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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."
Total waste of dolphin's blood.
The implication of your comment is that Concorde could easily avoid disturbing the populace between New York and Los Angeles by limiting its flight path to the oceans between New York and Los Angeles-- which do not exit,
Sure there is. It's just not the most direct route.
Then a controlled dive could eliminate the need for afterburners completely.
Because a controlled dive works so well on takeoff. If you do it JUST right, you can achieve Mach about the time the controlled dive passes the six-feet-under mark.
Pity is, you only get to do this once, there is no go-around, and there's not even an in flight meal. On the other hand, you can get by with a one-way pass and the sniveling brat in 5A is going to die nanoseconds before you do. Small justices matter.
Sig for hire.
To you that must have been annoying, but to me that sounds FUCKING AWESOME!
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.