off the ground.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
supersonic flights were banned over land because the sonic booms annoyed people. This problem persist to this day.
Now if the aliens (for the sake of this argument assume they exist... if you don't, feel free to ignore this post and not reply to it) are flying about in their saucers in the atmosphere at high speeds, why haven't people on the ground heard sonic booms? Is there something about the saucer shape that prevents sonic booms from propagating to ground level?
The article has all sorts of inaccuracies and key omissions. Concorde was always fuel inefficient and it was recognized as such in the 70s. It was thought it could still be successful despite this, until wide body jets took away much of its market. Because of its limited success, and limited money at the time, a slightly improved concorde (with greater range making a lot more transoceanic routes viable and about another 30 seats), or a vastly improved concorde (with about 250 seats), were never built. These might have been more commercially successful than the concorde that was built. Even so, Concorde was profitable as a niche market for British Airways. It was until it was grounded following the Air France crash. You may recall that BA spent a lot of money improving concorde and getting it back into the air (e.g. kevlar lining in the tanks), but then quickly wound the program down. They expected it to be profitable again, and fly for another 20 or 30 years. The problem was 9/11 killed concorde. The reason was it was such a niche that BA's concorde profits depending on a lot of regular fliers who repeatedly flew on it between London & New York - and many of these frequent Concorde fliers worked in the WTC. The treaty between the UK & France meant that unless both agreed Concorde had to be kept flying, so when BA lost interest the French neither had the prestige reasons or the monetary reasons (I don't know if their Concorde operations were profitable) to continue either, and it was mutually agreed to shutdown. Also omitted are some additional locations where Concorde can be visited. There is a Concorde (one of the two British test aircraft) that you can go aboard at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford near Cambridge. By coincidence I was there today, and yes I went aboard this Concorde.
We live in an era where we shy back from the edge achieved in the past. Air transport speeds have stagnated around mach 0.9, the top speed at Indianapolis was recorded more than a decade ago, and the optimistic plan for a return to the moon has three times the development time of the original flight. Between tendencies to ensure that we don't do anything that could fail and to form a bureaucracy to hide behind if it does, this century's progress in the peak of human achievement will far lag that of the last.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
I flew it once in 1996 (AF1 out of CDG), I recall it as the luxury ride of my life, and not at all as noisy. The food and wine were great, the stewardess looked just like Nastassja Kinski, and after a short nap I arrived in New York in time for a good day of work. I don't even think there was a line in immigration (this was my first visit to the US), probably they had a fast-track for Concorde passengers. Not very sustainable, but very convenient.
I always wondered why the wheels of large airplanes are unpowered. In the air, you need to push air to go, but surely on the ground it ought to be more efficient to use an electric engine from a Prius or something to taxi around. Anybody know why this is not done?
A Concorde's taxi to the end of a runway used as much fuel as a 737's flight from London to Amsterdam.
If that much energy were released over that short a timespan, the airplane wouldn't be there anymore, and neither would the runway.
This must be that "Journalist physics" I keep hearing about, similar in methodology to "Cop math."
London to Amsterdam? Sorry, can you convert that into American units?
Looking at a map it looks like less than 300 miles. LOL, Europeans are funny, they think that's a long ways or something. That's like a day trip by car to visit family in the US.
The article on which the submission was based simply stated it used too much fuel.
This was a quote from another article.
Yes, it used a lot of fuel, however at the time of the accident, the fuel and other costs were handily made up by the ticket prices. Every flight was full as I understand it.
Could concorde substitute in the low-cost carrier role - of course not.
Did it have a profitable (after writing off development costs) buisness going forward - yes, as long as the planes remained in good order.
Was it possible that at some point in the future that they would no longer be able to fill the seats - sure.
For a truly niche service, for the very rich, I question that they wouldn't be able to fill the seats at prices enough to pay all the costs now.
Concorde at Filton isn't even open to the public - it closed in 2010 for inspection by engineers (really? What engineering work had they in mind on a permanently grounded plane? Mind you, British weather had probably taken its toll on the frame...) and there's no scheduled reopening. I imagine there isn't the money to do any work - it was pretty much entirely staffed by volunteers - mostly older people who'd worked on it in the past and had since retired.
