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."

Comments

Laptops

[antifoidulus]

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.

Re:Laptops

[Sir_Sri]

As did the added layers of security. I've always lived about 2 hours from a major airport (Toronto). To spend at least 3 -5 hours before I even get on on the aircraft, to spend another 3-8 hours in the air, means I'm looking at at least 6 hours, and more like 8 or 9 hours minimum to get somewhere, versus 12 or 13. At that point the whole next day is a write off anyway.

Being able to do real work means you get a lot less from saving a couple of hours travel time,and having to waste hours before you can even board a plane to get through security means the time you save by a shortened flight is proportionally less. Between fax machines and the internet there's much less demand for moving documents back and forth, so ya, I think other less aircraft driven technologies also pushed concorde out of business.

Re:This is the backwards era

[sco08y]

...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.

Re:Old tech, poor efficiency

[Guspaz]

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.