Concorde ‘B’ (2014)
heritageconcorde.com
heritageconcorde.com
This is largely revisionist history. The reality was that logistics of flying the Concorde (routing, timing, airport services) combined with the experience (speed over comfort) made it expensive and just not that desirable. The plane was conceived in the era of big government bankrolled air travel and doesn't have a role in the reality of flying buses we see today.
The original text is true. The Concorde was what the airlines, aircraft makers, and the public wanted. It was fast. It was expensive. It was a trophy project. All things that appeal to one or more of those segments.
What changed was that fuel got too expensive, deregulated airlines started cutting corners everywhere, and people's priorities changed.
The world went from people wearing their Sunday suits to embark on a flight to people piling into Southwest air buses in their pajamas without bathing.
So the history is correct. It's just that the world has changed.
/Flew on the Concorde in the mid-1990's.
Still, supersonics will need some major breakthrough in operational cost.
There is a reason why Boom Supersonic is only targeting a plane that comfortably seats 50.
There's a difference between aspiration and market reality.
'The Public' never actually wants a 'Trophy Project' to the extent that they are not willing to actually pay for it out of their own pockets. Yes, they might like the idea, but what matters is "are people willing to pay the price"?
I suggest there was probably a lot of hubris in the project, that said, there's probably a lot of demand these days for such a thing.
There are a lot of hyper-rich people and they desperately need status.
Also, in Finance, there are a lot of 'important people' who's time is actually valuable. With long-flight times what they are, doing an Atlantic or Pacific run 'very fast' actually is just 'worth it' even for the company paying for it.
It was a market reality for 27 years — longer than most of the companies that employ people who post on HN.
One can argue that they got a lot more value out of it than the equivalent amount of money spent on fighter jets and bombers though, and those are just as much prestige projects.
The TSR-2 never went into production, which raises the question of which (if any) of these projects was riding the coattails of the other. I accept that the total bill written-off could have been reduced if there was some R&D cost-sharing, but, as the TSR-2 was a ground-hugging strike aircraft intended for relatively short European-theater missions as opposed to intercontinental flight, I suspect the issues that needed R&D were quite different for the two aircraft.
As for supersonic interceptors, the missiles that rendered the high-altitude supersonic bomber irrelevant did the same for the interceptor. The only supersonic interceptor both developed and deployed by the UK was the EE/BAC Lightning, the predecessor of the TSR-2. At least, unlike the TSR-2, this airplane was put into production and into service.
Research revealed that passengers thought that the fare was higher than it actually was, so the airline raised ticket prices to match these perceptions.[70][191] It is reported that British Airways then ran Concorde at a profit
Given that the original project ran into delays and overages throughout, it strains credibility to propose that, starting with the 'B', all the hard problems would be in the past, and that performance would henceforward live up to the promises.
There would arguably be no FBW (fly-by-wire)[1] in commercial aviation without the Concorde.
Like if I put a loaf of bread and start eating it before them, they would keep describing the Hypothetical Sliced Bread and that table would look like a live Monty Python filming.
For literature loving people, need-item is subset of want-item chosen by urgency or necessity, but I think maybe logical processes for needs and wants of average people are completely separate that they don’t care how two correlates or overlaps.
Didn't know average people flew it.
Glad to have experienced it, though.
The “public” you’re referring to is the small 0.1% of the population that gets annoyed when Delta One is sold out.
Also, it seems the bill for development of the Concorde was paid for by the governments of Great Britain and France, and wasn’t fully accounted for in the unit price.
If so, that made it a much more attractive proposition. I also would think some airlines placed pre-orders in a defensive move (if it had become wildly successful, airlines flying slow planes could get in trouble)
I doubt any manufacturer would have dared to design and build a supersonic plane if they had to have to pay for all development (Boeing had a competing project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707), but that, too, seems to have been heavily government sponsored)
But when business class came in, it got converted into an upper deck of business class seats in most configurations.
Interesting to note that China apparently also ordered Concordes.
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/29/archives/shah-of-iran-rep...
