Flight 4590 Didn't Kill the Concorde; Costs Did 403
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."
Wow. (Score:5, Funny)
Total waste of dolphin's blood.
But if you fly to /. on the Concorde... (Score:2, Funny)
Stretch Hummer powered by Dolphin Blood... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:"The" definite article (Score:4, Funny)
Re:sonic boom problem (Score:5, Funny)
Figments of imagination don't produce sonic booms. 's a well known fact.
Re:Problem: Speed doesn't really save much time. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Old tech, poor efficiency (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Besides the cost of the dolphin blood fuel has come way down.
Re:Seriously? (Score:2, Funny)
They had a basketball team named after them?
Re:But if you fly to /. on the Concorde... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:5, Funny)
Then a controlled dive [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:5, Funny)
To you that must have been annoying, but to me that sounds FUCKING AWESOME!