Neither of those planes made more money than they cost.
The Tu-144 was famously not reasonable at all.
The Tu-144 was famously not reasonable at all.
The TU-144 made 102 commercial flights, with 55 of those carrying passengers -- the others I assume were cargo.
Not 102 flights per day or month -- 102 flights TOTAL between the first commercial flight in December 1975 and retirement from passenger service in 1978 and from all commercial service in 1983.
With 16 built, that's an average of 6 flights each in their lifetime.
SpaceX has Falcon 9 rocket boosters with 4x as many hypersonic flights on them.
> Concorde at least made more money than it cost to operate (and maintain).
> Delays and cost overruns increased the programme cost to £1.5–2.1 billion in 1976, (£11–16 billion in 2023).
You should look at the costs of the F-35 :)
And yes, the program is expensive but there will be thousands of F35s by the end of it all (1000+ already)
The fact that the aircraft manufacturer spent far too much on development relative to the sales they made is of course important to the manufacturer -- or at least to whoever is financing the manufacturer, but that is a DIFFERENT question. In fact more than one question.
There is the question of whether the price they were sold to airlines for was greater or less than the incremental cost to build one aircraft. If the price was greater than the cost then there was some hope for a successful program, and they simply overspent on development and/or didn't sell enough copies.
If they were sold to airlines for less than the marginal cost then it's just an all-around manufacturing screwup that could never be solved by any amount of sales.
Could we at least limit it to choices made by elected governments?
yes. From the POV of the supplier, every gov't contract is going to be profitable.
That's why the military industrial complex is so big, and profitable. It's why some people go into politics to extend it. Esp. in america.
> How do you measure the profitability of military aircraft?
what you truly meant is how to do you measure the value obtained from a purchase of a military aircraft. And scholars have studied this for centuries and not arrived at a true answer.