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."
Old news day? (Score:5, Informative)
Really? How is this news?
Wow. (Score:5, Funny)
Total waste of dolphin's blood.
But if you fly to /. on the Concorde... (Score:2, Funny)
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Re:But if you fly to /. on the Concorde... (Score:5, Funny)
Stretch Hummer powered by Dolphin Blood... (Score:4, Funny)
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not gonna lie, id ride in it.
Old tech, poor efficiency (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Old tech, poor efficiency (Score:4, Interesting)
Thanks, but no thanks. I'm holding out for my suborbital scramjet.
Re:Old tech, poor efficiency (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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You're sort of right, but Concorde passengers flew first class, with dedicated checkin and security queues. It was more like 30mins at the airport.
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:Old tech, poor efficiency (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Virtually all of those technological improvements concern lowering costs. None of them increased performance, which is what the Concorde and the proposed American SST projects were all about... zooming civilian passengers around at military speeds. The Concorde was all about speed. We've actually slowed down since then, with the modern high-bypass turbofan airliners... especially the two-engined craft... gaining fuel efficiency but losing speed compared to the first generation of jet airliners with their thirsty-but-fast turbojets.
Here are some cruise speeds of jetliners vs. the later crop of comparable turbofan liners:
Boeing 707: 604 MPH
Douglas DC-8: 596 MPH
vs.
Boeing 767: 567 MPH
Airbus A330: 567 MPH
It's great that our jets are more efficient, but there's zero allure about that when it comes to the passenger. Nobody brags about the efficient fuel usage on their flight. Concorde passengers got to lord it over their friends that they went Mach 2.
Re:Old tech, poor efficiency (Score:5, Interesting)
Material science, computer modelling, automated assembly, and engine efficiency have, however. There are also some common-sense things, like the fact that you'd have gotten 2% better fuel economy on Concorde just by towing the damned thing to the runway instead of having it taxi under its own power. Today you might just have some auxiliary system for that, such as an electric motor in the landing gear wheel to handle taxiing or something. There are a whole bunch of vectors on which we could do better today. The biggest is probably weight. We could build a similar aircraft that was substantially lighter today. The aerodynamics can also be better, since we can model this better today. Heck, even the Tu-144 was more aerodynamic and it was from the same era.
Do you honestly think that they got everything absolutely perfect the first time around when they designed this thing in the late 50s, and that there is no room for improvement whatsoever?
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There was even a Concorde model B design that was due to go into production had more Concordes been sold, it did away with the afterburners and had a somewhat longer range... Had there been continual improvement, then today's Concorde would be massively more efficient than the original one.
Seriously? (Score:2)
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Of course it was economic. The only thing that kept it running as long as it did was national pride.
Creating a sonic boom over populated areas didn't help but the basic problem is the fact that it's so damned expensive to operate.
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I lived in Paris near CDG airport and never ever heard a sonic boom. They had Concorde taking off and landing everyday there, and its pretty much inland (closest sea is about 200 miles away). Fuel guzzling, sure, noise seems to be BS stirred by Boeing, from first person witnessing.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
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Actually what killed Concord was that we have to be at the airport two hours before the flight and that it takes three hours to get to a transcontinental hub. The terrorists killed rapid transport, they won and we live in a terrified world ruled by health and safety lawyers. Enjoy your cotton wool.
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Actually what killed Concord was that we have to be at the airport two hours before the flight and that it takes three hours to get to a transcontinental hub. The terrorists killed rapid transport, they won and we live in a terrified world ruled by health and safety lawyers. Enjoy your cotton wool.
Speak for your own little country. I leave home at 05:45, get to the car park at 06:00, security at 06:05, on board at 06:15, wheels up 06:30. And I don't live near a hub either - touch down at LHR at 07:30, time for a shower and breakfast, then on the 08:50 departure to TLV.
That's 2h50 until wheels up at a major airport. A modern concorde with increased range could do LHR-SIN in 4 hours, and immigration's always a breeze. Even with my connecting flight, that's 7h30 from leaving my house to arriving at hote
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Laptops (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The Concorde had a LONG history of failures (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Problem: Speed doesn't really save much time. (Score:2)
4 hours via concorde or 6 via normal plane is not a huge difference, so people choose the cheaper route.
Same on the ground. I compared the "speedy" Amtrak Acela versus the normal train, and from Philly to Boston it only saves 15-20 minutes..... but costs $250! (For that cost you could take a train across the whole country.)
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Ya, if you could take a flight from New York to Beijing or Tokyo in 5 or 6 hours versus 12-20 you might be making a compelling sale. But transatlantic routes just aren't that big of a deal.
