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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."
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.
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".
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.
Noise wasn't the only issue - it's just the only issue to have survived in the public consciousness.
The other issue was range, or more accurately the lack thereof. Back in the 60's, what the airlines wanted was range and carrying capacity - and attempting to provide that drove the costs of the US supersonic effort through the roof. Boeing especially wanted a piece of the growing trans-Pacific market, and took it very hard when it became clear that no practical supersonic aircraft was every going to be anything but a "small trans-Atlantic taxi". (The last quote come from a retired Boeing engineer I used to know.)
By air: 1h 30m in the air, plus be at the airport 1h before departure, plus spend 15m retrieving your luggage. Total time: 2h 45m. Average airfare: $83.60 one-way, according to gofox.com.
By Amtrak: 16h on the train, plus be at the station 30m before departure. Total time: 16h 30m. $145.
So it isn't quite as bad as you claim. But I agree, it's still not a very efficient way to travel.
For fun, let's add another potential option: high speed rail. 3h 45m, $69.40 one-way, and you can use your laptop and cell phone the whole time, and get up and walk around whenever you want, and there's even a restaurant car. Would you ride it?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Material science, computer modelling, automated assembly, and engine efficiency have, however. There are also some common-sense things, like the fact that you'd have gotten 2% better fuel economy on Concorde just by towing the damned thing to the runway instead of having it taxi under its own power. Today you might just have some auxiliary system for that, such as an electric motor in the landing gear wheel to handle taxiing or something. There are a whole bunch of vectors on which we could do better today. The biggest is probably weight. We could build a similar aircraft that was substantially lighter today. The aerodynamics can also be better, since we can model this better today. Heck, even the Tu-144 was more aerodynamic and it was from the same era.
Do you honestly think that they got everything absolutely perfect the first time around when they designed this thing in the late 50s, and that there is no room for improvement whatsoever?
Actually the Concorde had very good range for the type of plane that it was. The engines only needed reheat to bring it to cruise speed, then the reheat was shut off. During that part of the Concorde's flight regime, the Olympus engines were among the most efficient jet engines ever built, even today. All engines have an optimal operating range, and for the Concorde, since it was a supersonic airliner, that was at high altitudes and in the Mach 2 range.
The Concorde didn't even really need reheat to go supersonic, it just needed them to go supersonic in a short enough time to make the flight worthwhile. There is no point taking the Concorde if you are 2/3rds of the way across the atlantic before you hit the speed of sound.
Now as to what killed the plane? In terms of its market, two things mainly:
1) The oil crisis and the cost of fuel.
2) The pollutants were found to be ozone depleting. Now with the number of planes that were eventually made, that really didn't make much of a difference, but if the plane was built in much larger numbers then the environmental impact would have been much more significant.
Now the oil crisis had an impact, the regulatory issue of not being able to go supersonic until the plane was outside the territorial limits of the US and the UK did play a role in that, but that was more of a compounding factor than a critical one.
Once the decision was made to only make the 13 units, and the fixed cost investment was written off by the two governments, the planes were generally profitable. Yes that is accounting tricks because the fixed investment was taken off the books, but from an operational perspective, they weren't a drain on the airlines that operated them.
What forced them to be taken out of service? That was a regulatory thing. The successor manufacturer and the holder of the certificate of air worthiness (airbus) decided not to keep that up to date. So really neither Air France nor British Airways had a choice in the matter. Once the certificate expired, they couldn't fly the plane anymore.