And that’s ignoring the possibility that that order was in return for other transactions (for example, they got enriched uranium from France (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France–Iran_relations#Nuclear_... says they refused to continue to provide Iran with enriched uranium after the 1979 Islamic revolution, so they must have been delivering it before) and the technology to make it (https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/12/29/the-shahs-atomic-dreams...) and hundreds of Chieftain tanks from Britain (https://www.offiziere.ch/?p=33866)
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/26/world/france-and-iran-men...
> I wouldn’t use the Shah of Iran‘s intents as indicator of economical feasibility.
Or people who post from surface knowledge. Sure.
-- ps --
In 1975 Sweden's 10 per cent share in Eurodif went to Iran. The French government subsidiary company Cogéma and the Iranian Government established the Sofidif (Société franco–iranienne pour l'enrichissement de l'uranium par diffusion gazeuse) enterprise with 60 and 40 per cent shares, respectively. In turn, Sofidif acquired a 25 per cent share in Eurodif, which gave Iran its 10 per cent share of Eurodif. Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi lent 1 billion dollars (and another 180 million dollars in 1977) for the construction of the Eurodif factory, to have the right of buying 10 per cent of the production of the site.
"President Gerald Ford signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete 'nuclear fuel cycle'."[27] The Ford strategy paper said the "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals."
A 1974 CIA proliferation assessment stated "If [the Shah] is alive in the mid-1980s ... and if other countries [particularly India] have proceeded with weapons development we have no doubt Iran will follow suit."[28]
Doesn't government still bankroll the whole airline industry? I read about some massive handouts to both Lufthansa and The Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) due to the coronavirus; perhaps it was even more extreme 50 years ago.
The improvements to fuel economy, range and sound would have made little difference to the commercial viability of a niche of aircraft that already spent most of the time on the tarmac because the tiny handful built and basically given away weren't allowed to fly most routes or remotely approach economic viability for most others.
The governments threw their money at a project later called the Airbus A320 instead. Difficult to say they were wrong...
This is a little bit unfair. Among other innovations, Concorde was the first production airliner with fly-by-wire controls (first flown March 1969!). The people who worked on it carried their experience to later highly successful designs such as the Airbus 300 and Airbus 320 series, which is a backbone of modern air travel.
The 737 MAX fiasco shows that Boeing still hasn't caught up with what Airbus was doing in the 1980s.
The Air France 447 accident demonstrated to me that Airbus hadn't really thought things through either. Pilots entered conflicting inputs and the plane averaged them out instead of giving (good, actionable) feedback.
Side question: is fly-by-wire an obviously good idea for passenger airplanes? It's ubiquitous in e.g. fighter jets because of the inherent aerodynamic instability of those platforms, making them hard or impossible ("Hopeless diamond") to fly without computer assistance. Passenger jets have different goals and are built to have stable flight -- the plane wants to fly level. My takeaway from Air France 447 was that I want more Boeing-style (linked, mechanical) controls in passenger airplanes than I want fly-by-wire. Am I off base?
What we don’t have data for is how many accidents would have happened if not for the systems that prevented them. But we should be able to compare incidents of aircraft with and without such systems and get an idea of the (no pun) impact fly-by-wire has had on safety.
In other words, the answer is, show me the data.
I can think of a particular passenger jet that doesn't.
In AF447 it has been established that the crew failed to follow multiple protocols, ignored warnings (including the audible "dual input") and while design / instrument improvements have been put forward, it's not clear they would have avoided that tragedy. The conflicting inputs only happened during the final seconds of descent.
Here's a good discussion on the why: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/23577/why-do-ai...
The latest Boeing 787 has switched to fly-by-wire.
EDIT: an eerily straight-forward report of how the AF447 flight came down: https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a3115/what-really-ha...
The Boeing 777, much earlier, was the first Boeing aircraft with fly-by-wire.
