The Revival of Concorde
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
http://www.pprune.org/tech-log/423988-concorde-question.html
It starts off slow with a technical question, but gradually pulls in some of the plane's designers (and even a flight attendant) discussing every aspect of the plane's design and operation. One of the most amazing aviation threads on the Internet.
It's not a matter of people delaying or impacting flights, it's a matter of the flight being less appealing with inevitable security wait times.
Requiring anything like this will only make an already niche service less accessible with no benefit.
Eg, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08... and http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/magazine/11wwln-lede-t.htm... .
And Concorde passengers had the money.
A background check and your fingerprints, because ..? I recently landed in Heathrow after a looong time staying in Europe (yes, England's not Europe) only. I was literally shaking when I saw all the people going through a random scanner, looking into a camera, providing their fingerprints.
Ignoring that the system didn't even work half the time while I was watching and that it needed a supervisor that reset everything, brought the people back out of the 'check zone' to .. turn it off and on again: That's insane.
This is the amount I'm willing to pay to a crappy government to go easy on me:
This is the list of governments that are allowed to take my fingerprints outside of a criminal investigation(* ):
Again, I really really hope you were just kidding and making fun of a bad situation.
*: The next time my German ID runs out I _might_ have to do that for my own home country - and I still try to figure out ways to avoid that/let the ID run out (illegal) without a renewal etc. And I try to vote for the parties that aren't insane.
That was the full extent of the questioning, which lasted maybe 5 minutes.
(I thought also for the ID, but I was more confident about the passport.)
Get off plan, walk for a long way following signs towards arrivals exit, spot sign for UK residents/nationals, no queue, a sleepy fellow looks at my passport and face, then I walk through to the arrivals area and try to find the underground station.
Have things changed that much?
And the "I WON'T ANY GOVERNMENT HAVE MY FINGERPRINTS" is all fine and dandy, right until you, say, want to visit US and aren't a citizen of VWP.
Of course, you may value your beliefs about fingerprints higher than visiting some countries. Many don't. I don't.
Since I wasn't exactly able to move over and inspect the device from up close I admit that I just _assume_ that the hand thingy compares your fingerprints - I wouldn't know what else it could look at otherwise. Maybe it's just a bible and you have to solemnly swear not to be a terrorist, on camera. Looked weird from 10m away, everyone putting down their (right?) hand on the device, looking into the camera and waiting for the machine to say 'You are good to go'.
I don't plan to visit the US, ever. Personally I can easily state that I my desire to see some (probably) cool places over there isn't high enough to put up with the BS, professionally I am able to dodge any and all suggestions to go there so far - and will try to keep it that way (but that's the loophole: I won't sit on my hands and flat out refuse if my company forces me to go there. I will complain loudly and make sure that my unwillingness to go is heard though).
Great Britain lies on the European continental shelf, part of the Eurasian Plate. The United Kingdom is also culturally and politically affiliated with other European countries. Why is it not in Europe?
It would be like referring to someone from Cuba as 'American' because they are from North America. Technically true but people assume American means someone from the states.
It's $85 for 5 years, and realistically, yes, most of that money just goes to line the pockets of the politically connected. On the other hand, you can pretty consistently go from curb to club in 5 minutes, and you bypass the nude-o-scope.
I'm all for standing up for principle, but this one is already lost. TSA doesn't care if 10 ppm of the traveling population opt out. Google "managed inclusion" if you want to understand why organizing an opt-out protest on Thanksgiving (or generally encourage people to opt out) won't change anything.
Ever notice how older airports don't have the huge snarled lines of TSA checkpoints worked into their design? Instead they have disabled escalators that the line snakes down or a ton of stanchions forming waiting areas down side hallways and such. It's because there were no huge snarled lines at a few choke points when they were designed.
The baggage screeners just plowed bags through and looked for a guns, cartoon style time bombs and knives. I recall rushing my aunt to JFK as a kid and literally getting to the terminal 5 minutes before takeoff -- and she made it! Consultants who had to swap gigs for whatever reason would physically exchange tickets at the airport, no problem.
I suspect our ideas about the efficiency and timeliness of Amtrak may differ.
Instead of just chucking your hand luggage on the conveyor belt, you have to take out your laptop and tablet, you have to take off your jacket, belt and shoes, and assorted metal things (keys, etc.) -- I usually end up having to use four trays for all my stuff when traveling internationally.
I remember the 90s well, when the security gate took less than 20 seconds -- you walked through the metal detector and then waited for your bag. Since the queue wasn't jammed up with people, your bag usually came out at the same time that you were done walking through the detector. Occasionally something set off the detector, of course, but then they just made you go through again without the offending item.
