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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."
Really? How is this news?
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Total waste of dolphin's blood.
...sounds like something a B-movie villain would have. With seats covered in Baby Seal Leather.
The Concorde was designed in the late 1950s. We have made rather substantial improvements in technology in the past half century that would allow an aircraft designed today to achieve substantially better fuel efficiency, not to mention the additional efficiencies we can gain via higher altitudes. The stigma of its failure will probably prevent anybody from trying again any time soon, but just because an aircraft designed in the 1950s wasn't cost effective doesn't mean an aircraft designed in the 2010s couldn't be.
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
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.
...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.
Stop that right now. The "Too noisy" meme was started by Boeing to hurt sales of the Concorde, and it worked. You're still repeating it to this day.
A Concorde going overhead at around 1000 feet and normal cruising speed is no more noisy than a normal jet. It's the afterburners that are loud (REALLY VERY LOUD) and those are only used at take-off.
Too noisy was not just a Boeing claim. Early flights were not required to decelerate below mach 1 before reaching land and they sent sonic booms up and down the coast.
Sonic booms cover wide areas. Sitting 40 miles outside of Seattle one day I heard two large booms, and thought it was near by blasting. It turns out it was two F15s scrambling supersonic out of Portland when a small plane wandered into Air Force One's exclusion zone. Such booms leave a trail of 911 calls.
Eventually, every single Concorde route required subsonic descents and approaches for this very reason. For the same reason no country let them fly to interior airports except France and Britain.
The afterburners (reheat they called it) were turned off after getting off the runway before they hit the noise abatement zone.
With sufficient runway, they didn't need the afterburners at all except to break through Mach 1.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The article has all sorts of inaccuracies and key omissions. Concorde was always fuel inefficient and it was recognized as such in the 70s. It was thought it could still be successful despite this, until wide body jets took away much of its market. Because of its limited success, and limited money at the time, a slightly improved concorde (with greater range making a lot more transoceanic routes viable and about another 30 seats), or a vastly improved concorde (with about 250 seats), were never built. These might have been more commercially successful than the concorde that was built. Even so, Concorde was profitable as a niche market for British Airways. It was until it was grounded following the Air France crash. You may recall that BA spent a lot of money improving concorde and getting it back into the air (e.g. kevlar lining in the tanks), but then quickly wound the program down. They expected it to be profitable again, and fly for another 20 or 30 years. The problem was 9/11 killed concorde. The reason was it was such a niche that BA's concorde profits depending on a lot of regular fliers who repeatedly flew on it between London & New York - and many of these frequent Concorde fliers worked in the WTC. The treaty between the UK & France meant that unless both agreed Concorde had to be kept flying, so when BA lost interest the French neither had the prestige reasons or the monetary reasons (I don't know if their Concorde operations were profitable) to continue either, and it was mutually agreed to shutdown. Also omitted are some additional locations where Concorde can be visited. There is a Concorde (one of the two British test aircraft) that you can go aboard at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford near Cambridge. By coincidence I was there today, and yes I went aboard this Concorde.
Unfortunately, take-off and landing are the times noise creates the worst impact. Also, I don't think you meant "1000" feet, as a commercial jet does not normally fly that low and certainly wouldn't at supersonic speeds (cruise altitude for the Concorde was closer to 60,000 feet, going supersonic at 1000 feet would be really really stupid: noise, safety, and structural concerns due to higher atmospheric pressure that low would forbid it).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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".
I travel Portland to Sacramento and back once a year. Amtrak station in Portland is a few blocks from work, and the train stops literally in front of my hotel in Sacramento. Convenient, right? Every year I investigate, and every year Amtrak is about three times the cost of a plane ticket, with a journey time around 30 hours vs 43 minutes of flight time. Yeah, go by train...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Figments of imagination don't produce sonic booms. 's a well known fact.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
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.
Commercial airplanes use tons (literally) of fuel while taxiing. Idling a jet engine is expensive. And london-amsterdam is about the shortest commercially viable flight possible - only about 200 miles - or to put it in US terms, DC-NYC. So, yes, the concorde guzzled fuel - maybe 5 times what a 737 uses - but its fuel usage was not completely irresponsible - after all, you have to carry most of that fuel at mach 2.2...