Fly by wire is about removing the weight and complexity of mechanical control systems. A pilot wouldn't likely have the strength to move the controls without fly by wire. However, I don't think that's what you are asking. Fly by wire does not inherently have to be computer assisted; it could simply translate your input to a control surface movement without interpretation. Of course, to get any kind of feedback, it is going to have to be computer generated. The question is where to draw the line.
Finally, you compared Airbus to Boeing. Both are fly by wire. The difference is, I guess, that the control yokes on Boeing are mechanically linked to each other but not on Airbus. However, from the yokes to the control surfaces is fly by wire either way. My understanding is that the difference is in philosophy of how much the computer does for you.
I hope I got all this right.
You also can do more complicated mappings of control inputs to control surface movements more easily with FBW (you can think of automatic traction control in a car as a somewhat analogous system - it uses differential braking per wheel, which the driver has no direct control over, to attempt to straighten out the path of the car and follow the driver's inputs from the steering wheel). As another comment mentioned, this has been happening in fighter jets for a long time, mostly due to how inherently aerodynamically unstable they are.
Once you have electric control, you can start putting logic between pilot inputs and actual control surface movements. You can create dynamic, real-time-conditions-based safety stops that prevent pilots from doing common mistakes like pitching up too much and falling from the sky.
With direct control, it's up to pilots to figure out where the limits are and ensure that they are not crossed. With advanced fly-by-wire, pilots can resort to setting goals and it's up to the control system to figure out how far the aircraft can go (within safety limits) to meet them.
This is really difficult to get right, but saves lives when it finally works.
It's like memory safety in computer programming. If you're really good at programming and you never make mistakes, then you don't need it, but most people make mistakes from time to time and are better off when something checks that their buffers don't overflow and variables don't go uninitialized.
Which may end up doing more harm than good, as seen in Air France 447.
The AF447 didn't have automatic protections available due to sensor failure. Flight computers detected the failure and degraded flight controls into direct mode with less protections than under normal operating conditions. While flying on their own, pilots performed below their expected standard and there was not enough information available from sensors for automatic systems to save them.
Notably the net result was that when the pilots did the right thing (pitching down) and the sensors recovered, a stall warning sounded.
> While flying on their own, pilots performed below their expected standard
You're talking as though pilot performance is a constant. Notably these pilots had little experience flying "on their own", precisely because of these automated systems, and were thrown in at the deep end, having to take over flying under bad conditions.
This is to be expected. Pilots learn on their first single-engine prop trainer that stall horns are primitive mechanical devices based on airflow over the wing and warnings may trigger intermittently when the airflow is seriously disturbed. It's additive: blasting alarm indicates that something is wrong, but lack of warning doesn't mean that everything is right.
> were thrown in at the deep end
Shallow end. Like stall warnings, airspeed indicators are also known to become unreliable relatively often. It's like loss of cabin pressure, bird strike or a blown tire. Every pilot can reasonably expect it to happen to them, unlike the 737 MAX crashes that took place in completely uncharted territory that nobody knew to be afraid of or prepare for.
This makes the official animation at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-hbWO0gL6g really puzzling. Speed keeps wildly jumping around throughout the event, an obvious sign that it's faulty. At one point, airspeed indication drops by 200 knots in three seconds to almost zero without any other indications supporting it. Everything else remains consistent. Nose is pitched up and stable. Altitude is dropping fast, vertical speed is negative. Stall warning is blasting, albeit intermittently, and the aircraft is experiencing a characteristic stall buffeting as turbulent airflow develops around wings. Why would any pilot look at that and give a nose up command? It goes opposite to their training and the flying instinct that every pilot should have.
If anything, the AF447 case shows that automatic protections should be developed further, to work under wider range of conditions than they currently do.
Had some other failure disoriented the crew instead (eg engine failure), and had the protections remained active, they probably would've saved the flight.
In which case surely the warning does more harm than good - if the warning is sounding you need to check, and if the warning isn't sounding you... still need to check.
> Shallow end. Like stall warnings, airspeed indicators are also known to become unreliable relatively often. It's like loss of cabin pressure, bird strike or a blown tire. Every pilot can reasonably expect it to happen to them
Sure, which is why it's something that should be practised under normal conditions, rather than something that you do only when it's icing.
