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NASA Drops $2.3M On Supersonic Aircraft Research
coondoggie writes: This week the space agency said it invested $2.3 million for eight research projects that will address sonic booms and high-altitude emissions from supersonic jets. NASA's Commercial Supersonic Technology Project, which picked the new projects, focuses on developing sonic boom reduction methods and defines the necessary approaches or techniques for objectively assessing the levels of sonic boom acceptable to communities living in the vicinity of future commercial supersonic flight paths.
Not really. While this over-simplification ("It was too expensive!") might sound reasonable the true story is more complicated. Richard_at_work pointed at some of the issues. Another issue was that because of the Air France 4590 crash (which was largely due to bad luck), both British Airways and Air France got really jittery and anxious to pull the plug before another disaster happened.
Another thing that people ignore was that the Concorde was put to retirement largely because it was just a really old plane. It was designed in the 60's. It still had an _engineer_ in the cockpit - that's how old the design and avionics were. Unlike other planes designed during that period that are still flying, it never got any significant upgrades. It had a run of 27 years; more than good enough for any plane. Ultimately, it's not that Concorde failed, it's that we failed to replace it.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Concorde was profitable for British Airways on the trans-atlantic routes it typically operated on,
I don't call anything profitable until it makes back its development costs. Concorde never came close to doing that.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That depends on whose profit you are talking about - the aircraft made a profit for its operators, British Airways and Air France, but lost its manufacturers money. Two entirely different set of accounts, and its easy to turn that on its head for other aircraft as well - the Boeing 747 made Boeing a lot of money, but while it bankrupted more than a few airlines whose egos were bigger than their fiscal abilities, you wouldn't say that the Boeing 747 wasn't profitable for Boeing.
The reason it lost its manufacturers money was because of the 1970s oil crisis, it had plenty of orders before that baby hit - indeed, the oil crisis depressed the entire airline industry, and many people believe that if the Concorde production run had outlasted the effects of the oil crisis, orders would have resurfaced, but alas the order book was filled (at least in terms of long lead time parts) before the crisis passed, and thus no more orders were possible.
The Convair 880 and 990 were also profitable for its operators, but lost its manufacturer money. Same goes for the L1011. But operators loved both types and they lasted decades in operational service precisely because they were profitable to fly.