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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."
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
...powering a stretch Hummer with dolphin blood
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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.
Oh, goody, en expert. At normal cruising speed and 1000 you would blow every window and eardrum for 2 miles either side of the flight path. And burn up the airplane in a few minutes. This is a moot point as it won't go normal cruising speed at 1000 feet. .85 over land.
The noise associated with the sonic boom, and the accompanying regulation to prevent it, was well-understood in the 60's. That is indeed what killed any possible market for the Concorde - and every other potential SST including Boeing's own. It was dubious at best even without the subsonic limitations but it was a dead loser from a business standpoint once it had to go Mach
This is hardly a Boeing-generated myth. I am sure that Boeing would encourage someone like Airbus to take up the supersonic challenge again, it would be crippling to Boeing's biggest competitor.
Concorde was a British/French vanity project to make up for their (highly justified) feelings of inferiority to the USSR and the USA during the space race. It was a nice design but it was NEVER EVER going to make any money - a fact that many people knew and pointed out repeatedly before it ever flew.
...this century's progress in the peak of human achievement will far lag that of the last.
If you want to measure progress in "how fast a handful of executives fly around," sure.
Of course it was rejected. Their proposal travels at Mach 0.98. A regular aircraft (using the 787 as an example) travels at Mach 0.85. That's a really tiny difference; a flight that would have taken 6 hours would instead take 5 hours and 12 minutes. Yeah, it's an improvement, but not enough to justify the extra expense as compared to more efficient aircraft.
On the other hand, if you created an aircraft that travelled at the same speed as a Concorde but with much greater efficiency, you could do your 6 hour flight in 2 hours and 30 minutes. That's some substantial savings.
The econobox I drive to work each day would be a technological marvel to the most wealthy of executives even 50 years ago. New things are expensive, so the rich get them first, but if we never dream of any thing new simply to spite those more fortunate, we spite only ourselves on the long term.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Yep, Concorde was noisy but in a kind of cool way. I once stayed in the Raddisson Hotel right next to one of Heathrow's runways, and my room overlooked it - a planespotter's ideal room! The windows were astonishing - they totally eliminated all noise from the planes. Except for Concorde, which created a strong vibration and a dull roar on takeoff, where everything else took off in eerie silence.
Concorde's noise seemed out of place among the modern turbofan fleets but that reflects more how far engines have come since the 60s than anything really wrong with Concorde. Compare it to a Boing 707, DC-8 or other contemporary and it wasn't so stand-out noisy. All planes were quite loud back then.
Concorde may not have made much economic sense but it was a cool thing to have actually existed. Today's world is so run by idiot bean-counters that we are never likely to see a thing built "because it can" again. Rather sad, isn't it?