> It goes opposite to their training and the flying instinct that every pilot should have.
But how is a pilot supposed to develop that instinct if they're not hand flying often?
At that point it's either repudiate AA's announcement, harming relations with a customer worth at least 100 aircraft, or go build the thing. And if they build it, they're stuck with a bunch of the problems with the 737, like being unable to change how the controls work.
If they could sub out the control system from mechanical cables to fly by wire, they wouldn't have had any visible issues with the Max.
Not revisionist, speculative, as the B never came into being.
> logistics of flying the Concorde .. expensive and just not that desirable
Research revealed that passengers thought that the fare was higher than it actually was, so the airline raised ticket prices to match these perceptions. (Wikipedia)
> routing
Hmm...vastly improved routing was one of the main benefits touted for Concorde B discussed in the fine article.
> plane was conceived in the era of big government bankrolled air travel
It is reported that British Airways then ran Concorde at a profit. (Wikipedia)
Furthermore, it was actually (American) government that had a significant hand in killing the Concorde, by imposing overflight restrictions that made it far less useful. Of course this had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the US competition to Concorde never took off.
> doesn't have a role in the reality of flying buses we see today.
Concorde was operating profitably at time of its retirement, which came after an accident and issues with keeping the fleet in the air.
i know its a controversial post but its right for more reasons as well. Concorde was economically advantageous as long as fuel represented a small percentage of operational costs it launched in 1973 during the oil crisis and all the way through the OPEC embargo, and almost immediately became the most expensive plane any airline could choose to operate.
Airlines also had to contend with when and where to execute supersonic flight, as a boom over a populated city would immediately draw negative publicity. pushback in some cities in europe reduced the Concordes routes and speeds significantly in 1976
Concorde produced nitrogen oxides in its exhaust, which, despite complicated interactions with other ozone-depleting chemicals, are understood to result in degradation to the ozone layer at the stratospheric altitudes it cruised. while concord was a small fleet, 500 of them could become an ecological disaster.
Concorde's high cruising altitude meant passengers received almost twice the flux of extraterrestrial ionising radiation as those travelling on a conventional long-haul flight. the flight deck had a radiometer and an instrument to measure the rate of decrease of radiation. If the radiation level became too high, Concorde would descend below 47,000 feet. to my knowledge we still havent produced a SST that solves the radiation concern.
I'd actually wager a significant portion of the population would correctly say Airbus, but for the wrong reasons - it's the only French aerospace company they can think of.
I did a straw poll among some friends and got a lot of "I don't know what that is. Do you mean the grape?"
Who names a rocket "Fireball"?
This is a realtor talk right here. Selling limitations as benefits.
I think efforts like these suffer from serious disconnect at best, or some criminal lack of ethics at worst.
The airplane talk, let alone an SST, is pretty much all about the engine. So, with none of them putting an engine on the table, whatever else they do is, honestly speaking, pointless.
Be sceptical.
Even the best military engines today will barely work for the role.
They need around 20t of dry thrust at speeds at speeds around Mach 1.7-2.0, and big enough fan for takeoff at the same time.
https://sinsheim.technik-museum.de/assets/uploads/images/27/...
Flying subsonic requires you to be at the airport 60-90mins before the flight too (though i know some airports have that as low as 45mins).
Still a considerable reduction to the "in the air" time.
He told me that it was a cool experience once. But now, rather than having a relaxed first class meal on an overnight flight [EDITED: He may have taken daytime flights], he was getting into London in the middle of rush hour. He could probably have flown the Concorde had he wanted to but didn't have any real interest in taking it again.
And, today, with modern lie-flat business class and entertainment systems, there's even less reason to fly supersonic IMO, unless you're a CEO, lawyer, investment banker etc. flying from NY to London to have lunch with someone, seal some deal, and be back home for dinner.
But if you arrive in the morning in London, isn’t that rush-hour too?
Taking a 5 day longer trip to save $1800 is equivalent to getting paid $360 per day. If your salary is less than $90,000 per year, you'd be better off taking the ocean liner.