Commercial airplanes use tons (literally) of fuel while taxiing. Idling a jet engine is expensive. And london-amsterdam is about the shortest commercially viable flight possible - only about 200 miles - or to put it in US terms, DC-NYC. So, yes, the concorde guzzled fuel - maybe 5 times what a 737 uses - but its fuel usage was not completely irresponsible - after all, you have to carry most of that fuel at mach 2.2...
Or vagina.
and nobody thought about calculating all those costs before spending billions on designing and building the plane? maybe factoring in some inflation and potential fuel costs for the future?
really? they did? why build it then?
they didn't? MORONS!
Common sense.. it's a fucking superpower!
While Concorde was not fuel efficient, most airliners are highly inefficient taxiing on the ground. Doing so, they typically consume considerably more fuel than they do in cruise at altitude. Jets and turbines are very inefficient off design (i.e., full) speed, and fuel consumption depends heavily or even primarily on air density.
A new-and-improved SST could certainly be built -- there have been substantial improvements in the technology including
* supercruise, which allows supersonic flight w/o afterburners/reheat, which are very inefficient;
* engine design;
* much better understanding of sonic and supersonic aerodynamics; and
* much better understanding of sonic booms and how to minimize them.
But it wouldn't help much. Building such an airliner would cost hundreds of millions of dollars or more, and have a very limited market. It would still consume a lot of fuel compared to other airliners, and be limited to overwater operation. Perhaps a market could be found in trans-Pacific operations, but even that seems unlikely.
"(A Concorde's taxi to the end of a runway used as much fuel as a 737's flight from London to Amsterdam.)"
Amusing if true*, but Concordes were used for transatlantic routes, not channel-hopping -- in-flight consumption dwarfs taxiing about the airport.
Are we meant to be astonished that turbojets designed to cruise at Mach 2 are pitifully inefficient at zero airspeed? Surely comparing fuel consumption at supersonic cruise to 737 at cruise would be more interesting...
*The Olympus at full power uses ~3000 gallons/hr, or 200gpm for all four. (Double that with afterburner, but it's only used for takeoff and for transonic acceleration). Depends how far it is "to the end of a runway", but the 737 uses in the neighborhood of 1000 gph (at cruise; x~2 for climb, x~1/3 for descent) -- estimating one hour runway to runway, this gives Concorde about 5 minute minimum (or more, because not full power).
Used to live near Dulles around 1990. Midday Saturday once I thought a plane was scraping the roof the of the apartment building it sounded so close, but I could only find a Concorde off in the distance. Insane noise level.
100 miles is a long distance in Europe. 100 years is a long time in USA
911 killed the Concord.
Baby Seal Leather is for plebs. Mine would have Panda Bear leather seats and baby koala belly leather carpeting.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
We can't even get supersonic passenger transport going right here where there are destinations!! Here's a wake-up call to the delusional cornucopian Space Nutters: It's over. We are burning oil sands now... No warp drive, no fusion power, no dilithium crystals. No Mars colonies, no asteroid mining, no commuting to the bungalow on the Moon. The oil-powered sugar high is done. Let go of the fantasies.
Right after we inhabit Antarctica.
What is the point of a 2-3 hour flight if you now spend at least that amount of time trying to get through the security theater on at least one end of the trip?
Take the slow plane first class, drink heavily, and you might just actually come to enjoy the blue-gloved fondling.
The Concorde was far louder even at regular plane cruising speeds, for the same reason an F/A-18 is louder than a 737. The Concorde was loud even for its day and planes nowadays are far far quieter.
And at cruising height where it broke the sound barrier, yes, the sonic boom did extend to the ground and it was very loud.
Boeing's 2707 suffered from the same problem so I'm not sure why Boeing would make up stories.
The change to only fly supersonic over ocean was a compromise after the protests during the Concorde's goodwill tour. The goodwill tour was to drum up customers, but it garnered none and meanwhile the cancellations kept rolling in. It was a sales flop, no models were sold to companies other than the state flagship carriers of the two countries that developed the plane. And those were sold the plane on the cheap.
