Concorde's largest downfall wasn't technical, it was social. The original expectation was that she would rapidly climb, go supersonic over land, and supercruise all the way to her destination. If this was possible it was reasonably economical.
Problem is that sonic-booms over populated areas are a big "no no." So Concorde was forced to wait until she got out over the atlantic to supercruise, which meant more time spent in her inefficient subsonic configuration and longer flight times.
In 1976 the US actually banned Concorde due to noise complaints. The ban was lifted in 1977 after changes mentioned above.
I think it was in '03 and the price was just something like $12,000 for the two flights. It was high enough that I put it on a credit card. The prices had a lot of variation and I flew first class but they had a higher class that they called Concorde, as I recall.
I think there is an enormous market for something like Concorde now, much more than there was before. The amount of super rich has increased massively (and each of them have way more money). I think you'd even see executives using it over their own private jets for the speed increase - which means tickets could be crazy expensive, as operating a jet is very pricey.
I suppose it'd depend a bit on if you could get WiFi on it though. Wonder if that is possible at supersonic speeds?
So let's imagine you live in New York and have a meeting in Paris- and let's say, for the purpose of argument, that it's actually a transporter, instantaneous travel from airport to airport. You leave your house at 6AM, get to the airport at 7AM. Its an international flight, so you need to get to the airport early, so your flight leaves at 8AM. You instantaneously arrive in Paris, but that's six hours time zone different: 2PM in Paris. Two hours to navigate through customs and the airport and it's 4PM, an hour to do ground transport to your meeting and it's already 5PM.
So even with exactly zero travel time between JFK->CDG your meeting can't be conducted at normal business times. So if your meeting still requires traveling out the day before and dealing with jet lag and all the rest, there just isn't that much benefit to justify the costs.
It might make sense for a business jet, so long as the costs are really not much more than a GV, or if it's primarily about prestige anyway.
As for the wait time at the airport: if you're buying premium tickets the airline doesn't care how late you arrive as long as you don't delay the flight. IIRC, at least for domestic travel TSA requires that all checked luggage be presented at least 30 minutes prior to departure, so that's the only hard time limit. Maybe it's earlier for international travel, but for a single day itinerary you presumably wouldn't have any checked luggage.
It would be faster to get through the CDG customs lines if you had a Schengen citizenship, since they could get into the the Schengen lines, but that's not really particularly useful advice.
There are two real reasons this no longer works; first the international travelling class has turned out to be far greedier and care less about their lives than anyone imagined, secondly Skype.
As far as travel versus communications goes, from what I can see improving communications technology places a higher premium on travel than before, not less. Easier for senior executives to stay in touch with HQ on the go, but that ability means that relationship building is now more important.
But traveling? In 1985, you could somewhat stay in touch by telephone (but generally not cell phone) though it was easier if you had a dedicated assistant and international long distance was rather variable. And sending documents probably involved faxes. While meetings/flights/time zones mean I may not always be reachable when traveling on business today, it's a lot easier than it was 30 years ago.
On the topic of WiFi, SpaceX is able to return video from the Falcon 9 on ascent and descent in many cases. So even though the very high Doppler and tracking problems involved in wireless communication to a rocket are not trivial, they're already doing it.
One of the challenges Virgin Galactic ran into in its sales efforts was the high co-incidence between (a) people who can pay for a super-expensive form of transport and (b) people whose Board, limited partnership or employment agreements prohibit them from doing super-risky stuff.
All the gear would have been put in a transit and driven up by one of the technicians
It was also noisy and cramped. Fantastic though, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and a wonderful thing to have done.
If you felt the window, it was warm to the touch vs. cold on a subsonic. Outside window was much smaller than subsonic.
The sound of the air passing by was closer to a sizzling sound in super cruise vs. what we hear on subsonic.
Take off had a noticeably faster groundspeed before rotation.
60-90 seconds (I forget, depends on airport) after departing the runway, throttles were reduced and you felt the plane slow quickly and the plane's angle of attack was reduced. This was for noise abatement and they explained this prior to takeoff so not as to alarm you. Leaving JFK on 31L included a sharp left bank as soon as wheels up to follow the shoreline and avoid populated areas. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j-3003jtuY
After leaving populated area, throttles were pushed to full and climb resumed. If all went according to flight plan, Concorde would be at .95 Mach shortly and get the OK to go supersonic.
Afterburners. You felt them getting turned on to go supersonic. They were turned on in pairs - one on each side. Felt like someone was gently pushing you from behind.
No turbulence - would fly above the weather.
Landing was like being in a recliner. High angle of attach on the approach. Once down on all wheels, NOISE as the reversers kicked in.
The delta wing didn't flex like subsonic wings do, so any bumps during climb or decent felt a bit more sharp (less bouncy/spongy? hard to find the words). Maybe it was just me.
Other than that, it's the same as a regular subsonic.
10/10 would do again. Need time travel.
That's pretty much it... I enjoyed it but it wasn't life altering.
Was it worth it? Probably not for most. It was worth it just to have had the experience, in my case. I'd always wanted to go and they were shutting down. So, I went. At the time, I could have spent the money more wisely, but I don't regret it.
Concorde's narrow fuselage made it remarkably cramped and uncomfortable. The galleys were also tiny, precluding the elaborate à la carte dining that is now standard in the front seats of widebody jets.
For the kind of customer that used Concorde, the idea of being pampered in Business or First was often much more attractive than saving a couple of hours.
Today, Concorde would struggle to compete on overall journey time with the A318s flying out of London City Airport. The speed advantage of Concorde would be badly eroded by the Kafkaesque nightmare of travelling via Heathrow.