You can get a taste of this when you look at the cost of long distance rail— for example, a trip like The Canadian (four days in total), which VIA understandably sells as a cruise ship type experience rather than practical travel:
https://www.viarail.ca/en/explore-our-destinations/trains/ro...
Obviously some of the cost difference is just the massive economy of scale enjoyed by airlines, but at the end of the day there are certain fixed costs associated with being in their care for such a long period of time. Even with a cheap ticket where you don't get a sleeper bed and have to buy/pack your own food, they still have to staff the train that whole time.
I did take the overnight from London to Edinburgh a year or two ago. It was actually pretty convenient but it still almost certainly cost more than flying.
Honestly, I'd guess that depends on your job function, whether you can work effectively remotely, and the cost of the ticket.
As a remote employee, I can totally see justifying it to my employer. It wouldn't be typical, but if it costs about the same and the trip there and back would involve me getting as much or more done than I normally would... I'd definitely pitch the idea, and don't see any reason why it would be out of the question.
In fact, I'm making a mental note to investigate the cost when/if I need to attend a conference or something in Europe.
(And, yes, business or first class that you actually pay directly out of pocket for is priced like a luxury good. Of course, you can pay a lot more for the cabin too.)
My previous contract had these terms, although I rarely claimed all the time off to which I was entitled. It seemed a bit ridiculous when I'd already bent the travel rules as far as they could go, in order to take a holiday abroad after most trips.
https://www.peninsulagrouplimited.com/guides/travelling-for-...
To me, there's a significant difference between a trip where you can get up at home early in the morning but get to bed in your hotel late the same evening, and one that is even a few hours longer. There is a much less significant difference between that and one a few hours shorter - if i arrive in the early evening, i'm still not going to do much with the day. The next significant difference is when a trip is short enough to do the outbound and return legs in one day, and still have a useful stay. Concorde wasn't quite fast enough to that.
AND teleconferencing. Having a team, and not just CEO/lawyer/ibanker/etc, in NY working with a team in London is far easier today, compared to before the era of cheap video conferencing. Still too far from the real thing, but jetting over to the Atlantic for a quick conversation to clear something up, and coming right back isn't as necessary as it once was.
Coming out of the current situation I certainly hope that travel gets back to some semblance of normal. But I do expect that we'll probably collectively decide that some of the in-person ritual can be cut back on.
He said it was an amazing experience. But he'd never pay for a ticket himself, and the company was pretty tight with expense money, so they weren't going to do it either.
On my last flight between New York and Paris passport control and security didn’t take more than 5 minutes on a European passport (both in Paris and New York).
I think the bigger problem is the time you lose and uncertainty (immigration and traffic) door to door in these big cities, which limits the use-cases and might make an overnight flight or a direct connection from a general aviation airports preferable.
Given the cost premium associated with the Concorde, I seriously doubt if it were flying today passengers would be going through the "regular" TSA lines. The airline would certainly pay for a separate line just for SST passengers with a much shorter delay, and would likely shorten the time between ending boarding and being in the air as much as possible.
Most travelers on an SST wouldn't have checked baggage - the whole point is to get there and back as quickly as possible, after all. It really should be a matter of "arrive, go directly through security, board, and depart".
Regional airlines have much this type of experience today. I can fly from my home town of Harrison, AR to Memphis, TN on Southern Airways for $98 round trip. That's departing Sunday evening and returning Wednesday afternoon. There is no TSA in HRO, and that airline has its own terminal that bypasses TSA in MEM. You can easily arrive ten or fifteen minutes before your flight boards, with checked baggage, and comfortably make it. This is something of a special case - FedEx corporate is in Memphis and Harrison is the general office for one of its subsidiaries, FedEx Freight, so there is probably enough business travel to keep daily service profitable. I believe FedEx also keeps a small number of company cars at the Memphis terminal for employee use. For the airline, Harrison is one of two fuel stops between Dallas and Memphis, so any business they're able to pick up is gravy. It also means that a single person can fly from my small town to Dallas and back on short notice for about the same cost as driving.