The carriers who did fly them did make money on them, but if the purchase price had not been subsidized this may not have been true.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Concord(e) was an astonishing piece of engineering; it could achieve military jet performance with passenger transport reliability. Yes, it was horribly fuel inefficient by today's standards but it was designed in the 1960s. That is: fifty years ago! It was simply uneconomic in the end and in fact it was the requirement for the demonstration of continued airworthiness that really killed it. BA and Air France made a profit on the routes they flew because they sold tickets to rockstars at a premium and they were given the planes for free. The sinister side is that the USA, at the behest of Boeing, who could not compete with the product, did everything in their power to prevent the success of Concord. The FAA has a remit to protect commercial interests of the USA so it did what it was obliged to do. The sad result is that we no longer have any private or public means of travelling supersonically (unless you are Richard Branson and even then you can't take your Spaceship from LAX to LHR) and this is the result of the success of lawyers over engineers, regardless of nationality. Farmer > Miner > Engineer > Doctor... everything else is payload
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
As a kid in the 60's, living within an hour of a couple SAC bases, it wasn't uncommon for fighters to cut loose above Mach1, making the huge storm windows on our house shake and making my mom yell. The public, not wanting the shaking/breaking of windows was one of the downfalls of supersonic commercial flight, along with the cost. Boeing, North American, Douglas and several manufacturers made a few prototypes of supersonic transports, but the expense, fuel costs & public not wanting the BOOMS overhead, pretty much doomed it. Then, I think to make sure the British-French Concorde failed in the USA, they restricted supersonic over land, which means, the flights pretty much terminated at JFK.
From the summary: "The airlines couldn't sell enough tickets on the small plane to even make up for the amount of fuel it needed to guzzle on its journeys, let alone cover maintenance for the technological marvel."
With the increasing concentration of wealth, the number of people who could and would pay >5x the former Concorde ticket price (adjusted for inflation) is probably large enough to carry the aircraft operations and maintenance and then some. To such a target market, a small number of passengers per flight is not a negative at all - it's exclusivity writ large. I think that if the Concorde were flying today, its operators could charge $75K/passenger and fill the aircraft. There isn't any transportation system at present that provides its passengers what the Concorde did: an irresistable combination of speed, luxury, and a conspicuous imprimatur of being the richest of the rich. The market for extreme luxury goods is growing very rapidly, and the Concorde would have fit in perfectly today.
Concorde's "profitability" depended on British Airlines and Air France basically getting the aircraft for free, but that didn't help the carriers, because the Concorde passengers were drawn almost entirely from previous subsonic First-Class passengers. First-Class passengers on regular transatlantic flights were (and still are) enormously profitable, but barely break-even on Concorde. So every Concorde flight lost the carriers (and their competitors) a lot of money. ("Concorde Supersonic Transport: Issues of National Policy" Submission of Senator Birch Bayh to Secretary of Transportation Coleman. Congressional Record, January 21, 1976, pp. S217-S219.)
I've heard about half a dozen Concorde takeoffs at Dulles and Heathrow...
They're VERY loud. Significantly louder than any other plane. I can believe car alarms going off.
Wrong design.
Wrong management.
Wrong business.
Wrong President, Board, CFO ....
Wrong expectations.
Wrong thinking.
Just all wrong.
SoL even before the beginning.
LoL
Concorde, although a very expensive plane to maintain, was a crown jewel as far as British Airways was concerned. The seats were sold as "supersonic class", something above even first class. They've reused the chairs in the rather posh Concorde Room at Heathrow and access to that is generally restricted to those flying in First.
It's generally believed that the main reason the Concorde stopped flying is because Airbus, who provided parts for the planes, decided they weren't going to carry on manufacturing spare parts. Simple as that - nothing to do with costs to the operators, merely the fact that they couldn't keep a supply chain maintained.
Fun fact: BA rather meanly drained the fluids from their Concordes when they retired them, meaning it'd be nigh impossible to get them to fly again now. The sole Concorde left at Heathrow is now used as a magazine storage room!
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/18842117-post10.html
Pre-September 11 2001, Concorde almost consistently made operating profit on every flight. The aircraft only had to be half full to break even on all costs, INCLUDING FUEL.
(Source)
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
It was a noisy plane. From firsthand experience: I lived in Arlington, VA in the 1970's. An air traffic controller screwed up, and a Concorde that was landing at Dulles was put into the wrong landing pattern, which put it directly over my house. I was inside, and there was a loud noise and the entire house started shaking. I ran outside and looked up to see the unique shape of the Concorde flying overhead. It made the nightly news. No normal plane caused that kind of noise and shaking.
I was lucky enough to live about 20 miles out from Heathrow, under Concorde's flight path for the last 10 years of it's operational life. We were more or less under the point where planes started their final approach to the airport and it was not uncommon to have Concorde fly directly over our house.