People vastly underestimate the effect lay-flat travel had on demand for the Concorde.
Consider the time differences between London and New York. An overnight lay-flat loses a traveller little to no daytime. A Concorde, while faster, is less comfortable and leaves and/or arrives at an awkward time for a business traveller.
Yes, longer distance flights are, well, long but then you have a whole other set of engineering challenges to do those routes nonstop supersonic.
Lay flat preceded the Concorde. More than that, it was caused by it. "In 1977, El Al announced plans to reconfigure its aircraft with a small first class cabin and larger business class cabin on the assumption that most transatlantic first-class passengers would shift their business to the Concorde" [1].
EDIT: This is all wrong.
> Relatively few people are really in a situation where the few hours in a comfortable plane are worth $$$$
Business class is where airlines make the bulk of their profits.
Business class mostly started up as an offering for, well, business travelers who could give the appearance of being frugal relative to first class while still traveling comfortably. What's happened over time is a lot of dedicated first class seating has gone away and business class has been incrementally upgraded to something that's mostly much better than old-fashioned first class ever was.
> Relatively few people are really in a situation where the few hours in a comfortable plane are worth $$$$
Business class is where airlines make the bulk of their profits.
I wasn't clear. Yes. Lots of people will pay extra for business. I was saying I'm not sure how many of those will then spend 2x or more for a bit more speed when they're already comfortable.
ADDED: This article suggests lay-flat came in during the 1990s which sounds about right to me: https://thepointsguy.com/2017/05/evolution-of-business-class... I definitely remember flying business class transatlantic in the early 90s and it wasn't lay-flat.
You're 100% correct--my bad.
(And as I recall it got him in at rush hour rather than just having a nice dinner on the plane.)
All of the relevant destinations on both sides of the ocean (Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle) are right by the sea, which of course isn't the case for Paris and London where the Concorde flew from.
Sonic booms go parallel to your path, so a vertically moving rocket has a sonic boom that goes parallel to the ground and doesn't bother anyone.
However the big issue with rockets (other than technology which SpaceX thinks that it can handle) is that about 1/3 of people get sick in freefall. (Estimate that I read from the operators of the vomit comet.)
Do you think that that is unreasonable?
Sibling comment has a good point that hyperloop could make spaceports at safe distances more accessible.
So 15 miles is definitely out of the blast radius. What about the fireball?
Google told me the following. 15 miles is roughly 24 km. The mass of air is 1.2 kg per cubic meter. The volume of a sphere is 4/3 pi r^3. The energy of a kt is about 4.184e9 joules. It takes about 1 joule to increase the temperature of air by 1 C. When I put all of that together I calculate that a 15kt explosion has enough energy to raise the temperature of a 15 mile ball of air by about 0.9 C.
Please double check my figures and calculation, but I think that your average city can survive that. :-)
Edit: On my phone I'm getting ~5.8 joules per square meter. Google seems to be mangling the units, though, so I can't be sure it's not dropping or adding in a factor of 1,000, though.
Edit 2: assuming that figure is correct, unless it's released in <1/200 of a second, it's not competitive with the sun at the equator (>1,000 Watts/Joules per m^2 per second)
Here's the math, if you want to double check: (10 x 4.184 x (10^9 joules))/(4 x pi x (24000 meters)^2)
A supersonic jet makes a sonic boom on the ground over its whole trajectory. That's what makes it undesirable for overland travel.
I've heard it's cheaper (whether this is in terms of risk or dollars I don't know) to send up a dedicated tanker to top of a bunch of large planes that took off with little fuel than it is to make a bunch of large planes take off fully loaded with cargo and fuel.
The problem is that's a whole additional, expensive skill your pilots need.
A modern Concorde would almost certainly have an ETOPS rating which would allow for trans-Pacific routes, which is where the true time and fuel efficiency is to be found in supersonic flight.
LA-Tokyo is ~4700nmi (~8200km), and polar route flights are generally used by planes with a range around or above 7000nmi (~13000km) like the Dreamliner or the A350 XWB
ANC is still a major refueling and sorting stop for air cargo -- most all air cargo between China and the mainland U.S. passes through Anchorage. The Anchorage FedEx hub is only passed by Hong Kong and Memphis in terms of volume, and the UPS hub is also one of the largest for that company.
That's counterintuitive when you look at a flat map, but not on a globe.
Here's a flat projection of some great circle routes:
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SFO-NRT-SIN,SFO-HKG-SIN
Note that the shortest path goes a lot closer to Alaska than it does Hawaii.
That said, the furtherest north any of those charters landed in the far east was Hong Kong.
NASA is working on quieter supersonic flight, which reduces the sonic boom on the ground.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-begins-work-to-build...
Hopefully, we get commercial supersonic flight in some form in the 2020’s.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/news/a28351/supersoni...
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/boom-supersonic-jet/
https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/business-aviation/20...
Eventually the bill passed, it has a provision that the FAA should "obtain the input of aerospace industry stakeholders regarding the appropriate regulatory framework and timeline", and report back next year.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2997...
Yes but as scrumper notes that made it inefficient.
The Concorde seated 100 people, in first class. If you can’t fly at supersonic speeds, you aren’t going to spend the extra money.
Since the Concorde was a luxury airliner, it couldn't fly as often as a regular airplane.
If you're in London and you find out you need to be in NY right now at all costs, it may be faster to hop on a business jet or even a commercial flight rather than wait for the next Concorde.
And as first class (and business jets) got comfortable, the need to get out of the air ASAP is much less than it used to be.
US banned concorde because Boeing ordered the government to ban it