Given that domestic regional airlines can offer such fast service today, I don't see why a well-funded premium international route couldn't do the same. It just doesn't make sense to when travel time isn't the selling point.
> On my last flight between New York and Paris passport control and security didn’t take more than 5 minutes on a European passport (both in Paris and New York).
My last international flight was from Virginia to Montreal, and customs on both legs was relatively painless. A previous flight on that route had my group pulled aside going into Canada by customs due to some confusion over the boxes of conference swag we had with us, but even that only took fifteen minutes or so to work out. We shipped it next time.
> I think the bigger problem is the time you lose and uncertainty (immigration and traffic) door to door in these big cities, which limits the use-cases and might make an overnight flight or a direct connection from a general aviation airports preferable.
Yep - while the change in business culture was likely the biggest reason for the demise of transatlantic SST service, the fact that time in the air is just not a big part of overall time spent traveling for most people is why they couldn't shift their market focus.
I flew out of Merced airport a few years ago, on one of four half-full 20-seater flights departing that day. There was one airport or airline employee, who checked me in, took my luggage and then went outside to refuel the plane. For that complement there were six TSA agents in perfectly pressed blue shirts - and I expect six more on the other shift.
In fact, the first time I flew from there to Memphis, I checked a handgun in my luggage. They asked me if it was unloaded, put the little slip in the case... and handed it back to me. I handed it off to an employee for stowage when we boarded - but “stowage” in this case means “behind a cargo net at the rear of the plane, accessible from the cabin.
I may stop by there tomorrow just out of curiosity, to see if anything has changed. I seriously doubt it has; it’s still the same airline. They’re tiny planes - I want to say 12 passengers or so.
I never understood the skip-security and skip exit-control line: those are public services.
They don't offer the service for free.
The only issue with queue-jumping public disservice is that it discourages fixing the problem in the first place.
* Some low-cost airlines (like EasyJet) are pretty much doing just that, their premium membership give you access to priority lanes without any other significant benefit (since they don't really offer any).
* I don't think anyone wants ticketing to get even more complicated. It's obviously a lot easier and more rewarding for airlines to treat their frequent/business flyers well and make everyone else take the slow lines.
* First and business classes don't fill up the planes, airlines are directly impacted by shitty airports that can't embark/disembark/transfer 80% of their passengers (and luggage) quickly enough. You can't say there's zero incentive to fix the problem.
1) it's serviced directly from London City airport, which is tiny, but also closest you can get to the city centre by air
2) because of how short that airport is, BA ordered special shortened Airbus A318 that is only made in a full business class configuration(only 32 seats) and it only ever flies on that one route. And even then it's actually too far for its range, so it makes a quick stop in Ireland to refuel before crossing the Atlantic first.
I'm reasonably certain that paying extra for this special flight saves you more than 90 minutes compared to taking a conventional one from Heathrow, no matter which class you'd travel.
It's only too far for its range when flying from an airfield _with a runway the length of City_. From Heathrow it could do the flight non-stop: it just can't take off with so heavy from City.
Of course Heathrow is also far busier than Shannon and far more likely to have delays.
In its latter years Concorde was a revenue earner.
The product evolved into a very expensive thrill ride, sold to the same demographic that would go on cruises. These customers didn't care about a crowded cabin and they would gladly get to the airport extra, extra early. Many of them had promised themselves a trip on Concorde for decades. They were in it for the journey and not the destination.
These flights, e.g. to see 'Santa in Lapland', sold out in advance so there were no empty seats.
The crash in 2000 didn't entirely dampen customer enthusiasm, however, 9/11 came along and it was a different era. Airbus deciding to stop making spares was a convenient get out for BA and Air France.
911, Patriot Act and TSA changed all that for the worse.
However, it's risky now because airlines are under much more pressure to get flights off the gate, and they'll gladly close the door on you if somehow they have a quick boarding process.
Because yes, Concorde was wildly profitable by 2000 - winter quarters it was majority of British Airways profit.