It's definitely much worse now.
Security didn't deter from the LHR–JFK route before with security at the UK end, and I doubt it'd deter from it at the US end.
Then there's the baggage x-ray and metal detection, after which my son routinely (this has happened every time at Gatwick) gets pulled aside for extra screening, which involves x-raying his shoes, and passing him through an extra scanner, and then patting him down. I usually don't have to, but if I don't it means I won't be able to accompany him through a process he already finds uncomfortable and scary.
Nobody has been able to explain why he always gets pulled aside, and it doesn't happen on the return journey from Oslo (most of our foreign trips are to visit family in Norway).
(Meanwhile we routinely forget to take bottles of water or juice out of our carry on, and nobody has ever noticed it until I've realised afterwards; in other words, the fluid restrictions only work on people who voluntarily hand it over and doesn't put it in their bags.)
So while security can be quite efficient now, for a substantial number of passengers it's gotten to be a real pain, and it's pretty much unpredictable enough that you have to plan for it to take time just in case.
Can't say what JFK on the way was back like as I flew to Barbados, where facilities were a little more basic.
There are still ways to get faster through security, London City airport always feels fast when I fly through it and one day I will do the BA001 flight (Concordes old number) to JFK where again I suspect time spent in security theatre will be small.
Your air travel experience will be much more pleasant if you exclusively do carry-on. I've never needed more than a backpack and a suitcase. Most destinations have laundry machines.
My understanding is that weather, taxi gridlock, and under-provisioned gates are the primary drivers of slowness in airports.
It is probably safe to say that almost anyone flying on the concorde at the time would have pre-check today.
So in a way, it got louder with age.
And here's what it sounds like on takeoff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1ShTUVIzCI
Note that it sets off nearby car alarms.
Much more is understood about the noise footprint now than in the '60s.
It was completely unlike the noise a normal jet makes, more like a rocket engine than anything else. I can't say it particularly annoyed me; I liked knowing it came from Concorde.
[*] To be fair, I didn't have very good windows.
Reducing sonic boom noise is something we do understand.
Once BA worked out that most Concorde passengers didn't buy their own tickets, they increased pricing dramatically. The passengers didn't drop off.
In some markets, higher prices signal certain status which then allows even higher demand. Same with exclusive real estate, jewellery, artwork, etc. As long as supply is limited it's not necessarily a problem.
As to your question, it rather depends on the cost, doesn't it?
To start with, it saved about 4 hours on the Paris/NYC connection, not "an hour or two." If it were only $400 more to save 4 hours of overseas travel, then many would jump at it, and find it a real advantage.
The only technical reason (technical not economical) Concorde doesn't fly anymore is because the type certificate, aka the airworthiness of the aircraft, was surrendered by Airbus, hence grounding all the fleet and making it unlawful to fly it.
So to fly it, they would need that to be reinstated.
For the Avro Vulcan, they went through a different aerospace company for that.
I'd love to be wrong, but I doubt Airbus would let anyone fly one of its Concorde...
That does not require manufacturer support, it's similar to US Experimental classification. But it would not permit carriage of passengers.
Concorde wasn't $400 more than an equivalent flight. It was >$11,000 more than a similar comfort premium economy class seat, and that's after the British government had underwritten the losses from the design program (around $2000 per passenger per flight in today's money)
FWIW, the full economics must note that people with a lot of money are more likely to hop on a business jet and get point to point service. When Concorde was designed, business jets that could fly non-stop between US and Europe had just barely entered the market. (The Gulfstream GII, May 4, 1968 vs. first demonstration flight of the Concorde 2 March 1969.)
But supersonic transport could win for long-haul flights over ocean. Depending on the direction, SFO-TPE takes 11-14 hours. Going at mach 3 would cut that down to 4 or 5 hours. Airlines could charge significantly more for such speed. Faster trips also mean that each plane can make more trips per day. For a trans-pacific route, a 777 takes over 24 hours to go back-and-forth once. 300 passengers go west, 300 passengers go east. A mach 3 transport, even if it had half the capacity, could ferry more people in the same time period. If fuel costs were low enough (unlikely, I know), the supersonic craft could actually be more profitable than the 777.
Concorde had a range of 3900nmi (7200km/4500mi), a 777-200LR has a range of 8500nmi, an A340-500 HGW has a range of 9000nmi
In theory Concorde could perform a one-stop Sydney to LA service (stopping at Cassidy International, Kiribati), supersonic the whole way.
If say the US had come up with something else than just a wooden supersonic airliner (Boeing 2707), I guess swallowing the supersonic pill would have been easier.