A Concorde going overhead at around 1000 feet and normal cruising speed is no more noisy than a normal jet. It's the afterburners that are loud (REALLY VERY LOUD) and those are only used at take-off.
I'm sorry but that's wrong. I live in London and you *knew* when Concorde was flying over. But it was damn cool!
Too noisy was not just a Boeing claim. Early flights were not required to decelerate below mach 1 before reaching land and they sent sonic booms up and down the coast.
Then they stopped doing that and they stopped being "too noisy". Calling them "too noisy" today is incorrect.
Eventually, every single Concorde route required subsonic descents and approaches for this very reason.
Uhhh, more like they required subsonic descents and approaches so they could be handled with normal traffic, and to obey federal law that has been around for a very long time. 250 knots below 10,000 feet, and 200 knots below 2500 AGL.
The only exemptions are "approval of the Administrator" (unlikely), and "minimum safe airspeed", which certainly isn't above mach 1 for the SST.
I fail to understand how having meetings can do anything to improve productivity.
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.)
You could hear concorde's shockwave from 60 miles. Given that concorde traveled at 53,000 ft (ten miles), well you do the math.
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.
He had to refuel twice.
source
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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?
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.
Keep in mind the concorde needs a very long runway and operated at only the largest airports were it would have to wait in line and/or travel a long way from loading to takeoff at low speeds which is very inneficient for a jet engine.
Acording to Wikipedia due to jet engines being highly inefficient at low speeds, Concorde burned two tonnes of fuel (almost 2% of the maximum fuel load) taxiing to the runway.
According to http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5195964.stm the Concorde burned up 94 tonnes of fuel getting from London to New York and a whopping two tonnes simply taxiing onto the runway.
A random google result says a 737 uses 2400 kg/hour in fuel and 1 hour at 485 mph, 780 km/h should get you about 485 miles / 780 km :)
London to Amsterdam is only 221 miles (356 km) so it looks like Concorde as designed in the 50s used more fuel taxiing around as a common jet does in an hour flight
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.
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.
You could hear concorde's shockwave from 60 miles. Given that concorde traveled at 53,000 ft (ten miles), well you do the math.
I grew up in southern RI, just north of the spot where the Concorde went supersonic. Every day during dinner, all the plates would rattle in the cabinets from the shock wave of the 5:00 flight. At that distance the boom wasn't audible, but there was still enough subsonic energy to shake the house.
What? The sonic boom is generated by the passing of the shockwave from an aircraft flying overhead at supersonic speed. It doesn't just happen once when the aircraft "breaks the sound barrier". The shockwave is produced as long as the aircraft is flying at supersonic speeds. Everywhere that the trailing shock wave passes over will experience the sonic boom.
Pre-September 11 2001, Concorde almost consistently made operating profit on every flight. The aircraft only had to be half full to break even on all costs, INCLUDING FUEL.
(Source)
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Well, on the one occasion I flew Concorde JFK-LHR, luxury was not really at the top of the agenda. The *service* was good, but it was also necessary - taking coats from passengers in the private lounge to stow on board gave the impression of service, but was necessary because the aircraft was so small there was nowhere in the passenger cabin where people could have stowed them themselves. The seats were small. The aisle was small. The food selection was small (compared with First Class) because the galleys were small and the food storage areas were small.
There was almost a pioneering air about it - as we climbed out of JFK the captain announced "please don't be alarmed: we're shortly about to turn off the engines [I suspect he meant the afterburners] as part of noise control procedures, but don't worry, they've never failed to reignite yet". The interior walls became noticeably warm as the mach indicator ticked up.
But the big attraction was that Concorde flew during the day (unlike all but a couple of other US/UK flights) and you arrived without the fatigue of 7 hours of confinement in bad air.
And even 35 years back, I got to fly because a conventional aircraft had gone out of service and there was room on Concorde at the last moment to accommodate all the bumped First Class passengers and a good chunk of Business Class - so even then there weren't that many people (the aircraft only had 100 seats) for whom that attraction was worth the price.
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.