The problem with Airbus was that they really wanted Concorde to die (and pretty please buy more A340 and maybe A380 in its place) and the quality of their parts was getting worse - especially vertical stabilizers, which had increasing rate of failures.
For the general public, electronic computing and subsonic flight both work fine, are not tremendously expensive and don't require ongoing complex maintainance and engineering.
I would guess this analysis is still mostly true today.
I believe the sonic boom problem has been at least partially solved, but the economics still don't work out. One day, they will. Likewise with optical computing - either ownership costs will fall to the level that they're acceptable for general use or advancements in parallel fields will make it impractical.
This sounds like magical thinking to me. Supersonic travel will always be at a huge cost disadvantage to conventional airlines, and for the vast majority of people the benefits are not there.
I'm more curious about optical computing. I didn't realize there were costs in optical computing that make it fundamentally (i.e. at a physics level) more expensive than electronic computing; I thought the issue was mainly just that there was already over a half a century invested in electronic computing. What are the aspects of optical computing that make it inherently more expensive?
Those are some long flights. LA to Tokyo or Beijing in half the time, with a quick stop in Hawaii.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707
Part of the pitch for Concorde was that an SST would have greatly reduced capital costs since it could fly at least twice the number of flights in the same unit of time. It wasn't really fast enough to do this on the routes that it flew, so this benefit wasn't realized.
A Mach 3 airliner (SR-71 class!) is fast enough to realize better capital efficiency, and can do better on fuel consumption than a Mach 2 airliner. Some fuel is spent fighting air resistance, but some is fighting "induced drag" which produces lift. If you spend less time in the air you need less lift, and fuel efficiency improves.
The only problem is that aluminum would melt in a Mach 3 airliner so you need some revolution in materials to make it practical.
Then the Air France crash happened in 2000. That hurt. Then They were brought back into service a bit over a year later, on September 11th, 2001. Talk about bad timing.
Even after BA retired them Richard Branson wanted to buy (and operate) the entire fleet.
I think that today the supersonic airliner market is still quite tough, because first class has gotten so good. For transatlantic, you only save four hours, and you can spend that sleeping fairly comfortably or using your computer with provided power and pretty good Wi-Fi.
Where there is more legitimate value is transpacific, where supersonic might shave 10 hours. However, due to the higher fuel burn, there's almost no way to avoid stopping for gas, which erodes the advantage both in time and comfort.
It's mostly a case of dialing in the space and price per passenger for the market. Given enough space and entertainment options--hey, live performances in the lounge!, celebrity chefs--very few of us really care that much about getting to a destination 12 hours faster.
What you are probably thinking of is that drag peaks in the transonic region (Mach 0.95-.99, say) but the Mach 0.85-.9 mostbairliners cruise at is much lower drag than either.
A Supercuruising Concorde has higher fuel flow than a (much much larger) 747.
Your whole “engines more efficient at higher speed” argument is totally unsupported by facts. Supersonic flow is a major problem is jet engines. They have to use special very-high drag inlets to slow it down to subsonic velocity to actually combust.
The air being thinner doesn’t help, either. It’s basic chemistry... every unit of fuel you burn requires X units of oxygen. The density doesn’t really matter - except that denser air moving slower decelerates less and thus causes less drag.
Vehicle A takes 10 gallons of fuel to move 4 passengers 500 miles.
Vehicle B takes 40 gallons of fuel to move 4 passengers 500 miles.
In what possible universe is vehicle B more fuel efficient than Vehicle A?
I'm saying put vehicle A's engine in vehicle B to make some far more efficient vehicle C and it'll only take 5 gallons of fuel to move 4 passengers 500 miles.
It's probably true that Concorde, with its supersonic optimized design would have been less efficient traveling at Mach 0.95, even when traveling at its optimum speed a subsonic optimized airliner is going to require significantly less fuel per passenger mile. I mean this is one reason Concorde failed: the oil crisis turned its high fuel consumption into a serious liability.