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Acela faces the same problem most of Amtrak does: it travels far under rated speed for most of the route because it's on freight rail. The only time it's travelling faster than the regular Northeast Regional is certain areas before it enters CT (though both trains outpace free-flowing highway traffic in NJ). The principal improvement in travel time is that it stops only once per state, and I believe has a shorter-than-normal layover in NYC (Northeast Regional stops for a good 45min at NY Penn).
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Same in the UK!
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>>>You have obviously never priced cross-country Amtrak tickets.
L.A. -to- Philadelphia or Baltimore or D.C. or Pittsburgh or Chicago or New York City: $212 or $262.
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Yeah, if you want to travel cattle class - which is probably as good as business or (nearly) first class on an airplane.
So on a 'cattle class' train you get a seat that folds down into a bed, TV built in, free champagne, etc?
I should travel by train more often.
Re:Problem: Speed doesn't really save much time. (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Re:Problem: Speed doesn't really save much time. (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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High speed is a joke unless they lay new rails owned by the passenger rail company. The basic problem with rail travel in the US today is Amtrak sold almost all the rail lines off to freight companies so now passenger trains sit on sidings waiting for freight to open the rails up.
The problem with new rails is that it is going to cost a lot of money to tear down homes to make a new rail corridor. The existing ones are pretty much full of tracks and other stuff so there is no room for a new set of rails, es
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Um, yeah... Moreover, I remember reading somewhere... would have to look for the reference, that modern passenger trains are capable of going a lot faster than they do, except for the condition of existing rails.
Re:Problem: Speed doesn't really save much time. (Score:5, Funny)
"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.
Re:"The" definite article (Score:4, Funny)
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That's "Harrolde"
Matthew Inman on slashdot? (Score:2)
*it'd be like powering a stretch Hummer with dolphin blood*
Kinda sounds like The Oatmeal...
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.
wow, i did not know that (Score:2)
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: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.
Inaccuracies & another Concorde (Score:5, Informative)
This is the backwards era (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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: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.
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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 devel
Wheels (Score:2)
I always wondered why the wheels of large airplanes are unpowered. In the air, you need to push air to go, but surely on the ground it ought to be more efficient to use an electric engine from a Prius or something to taxi around. Anybody know why this is not done?
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Probably the weight of the engine + drive apparatus. The extra fuel burnt while on the ground probably is less than what would be required to haul an engine across the country.
Re:Wheels (Score:4, Informative)
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:Ridiculous (Score:5, Informative)
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 [bbc.co.uk] 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
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wait a second. How much fuel does the 747 use in taxiing? How come the comparison is made between Concorde on the GROUND (where ANY aircraft is horribly inefficient!) and a BEHEMOTH IN THE AIR!?
THIS DOES NOT MAKE A LICK OF SENSE!
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A random Google result for Concorde has the following:
Fuel Consumption (at Idle Power) 1100 kgs/hr (302 Gallons/hr)
Fuel Consumption (at Full Power) 10500 kgs/hr (2885 Gallons/hr)
Fuel Consumption (at Full Re-heated power) 22500 kgs/hr (6180 Gallons/hr)
I can buy the '2 tons' figure if it includes takeoff (which is done with reheat). Otherwise, you'd have to taxi around for at least an hour to burn 2 tons of fuel.
Bald assertions do not make facts. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Lazy article (Score:2)
Concorde at Filton isn't even open to the public - it closed in 2010 for inspection by engineers (really? What engineering work had they in mind on a permanently grounded plane? Mind you, British weather had probably taken its toll on the frame...) and there's no scheduled reopening. I imagine there isn't the money to do any work - it was pretty much entirely staffed by volunteers - mostly older people who'd worked on it in the past and had since retired.
737 vs concorde comparison misleading (Score:5, Informative)
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...
There is a market for Concorde-like aircraft (Score:4)
From the summary: "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."
With the increasing concentration of wealth, the number of people who could and would pay >5x the former Concorde ticket price (adjusted for inflation) is probably large enough to carry the aircraft operations and maintenance and then some. To such a target market, a small number of passengers per flight is not a negative at all - it's exclusivity writ large. I think that if the Concorde were flying today, its operators could charge $75K/passenger and fill the aircraft. There isn't any transportation system at present that provides its passengers what the Concorde did: an irresistable combination of speed, luxury, and a conspicuous imprimatur of being the richest of the rich. The market for extreme luxury goods is growing very rapidly, and the Concorde would have fit in perfectly today.
Re:There is a market for Concorde-like aircraft (Score:5, Informative)
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.
TFS is not merely inaccurate, it's dead wrong (Score:5, Informative)
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 [concordesst.com])
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Fuel costs didn't kill Concorde, the death of first class flight did.
