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

This is the backwards era

[TheGavster]

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.

Re:Oh Boeing...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.