The important thing to remember here is that at the same time as the concorde was being developed, another technbology, the high bypass turbofan, was also developed. This looks like and is commonly referred to by the layperson as a jet engine, but the two are very different. A Turbofan is 10 to 50 times more efficient than an afterburning turbojet, regardless of speed. The concorde didn't have turbofans, the planes it was competing with did. You slap the concorde's engines onto any other airframe and fly at any other speed, it's still going to burn an order of magnitude more fuel than a turbofan aircraft.
Compare the concorde to turbojet powered aircraft it is competitive. The turbojet powered boeing 720 got 16 passenger miles per gallon and the 727 got 10. In that context the concorde's 17 at over twice the speed looks pretty good.
Drag is proportional to density times velocity squared
flying through air with 30% the density at 2.5 times the speed thus produces (.3)x(2.5^2) = 1.875 times the drag.
Using 1.875 times the power for 1/2.5 = 0.4 times as long requires (0.4)x(1.875) = 0.75 times as much energy.
This is before you consider that jet engines moving at higher speeds and higher altitudes are more fuel efficient.
The 737 uses turbofans which are much more efficient than the concorde's turbojets. Trying to compare their fuel consumption is meaningless unless you account for this. If you compare the concorde to a subsonic turbojet of its era, like the 727, the concorde burns significantly less fuel per passenger mile.
Interesting to consider a Concorde like design today using a slightly scaled up version of the P&W F135 supercruise capable turbofans.
But you'd still be competing with highly efficient turbofans like the GEnx series in a cost dominated aviation market. Also you still have issues like not being able to fly over land in the US that seriously limit the potential market.
This is false. First, drag is proportional to air density, not pressure, with density at FL600 being 30% of FL350. Drag is increased by 1.728 times[1], which means thrust required is increased by 1.728 times, but energy required is not linearly proportional to thrust required. As a jet engine moves at higher speeds and through less dense air, it's efficiency increases and therefore the power required to produce a unit of thrust decreases. So even though you need 1.728 times the thrust, you need less that 1.728 times the power. Even if it were the same amount of power, at 2.44 times the speed you are only expending that power for 41% of the time, and thus the energy consumption would be 73%.
There are plenty of very valid concerns with regards to the concorde and supersonic transport in general. For starters, you can't simply slap a modern turbofan on there and call it a day, you'd have to sacrifice decades of lessons learned to make high bypass turbofans of the necessary size, so they're still going to be inferior to more refined engines on subsonic aircraft. But the belief that the laws of physics force SSTs to be ridiculous gas guzzlers and no amount of technological refinement can overcome it is misguided at best.
[1] This is actually an oversimplification. Drag does not scale perfectly with qV^2 through the transonic and low supersonic regimes. Wave drag dramatically increases drag close to Mach 1 (which as an aside is the source of the term sound barrier). Wave drag becomes less significant past Mach 1.4 though and by the time you get to supercruise qV^2 is once again a good approximation.
Probably more precisely, they're moving towards more direct routes rather than routing almost everything through some specific hubs.
- Concorde
- Mini Cooper
- Miniskirt
- Spitfire
- Tube Map
- Jaguar E-Type
What could be added to this list to induce total industrial design hysteria? InterCity 125? Instamatic? Mellor traffic lights?
Bowler Hat
Wellington Bomber (geodesics)
Sinclair Calculator
The only other person I know who flew on it was my wife (before we were married).
Web site designers please take note: just because you can doesn't mean you should. Animated backgrounds are the <blink> tag of the 21st century.
The site here looks to my eye to be the product of an enthusiast looking to make their own site and present their own voice - which they have every right to do - not a 'web designer' per se trying to be fancy.
No, I just meant: people who design web sites. Whether the person who designed it got paid for the work is of no concern to me.
And my comment was intended more as venting of steam than well-considered critique.
There was tha fad many years ago for having fairly low quality, low contrast greyscale video set under halftone or pixellated filters to make the apparent quality better, but I'd still class that as not-so intrusive. They tended to be on multi media or 'design'-centric sites anyway.
Bad guideline.