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."
Laptops (Score:5, Insightful)
"The" definite article (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's get one thing straight. It's customary to refer to Concorde as "Concorde." Not "the Concorde", just "Concorde."
Carry on.
Magical Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
...powering a stretch Hummer with dolphin blood
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
And networking killed it next (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Laptops (Score:5, Insightful)
As did the added layers of security. I've always lived about 2 hours from a major airport (Toronto). To spend at least 3 -5 hours before I even get on on the aircraft, to spend another 3-8 hours in the air, means I'm looking at at least 6 hours, and more like 8 or 9 hours minimum to get somewhere, versus 12 or 13. At that point the whole next day is a write off anyway.
Being able to do real work means you get a lot less from saving a couple of hours travel time,and having to waste hours before you can even board a plane to get through security means the time you save by a shortened flight is proportionally less. Between fax machines and the internet there's much less demand for moving documents back and forth, so ya, I think other less aircraft driven technologies also pushed concorde out of business.
Ridiculous (Score:4, Insightful)
A Concorde's taxi to the end of a runway used as much fuel as a 737's flight from London to Amsterdam.
If that much energy were released over that short a timespan, the airplane wouldn't be there anymore, and neither would the runway.
This must be that "Journalist physics" I keep hearing about, similar in methodology to "Cop math."
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This is the backwards era (Score:5, Insightful)
...this century's progress in the peak of human achievement will far lag that of the last.
If you want to measure progress in "how fast a handful of executives fly around," sure.
Re:And networking killed it next (Score:5, Insightful)
I have meetings most days. I have a handful of 'virtual' meetings. Regardless of the technology there is no substitute for being there.
Concorde could made meetings that much more practical. Post 9-11 the increased times for check-in, security checks, meant that the advantage of flying by Concorde was gone.
Re:Old tech, poor efficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it was rejected. Their proposal travels at Mach 0.98. A regular aircraft (using the 787 as an example) travels at Mach 0.85. That's a really tiny difference; a flight that would have taken 6 hours would instead take 5 hours and 12 minutes. Yeah, it's an improvement, but not enough to justify the extra expense as compared to more efficient aircraft.
On the other hand, if you created an aircraft that travelled at the same speed as a Concorde but with much greater efficiency, you could do your 6 hour flight in 2 hours and 30 minutes. That's some substantial savings.
Re:This is the backwards era (Score:5, Insightful)
The econobox I drive to work each day would be a technological marvel to the most wealthy of executives even 50 years ago. New things are expensive, so the rich get them first, but if we never dream of any thing new simply to spite those more fortunate, we spite only ourselves on the long term.
Re:This is the backwards era (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it simply costs too much to fly faster than that.
Because top speeds are now increasing regulated both for safety reasons, and to keep it a competition between drivers rather than checkbooks.
Actually about one and a half times once you understand that Apollo development actually started in the mid 50's. And, actually, not a bad thing once you understand the difference between a large budget and limited one.
Only because we live in the real world, and you don't seem to.
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Vanity project?
Let's see they basically had a mach2 capable bomber design, which they never (AFAIK) tested as a bomber (though they *did* carry out a number of rather strange tests in France which made absolutely no sense for an aircraft intended as passenger transport, but were perfectly understandable in the context of testing out a strategic bomber..and testing out defences against similar such supersonic bombers then in development by a.n.others).
Concorde gave both the French and British military a lot of aircraft stress data, and provided a useful testbed for a number of technologies under the pretext of it being a civilian airframe design.
The reason that they never did anything further overtly militarily with the design?, feh, who knows?, typical French apathy and the usual British incompetence? (and the continued British fawning and kowtowing to the US stopping anything interesting happening here).
A cynic might argue that the main British interest in the continued subsidising and maintaining the use of the aircraft as a SST for so long after it was obviously economically non-viable (and as part of their original spec for the design was to take about 100 people across the Atlantic as fast as possible) was that it meant that they'd still be able to get Queenie and the rest of the Royal parasites across the pond to Canada in the event that WWIII broke out in a somewhat unexpected and exciting manner (height of the cold war, damn'd Russkies, don't trust 'em, never could play the war game like gentlemen..), having a fleet of them meant that some of the parasite politicians/civil servants of the day could also escape to that remote part of Canada with the suitable airstrip...
Then, the accident happened. They re-evaluated, someone spotted that the cold war was over, the inertia to change finally gave way, exit Concorde stage left...and I have to leave the last words on her to PTerry
'It wasn't a thing, it was a bit of shaped sky ...'.
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:4, Insightful)
Fuck yeah. What's wrong with a bit of noise?
PEOPLE SHOULDN'T COMPLAIN THAT MUCH!!!