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But the Concorde doen't travel at "normal cruising speed". That's for proles. It travels at Mach 2.04.
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According to TFA, they didn't go to supersonic speeds until after they were over the ocean.
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Let us suppose,just for a moment, that Concorde flew from New York to Los Angeles-- a route that they were forbidden from due to hysteria over noise. 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, despite the efforts of Francisco de Ulloa [wikipedia.org]
Comments have context.
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Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:5, Informative)
source [nasa.gov]
Moreover,
source [psu.edu]
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Indeed. However, and take this with a grain of salt, they are working on sonic boom suppressed designs, and apparently have made some good progress.
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:4, Insightful)
Fuck yeah. What's wrong with a bit of noise?
PEOPLE SHOULDN'T COMPLAIN THAT MUCH!!!
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:5, Informative)
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In America, sonic booms were silenced by public complaint. In Soviet Russia, public complaints were silenced by sonic booms.
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:4, Informative)
You could hear concorde's shockwave from 60 miles. [bbc.co.uk] Given that concorde traveled at 53,000 ft (ten miles) [travelscholar.com], well you do the math.
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:5, Informative)
You could hear concorde's shockwave from 60 miles. [bbc.co.uk] Given that concorde traveled at 53,000 ft (ten miles) [travelscholar.com], 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.
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:5, Funny)
To you that must have been annoying, but to me that sounds FUCKING AWESOME!
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [kirotv.com] 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.
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Then a controlled dive [wikipedia.org] could eliminate the need for afterburners completely.
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, Informative)
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 [flightsimaviation.com] 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.
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Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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Even military jets don't normally go supersonic at 1000ft. A clean F15 could go that fast, but in a few minutes it would use up all its fuel.
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:4, Interesting)
There's at least one video on YouTube of it taking off and setting off car alarms at Heathrow. Night too, so you can see the afterburners.
Given the cruising speed was Mach 2, I suspect at 1,000 feet it was probably a fair bit louder than a regular jet. Briefly. Also given Israel has actually used sonic booms as the basis for a form of psychological warfare, I suspect it would be plenty loud enough to wind people up.
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Given the cruising speed was Mach 2, I suspect at 1,000 feet it was probably a fair bit louder than a regular jet.
When I lived in the UK, jets from Heathrow would often fly over my house a few minutes after takeoff. Concorde was the only one I could hear from inside the house, and the usual result was a lot of people stepping out into their garden to watch it go past.
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:Oh Boeing... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:4, Informative)
My parents' house in northern VA was right under a flight path of Dulles. When the Concorde went overhead during takeoff, it wasn't just REALLY VERY LOUD, it was DAMN REALLY VERY LOUD.
Re: (Score:3)
I really hope you mean Harrier, otherwise I've really missed out on a neat trick the Vulcan could pull off :-)
Re:Oh Boeing... (Score:5, Informative)
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!
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:4, Interesting)
Have you heard of The Capital Gate in Abu Dhabi? [wikipedia.org]
Now there's something built, Just Because We Can!(tm)
It's the world's "most crooked tower" with it's top floor overhanging the bottom floor by more than 100 feet. It's an astonishing building with a design of little practical value, and a lot of wasted space. It's core was built tilted in the opposite direction of the current tilt, then the shell was built and pulled the core straight leaving a huge 80 story tall atrium in the tower. While a gorgeous building, It's one strange customer.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My school was in the noise-abatement area near Heathrow. Naturally it was pretty well soundproofed. You could tell Concorde when it was flying over, but it wasn't much louder than other aircraft were then (they are generally quieter now). One day we heard an almighty roar, so loud that in our soundproofed classrooms we couldn't hear the teacher talk.
One the news later we found out what had happened. At Heathrow aircraft come in to land in a line of three. The plane landing before Concorde had suffered unde
Re: (Score:3)
Stop that right now. The "Too noisy" meme was started by Boeing to[...]
Okay, no. Stop. Repeat after me: NOT EVERY PIECE OF INFORMATION IS A "MEME".
This is in much the same way that not every fucking use of the internet is "the cloud". Stop that right now.
So you're complaining about the Cloud Meme... and the Meme Meme?
Re:sonic boom problem (Score:5, Funny)
Figments of imagination don't produce sonic booms. 's a well known fact.
Re: (Score:2)
Now if the aliens (for the sake of this argument assume they exist... if you don't, feel free to ignore this post and not reply to it) are flying about in their saucers in the atmosphere at high speeds, why haven't people on the ground heard sonic booms? Is there something about the saucer shape that prevents sonic booms from propagating to ground level?
Supercavitation, [wikipedia.org] maybe?
Methinks you would be better off asking that question on ATS' forums...