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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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.