Plus realistically, it's not like military planes are not allowed to fly supersonic over their own countries. Really, solutions, routes, compromises could have been found, it's just no one had the guts to.
When British Airways retired one of its Concorde to Seattle, it flew from New York / JFK to Seattle, it flew supersonic over Canada. Flight time: 3 hours and 55 minutes. Regular flight time is more like 5h30. Supersonic all the way would have been even quicker...
Honestly though I think shaving off an hour or two is worth quite a lot. There are many people who have conditions, like claustrophobia, people with knee and back issues or hell just regular people get uncomfortable when you're flying for hours and hours. My last two flights were both almost 6 hours each way and I was incredibly sore and ready to get off. It's anecdotal, sure, but I don't know a person who doesn't feel the same way.
Anything that improves the quality of life is good and when these types of planes are more ubiquitous the prices will drop and they will become normal. See Concorde Mark 2 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/eng...
The moment you need connecting flights is when you start racking up the extra time rapidly.
Concorde crossed the atlantic (JFK to Heathrow) in ~3h15 (flying time, excluding ACT delay and the like), a standard subsonic flight takes ~7h.
The kid in me wants to see Concorde fly as an aircraft, but the working adult would see it as yet another toy for the very rich, undeserving of any special consideration from my ilk. When I see a ferrari drive by I think "cool car" but I certainly would be against any and all tax breaks or special treatment to keep it on the road. Mounting a Concorde on a special platform in the middle of the London Tames seems like a cheap tourist trap.
Everyone whose income is largely derived through long-term capital gains does this, really; hedge-fund managers just happen to be people who seem like they are working for someone else but manage to get paid for that work in a way that gets them taxed like capitalists.
(Which might explain while a few notable actual major capitalists -- who don't favor general reform of taxation on capital -- have come out in favor of reforms that would tax hedge-fund manager earnings like normal income.)
Those tax benefits the wealthy receive are a less risky subsidy than directly giving electric vehicle and charging infrastructure companies funds directly. Its a balance between doing nothing and doing something more drastic (full disclaimer: we aren't doing enough, and we should be pouring buckets of money into electrification of mobility, but that's an argument for another thread).
With regards to gas taxes, most people already aren't paying their fair share of gas/road taxes (the US highway trust fund is completely broke). I'm not sure electric vehicles are contributing to the problem as much as the existing 253 million internal combustion vehicles already on the road (not counting heavy trucks, that contribute even more to road damage).
However, assuming that by "electrification of mobility" you mean "everybody who's driving their own car keeps driving their own car, only it's electric rather than gas-powered", then I believe you're looking at it all wrong. In cities where people increasingly live, single-person cars have huge negative externalities aside from fossil fuel consumption, starting with congestion and moving on to over-building of parking, road deaths, sprawl, etc. Electric cars won't solve all of these, and neither will self-driving cars, or self-driving electric cars.
Instead, what we need for mobility in cities is better land use, with dense areas or corridors, safe walking and bicycling infrastructure, frequent and convenient mass transit, and congestion charging.
Do all that and you'll have real mobility fixes.
as far as in understand the X-15 is more simple than Concorde. The suborbital and ICBM-ballistic tech is well understood and has been in constant use for half a century, where is Mach 3+ aircraft territory is still almost no-go zone. Compare to high Mach the suborbital/ballistic is just more energy efficient.
Imagine the chaos of a dozen members of the general public experiencing zero gravity for the first time. Better bring lots of towels ... and an umbrella.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1118/1
That article quotes 7km/s for a 10,000km trip, compared to about 8km/s for LEO.
The X-15 (and SpaceshipOne, for that matter) was never trying to actually go anywhere; it just hopped out of the atmosphere and come down again very close to where it took off, with a delta-V of about 1.5km/s.
It's worth getting a copy of KSP and actually trying this. It's eye-opening.
Security is hardly an issue flying privately, I've had experiences where we've landed and all stepped out of the plane just looking around the airfield waiting for someone to come say something... and nobody coming.
Seriously though, you're forgetting timezones. Hop on the jet at 11am NYC time and be in London at 7:30pm London time. Leave London at midnight and be back in NYC at 10:30pm NYC time. You're not going to be exhausted from travel because it's first class all the way and you don't even need to pack bags.
You may not be exhausted but sitting stationary for 7 hours just to get dinner doesn't seem like such a fun thought, even in first class. (The novelty wears off very quickly)
They both do the same job in the same amount of time, arguably both are as comfortable as each other (or near enough as makes no difference).
The concorde has enormous brand appeal and exclusivity, and that matters to people.
If someone cracks the economic difficulties of supersonic passenger flight, maybe some other aircraft could do it. But Concorde is going to remain a museum piece.
