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Comment by zoeysmithe | Hacker News Reader

Also, it only existed via extreme subsidizes. So working class French and UK people were subsidizing rich people farting in 1st class seats going mach 2.

Its funny how its beloved by the "free market" types when it was just a welfare flight for those who thought themselves too self-important to fly a few more hours between major far-away cities.

113 people died in 2000. It wasn't exactly the safest plane out there either.

With teleconferencing and modern technology, the need for the business class to show up to far-away places should go down. But a lot of it is entitlement, that is to say, show up for a meeting then enjoy a free vacation while "working."

Everything about the Concorde was corrupt if not classist. It was a mistake even if the engineering was impressive. Imagine if that money would instead have gone to public transportation. We'd have the Chunnel in the 70s instead of the 90s.

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The money DID go to public transportation. The cost of the Concorde program is peanuts compared to how much value was gained from it. Concorde brought many innovations such as its electric control system, which was developed further for the Airbus A300, and then reached its pinnacle in the Airbus A320. This tech tree is one of the cornerstones of unprecedented safety that modern airliners have brought to air travel, flying hundreds of millions of people every year without causing the loss of a single life, regardless of whether one is a self-important elitist or a regular schmuck on a 20 EUR flight to Ibiza.

You can't just go out and buy such innovation. It's the natural by-product of relentless pursuit of borderline impossible goals.

Most of Concorde's engineering innovations were tech tree dead ends though.

The Concorde project was certainly good at fostering Anglo French cooperation in aerospace but it's difficult to imagine the counterfactual scenario where the cooperation is doomed to failure because the debut product is a commercially viable subsonic aircraft rather than a technically impressive aircraft that doesn't sell. Similarly, whilst some of the R&D investment in control systems did find it's way into the A300, the A320's digital fly by wire is a completely different system, and it's difficult to imagine the scenario where a nascent Airbus project doesn't consider fly by wire because they hadn't figured out delta wings or droop noses yet

Electric control systems were bound to happen, planes can be safe without them as well. The Concorde cost a huge amount and getting a electric control system out of it isn't actually a good deal.

> It's the natural by-product of relentless pursuit of borderline impossible goals.

No it isn't. Its a direct product of the choice to develop it, and funding it.

Increasing electric support had been going into aircraft for a while and any new development of a major air plane would consider it.

At best it might have slightly push forward adoption of that technology.

> Its funny how its beloved by the "free market" types

Not sure what 'free market' types you are talking about. Most 'free market' types I know were and are not in pro of such projects.

> Imagine if that money would instead have gone to public transportation.

I totally agree with you that money invested in high speed trains all over Europe would have been a far better investment. And you can support just as many jobs and you can do just as much research if you really want to.

Britain at the time actually decided between Concrode and more practical single isle plane more like the 737. A workhorse type plan that you could at least make an argument about beyond creating jobs.

The problem with this line of argument is that most tax receipts come from people who are pretty rich, i.e. they are the ones actually funding the government. E.g. in the UK the top 10% of tax payers contribute roughly 60% of income tax receipts, whereas the bottom 50% contribute less than 10% of income tax receipts (https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...).

Concorde was at least partly a remnant of people flying to London to close a deal over lunch and getting back to New York in time to tuck the kids in. I assume that sort of things is at least less common today.

JFK-LHR is still one billion dollars in revenue for British Airways alone.

The innovation that killed Concorde was the lie flat business seat. You could be cramped in the Concorde’s leather bus seat for three hours, or you could save money and get a sleep in for six hours.

Not really, because Concorde died in the seventies when the lie flat business seat didn't exist.

BA and AF managed to keep the zombie fleet going very profitably all the way until the end in the early 2000s, and that business wasn't killed by the lie flat business class seat either. It was killed by the impossibility of continuing to operate a tiny fleet of '60s planes forever.

Now if you said that the reason we don't have ANY supersonic passenger jets today is because lie flat business seats are good enough, then that's a more defendable position, but I'd still say that the overland flight restrictions limiting any SST to just a couple of routes is a bigger factor.

When I flew on Concorde the one thought I never had was "I wish I had a lie flat seat and half the airspeed".

It is the combination of lie flat seat and the very limited range and the overland restriction.

A six to three hour flight is not really worth the premium. At the same time no supersonic flight has the range to do transpacific where the time difference would be much greater.

It's still a huge route but it's also something you can do on a day flight. Heck, from Boston, I can fly to EWR and still be in London for a late dinner. I don't even need a lie-flat seat.

The extra $4K or so in your pocket pays for a lot of reduced comfort for 10 or so hours.

Sure, but an economy seat is pretty irrelevant vs a business seat for someone who was in the market to drop above $10,000 on a Concorde seat anyways.

The anecdotal, apocryphal rumor I heard back in the day when Concorde was still flying was that the big Wall Street investment banks accounted for a third to a half of all Concorde traffic between London and New York. Impossible to verify, and possibly too good to verify... but I would not be surprised if a large chunk of passengers did come from that demographic.

Was there ever a timetable that permitted that kind of day trip, as they took off and landed in pretty civilized hours?

A schedule I found was:

BA002 dep JFK 08:30 -> arr LHR 17:15

BA003 dep LHR 18.25 -> arr JFK 17:00

Still, certainly allowed "oh crap, need to get to london to do some very important same day business (and return the next day)"

Yeah. You're probably right. The time change sort of kills you. You could fly to London for a dinner and return the following day. (You can sort of do that today but it's going to be a late dinner.)

I found [0]

BA 001 LHR-JFK 10.30am arrive JFK 9am

BA 002 JFK-LHR 9am arrive LHR 17.25

BA 003 LHR-JFK 18.25pm arrive JFK 5pm

BA 004 JFK-LHR 12pm arrive LHR 8pm

A same-day return would be useless as you'd have only 3 hours at JFK.

[0]: https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=458613

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