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Comment by kiratp | Hacker News Reader

Concorde was profitable. Accidents + 9/11 pullback killed it. The major factor against supersonic is actually the fact that sonic booms are not allowed over the continental United states. Companies like Boom Supersonic are focussed on eliminating those.

https://simpleflying.com/did-british-airways-make-a-profit-f...

> If British Airways and Air France were looking for more profit, these issues would have to be addressed. And that was the plan. British and French aerospace divisions were looking to create a brand new supersonic aircraft before plans to take the Concorde out of service in 2000 were realized.

> Of course, that never happened. With a plethora of odds stacked against it, the 2000 crash in France, 9/11 affecting interest, and Airbus scrapping Concorde part replacements, the Concorde was shelved before its time.

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The prohibition on sonic booms mysteriously appeared when it came out neither the Lockheed nor Boeing SST would ever become a reality, leading to the embarrassing situation of the only supersonic airliner being a British-French collaboration.

NASA's X-59 project is aiming for a very low sonic boom

Making some money doesn't mean it was necessarily profitable enough to be worth flying. Typically you have a rate of return across the company that an investment needs to clear to be worthwhile. Especially when considering the aircraft almost certainly required specialized maintenance crews and parts, the bar was probably fairly high.

Two quotes from the link you provided.

> In total, both the French and UK governments put in $1.44bn to get Concorde off the ground. $2.8bn went into realizing the world's first mass supersonic transport.

> At the end of it all, British Airways had gained £1.75bn in revenue with the Concorde against an operating cost of £1bn.

> The major factor against supersonic is actually the fact that sonic booms are not allowed over the continental United states.

How do military pilots train then I wonder?

Only civil aviation above Mach 1 is prohibited by the FAA. Rulemaking to certify quieter supersonic planes is underway. [1]

1. https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/supersonic-flight

There are explicit supersonic-permitted areas used by military, but you can actually do supersonic flight as civilian too if you arrange their use (mainly a thing of scheduling so you don't collide with military/state aircraft).

The big rarity of that is that there are very low numbers of supersonic planes in civilian hands, and outside of Concorde and some Tu-144 models (not all of them), all are ridiculous fuel guzzlers in supersonic flight. I know there's one near Palo Alto, a civilian owned MiG-21.

Who the fuck owns a MiG-21?

Well, there's one guy in Palo Alto who had instructor permit on it even, and was looking for partner in its ownership (quite common solution for more expensive planes in civilian hands).

According to wikipedia: 44 people in the US and one big company that owns 30:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-21#Civili...

Numbers from 2012 tho... But probably won't be too different now.

More than 11.000 were made, wow.

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