Maybe once or twice. After that it was super annoying. It would set off car alarms it was so loud.
For example, want to waive the height restrictions so you can have airplane view so of Manhattan from your $100M penthouse? Sure, no problem. Want to pay the same property taxes as a $3 million apartment? That's a horse of a different color.
What's wrong with some tax breaks for old classic cars to keep them on the road? They're part of the modern design language and aesthetic and just as important as any important architecture. If you see road/fuel taxes as a cost of using the public road network then providing lower taxes to vehicles who barely drive 500 miles in a year is hardly a burden given the benefit that seeing old classic cars brings to people. Besides, the majority of people driving old cars (even old ferraris) are not mega wealthy but people on more regular incomes who are dedicated to their hobby.
Putting any type of barrier in front of wealthy people spending on this type of technology is a net lose for us all. A private SST would not be built by exploiting workers or robbing pension funds.
As for cheap Tourist traps - London is crawling with them already, including the London Eye and the battleship in WW2 camo.
Did you ever hear the term "jet set" used to describe the glamorous social elite, well that term comes from the days when international air travel was the exclusive preserve of the super rich. Nowadays you can jump on a plane for less than the cost of a meal at the airport (+ taxes of course). Small-minded attitudes like yours would have kept us living in caves because people in mud huts were the "undeserving rich".
Not having such cheap flights might ultimately have been for the better. Flying has become very cheap, but we're not paying the true cost in terms of environmental damage.
Short-haul commuter flights are a different thing entirely.
Then again, when one reads things like "A particularly extravagant excursion was a one-day visit to the pyramids in Cairo in 1982; priced at £780, it was marketed as the most expensive day trip in the world," and ponders the sort of mindset where "most expensive in the world" is considered a marketing point, F. Scott Fitzgerald does come to mind: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me."
Here it is on Street View: https://www.google.fr/maps/@48.715764,2.3727748,3a,75y,274.5...
and here's a picture I took of it a year ago: http://imgur.com/UtD294i
It doesn't appear to be in great shape.
To start with, Concorde was a high-maintenance airframe, more like a military aircraft than an airliner. Each airliner averaged about a day of maintenance in the hangar per two hours of flight, so made one return trans-Atlantic crossing per week. It also burned roughly 100 tons of fuel shipping 100 passengers between NYC and London in 3h30m, compared to a 747 burning the same amount of fuel to ship 450 passengers between London and San Francisco; about 5-10x the fuel burn per passenger-mile.
But the reason it eventually tanked in the market ...
Suppose you're flying London-NYC, post-9/11. You can queue up for security checks 2 hours before you take your seat, then either fly on a regular subsonic airliner or Concorde. After your flight you spend 1 hour getting through immigration and customs at JFK. Total time on security/queueing: about 3 hours. Total time in flight: 3h30m or 7h. So Concorde only cuts your end-to-end travel time from 10h to 6h30m.
Note that a Concorde seat is a cramped, narrow coach-class seat. Okay, there's first-class food and drink and a buffet in the departure lounge: but it's still coach-class leg-room. Meanwhile, a first class seat on a 747 gets you a lie-flat bed along with your posh nosh ...
But if you have the money to fly Concorde, you have the money to pay for a seat on a private bizjet or a charter service like Netjets. It's still subsonic, but you by-pass the entire check-in/security/boarding/immigration/customs mess. Just drive through a gate and up to your bizjet, board it, and it takes off when you're ready for it, not vice versa. And on arrival, an immigration officer comes out to meet you and stamp your passport (if you pay extra -- part of the service). Travel time: 7h.
The takeaway is that the super-rich/first class jet-set passengers deserted Concorde because they could get the same travel time for the same money on private business jets, without being treated like cattle by the TSA.
Even if you could wave a magic wand and streamline the queueing/bureacracy for Concorde passengers, there remains the fact that if you re-started services tomorrow they'd only be able to manage one flight in each direction per day (if they had a fleet of six hulls magically preserved and ready to fly). Whereas the bizjet is ready to fly whenever the passenger wants it.
Upshot: mass supersonic jet travel is dead for the time being. A market may exist for supersonic bizjets (and indeed Aerion claim to be bringing a Mach 1.5 bizjet to market within the next 5 years -- but someone or other has been saying some variation on this theme since about 1990). The only way we'll see supersonic passenger airliners the size of or larger than Concorde again is if we get a propulsion technology breakthrough that makes it feasible to run a scheduled daily-or-more-frequent service across distances that make it desirable -- LAX to Tokyo or Beijing, London to Sydney, and so on. Nuclear, anyone?