Most modern planes were barely noticable - the most annoying sound was that of the flaps coming down at quarter past six in the morning as the first flights came in to land.
However, Concorde had a very distinctive sound - and very loud compared to other modern planes. You could hear it, know what it was and set your watch knowing that it was 7:20 in the evening.
It was however a glorious sight, enough to lift your mood on its own if you were lucky enough to be outside when it flew over (either on its way out to the US in the evening, or preparing its approach to Heathrow).
There was no sight quite like a speedbird passing overhead. Pictures and video can't quite convey the sheer elegance and sheer beauty of this plane. Nothing else comes close. And it was so fast. Other planes lumbered overhead - Concorde flashed past like a glorious white arrowhead.
Having also lived on the English Channel I can also tell you that the sonic boom was quite loud and distinctive - enough to rattle the windows from even 30 or 40 miles away.
It will be interesting to see how far along it is. Supposedly, we will see it this year. However, it is supposed to have a small pop and then nothing behind it. No boom like the concorde had. Likewise, it is supposed to be only slight more fuel sucking than a super sonic. The reason is that it will travel at 50K'. Obviously, getting to that altitude will take fuel, so this is not very good for short routes. In fact, a very short one might be ORD to LAX, though it might also be JFK to LAX.
Whatever the losses were, the plane just kept on flying. So definitely, costs didn't kill it. Costs did made the difference between mere existence and a real presence on the market. The accident made the difference between existence and nonexistence. The PR value of the plane was gone and the prestige of it for the clients was gone.
Reducing a long overseas flight from 10 to five hours would be huge. Five hours in a plane is tolerable, but after that the tolerability curve has exponential drop.
I personally could not justify buying a seat at 10x the price for that time savings, but the people that fly regularly might well be able to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
when the Concorde was designed, then the Suez Canal Crisis and Arab Oil Embargo happened --- it was only British and French pride which saw it through to production and service.
It was actually testing its new tires on 9/11 on a flight to New York filled w/ employees when it had to turn around --- I've always wondered if that was a consideration in the selection of the date for the terrorists.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I lived under the landing pattern about 7 miles from Dulles Airport and the Concorde was noticeably louder. I'd be working out in the yard and ignoring the normal planes but when the Concorde flew by you could tell. Such a beautiful bird, it was almost always pointed out by pilots of other type planes as they were departing the gates to go to their runway and they passed the Concorde.
I never found it too loud but it was always subsonic over land. Never heard one at full roar.
You'd be hard pressed to overcome the lobbying money used to get permission to run the Concorde all over the US morning noon and night at Mach 2. Tickets would be TWICE the price now as they were before and every flight would be 100% booked months in advance. Hedge funds don't run themselves, you know.
Ever been in a Concorde? I'll tell you why it died, there is no real 'first class' its like all COACH through the plane. It's small & cramped. And hell legroom was non existant. The only saving grace was its speed, but it had to be MACH+ as you'd go insane from claustrophobia! TLDR; Concords sucked.
When Concorde was losing money, BA surveyed their Concorde passengers and asked them how much they thought their ticket cost (presuming each passenger's secretary actually booked it). The consensus price was much higher than the actual ticket price at the time, so BA increased it and voila, profitability.
The concorde was 50/60's tech that flew from the 70's to early 00's. It was a magnificent plane.
Now imagine the same thing with modern tech:
-all glass cockpit
-fly by wire
-supercruise engine technology
-modern materials (probably still involve a fair bit of titanium, but not as much per se)
-modern electronics tech (look ma, no tubes!)
Imagine if you could do the ultimate "upgrade", changing everything to its modern equivalent.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Normally, I'd say "whoosh", but in this case, I'll say "boom!"
So, who's the twit?
They flew some limited commercial flights from Moscow to Kazakhstan. The Tu-144 cabin was so noisy that passengers couldn't talk, they had to pass written notes. The Russians soon discovered SST travel was uneconomical as well and ended the heavily subsidized Aeroflot flights. It wasn't a very safe plane either...
If it were downsized to a 50 passenger plane. I still think sonic commercial jets are more than viable, Boeing tapped out, and Airbus is obsessed with super-heavies so interest in a faster commercial jet is just not there. GE also came out with a brand new ultra-high bypass engine, so fuel savings can be achieved without radically altering conventional commercial airliner designs.