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Comment by podgib | Hacker News Reader

"This thoroughbred airliner could fly from London to Sydney in 17 hours, three minutes and 45 seconds; compared to around 22 hours on a Boeing 747."

This sounds wrong - the concorde's cruising speed was more than double that of a 747. Unless they're taking the refueling time into account (Concorde would need more refueling stops)

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From what I've been able to find the route was a one-off chartered flight in February, 1985[1]. There were a few delays and because they were attempting for a world-record time, a bit longer because certain conditions had to be met.

[1] https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19850215&id=...

That's apparently the record time it achieved, as a charter flight. I'm sure there were multiple stopovers built in, and another major factor is likely to have been speed restrictions when flying overland.

On the grounds of comfort I'd have preferred the even longer journey in the 747...

Yes that would have been a fairly miserable trip. Concorde was pretty noisy, cramped and, near the end of the flight as the fuel (which was also a coolant) got used up, really quite hot. I did once fly on her from London to New York and it was a pretty amazing trip, but for any flight much longer than that I'd rather take first class on a 747 any day.

Concorde had to stop for ground refuelling something like 4 times on the London-Sydney trip. Each time it took about an hour and a half to come down from cruising altitude and land, slurp up a hundred tons of jet fuel, and take off again.

Short legs.

In-flight refueling is a solved problem for military aircraft. It has never worked out for commercial airlines, though.

Also there were over land speed limits applied. Apparently while at BOS you could hear the boom as the JFK-LHR flights accellerated once far enough off the coast

A far better measure is the London-NY time record comparison. 777-200 did it in 5.27 hours on Jan 15 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...).

Concorde record was 2.88 hours (2h 53 minutes).

Ratio = 1.83:1. Much higher than the confusing Sydney comparison (1.25:1) with its stopovers.

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