The Concorde’s Cousins
slate.com
slate.com
"The costs are astronomical, too. The British government’s financial contribution to the project is just a small fraction of the billions needed to complete it."
They conveniently don't mention that every new airplane design costs billions to start producing. This is true even for mundane passenger jets, never mind anything new and experimental (the B2 bomber cost $45 billion to develop - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-2_Spirit). Without technically lying, they make it sound like this project in particular is outrageously expensive, which (as far as I can tell) isn't actually true, compared to other new aircraft designs.
"It was one of the greatest economic boondoggles of all time."
Of all time? Really? The Concorde (cost: a few billion) is now in league with the 2008 financial crisis and dot-com bubbles (cost: trillions upon trillions)? Evidence presented for this claim: none. In fact, we know it was profitable on its NYC - London and NYC - Paris routes (http://news.google.co.uk/newspapers?id=VAQkAAAAIBAJ&sjid=MO4...).
"Very few people could afford a $12,000 round-trip ticket.... "
This is true for every elite airline service. Ask anyone who travels a lot - most of those in international first class are using miles, or are on a corporate travel program.
"Not to mention the environmental waste—more than 6,800 gallons of fuel per hour."
More meaningless numbers designed to look scary. Doing some math, if the Concorde had 100 passengers and flew at 1,350 mph, that's 135,000 / 6,800 = 20 passenger-miles per gallon. Better than most SUVs.
"In spite of its well-earned reputation as one of the great economic debacles of the 20th century..."
Evidence presented: none. In fact, when the Concorde was retired, Richard Branson offered to purchase the fleet and continue service "for many years to come" (http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-109201077.html).
And that's just the money that British Airways spent on it. The British and French governments also subsidized the project. Thus, looking purely at British Airways' accounting profit is ignoring the actual costs of the Concorde project.
Most jetliners are more efficient than an SUV. It's not hard, because SUVs are so incredibly inefficient. The proper comparison is to other jetliners. The Boeing 747 gets about 100 passenger-miles per gallon. That's 5x as efficient as the Concorde, at 20 passenger-miles per gallon.
When the Concorde was retired in 2003, Jet-A cost $1 per gallon. Today, aviation kerosene costs $3.50 per gallon.
The Concorde was twice as fast - which is why it was worth a premium over a 747. Just like it costs more to send a package next-day than it does grown.
It's also 'worth' the fuel penalty. Just like you car burns twice as much gas going 100mph as it does 65mph, but you get there faster so it could be 'worth' it if you're in an emergency, or poor planner.
Speaking of efficiency, what does a Greyhound Bus or Amtrak train get as far as passenger miles/gallon?
The DOE has calculated normalized energy usage among the various modes to BTUs per passenger-mile.
Data for 2011: http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...
Amtrak: 1628
Airlines (domestic): 2597
Airlines (domestic): 3519
Automobiles (short wheel base): 3898
Automobiles (long wheel base): 5479
Transit buses: 3343
Amtrak operations include both diesel and electric trains, and count only the actual electricity drawn -- not the heat required to generate that power. (Most of Amtrak's electric operations are in the northeast, which gets a lot of its electricity from nuclear and gas.)
Interestingly, domestic airline operations are more efficient than international. This is likely due to the reduced fuel loads, increased load rates, and the greater efficiency of turboprops.
Most kinds of mass transport are going to be more fuel efficient than an SUV (and many regular cars). Airplanes are however unique in that they enable people to travel thousands of miles in a few hours. The alternative to flying Paris - London for a week long trip or a weekend is not going there by SUV (or boat), it's not travelling Paris - London for a week long trip.
It's not that developing Concorde was unusually expensive, at around $10bn in 2013 dollars. It's that because they were so hideously expensive to fly the entire programme resulted in less than 90,000 flights, including test flights (Delta has individual DC-9s approaching 70k flight cycles). That doesn't compare favourably with a $1bn engine programme that sells hundreds at $15million+ a pop and millions of dollars worth of replacement parts.
($10bn of taxpayer money across 90k flights works out at over $100k per flight. According to their stats BA carried around 50 passengers per flight - around 50% full - so assuming Air France had similar load factors that's a $2k subsidy per passenger.)
The author does. In the sentence immediately after what you quoted.
The British government’s financial contribution to the project is just a small fraction of the billions needed to complete it. “Just to do a run-of-the-mill, state-of-the-art subsonic aircraft engine, you’re talking a $1 billion bill,” says Stephen Trimble
If the engine is $1 billion then it's easy to infer that "every new [state-of-the-art] airplane design costs billions to start producing."
The Skylon is completely different in that supersonic speed is a prerequisite for space launch, it aims to vastly improve on the economics of a well-established demand for satellite launches, and could theoretically dominate the sector (or totally fail: space programmes are very all-or-nothing)
Whether it could have been viable from a cost perspective if it could fly more routes we'll never know.
And even if, it was important because it was something great we could do. Supersonic passenger plane ? Yes, we can do that. In fact, we did it, and not just a prototype, a real regular line. I didn't think much about it at the time it closed (I was too busy enjoying high school), but nowadays all I can hear our politics and many countrymen say of my country is "no we can't do that", "that's not possible", "be realistic", ... If you have that attitude, you fail before you even start, and Concord was in the exact opposite direction, it was doing something not because it made economic sense or because you needed it, but to prove a point: yes, we can do that, and we're going to prove it to you.
Frankly we need a lot more of that today. I'm tired of all the negativity.
I think that's also a huge part of why, despite being a joint FR/UK project, both side kind of think of it as "their" plane.
It simply feels wrong that we were able to make it happen and couldn't figure out a way to make it sustainable in all this time.
Thank heavens we soon discovered we were destroying the planet and environmentalism became a thing.
But was my summary inaccurate?
I find endless applauding of its greatness tough to stomach when it was just a mode of transport for the mega rich and given how much it cost.
He said the interior was cramped, but the food was amazing and watching the Mach number climb past 1.0 was phenomenal.
This would have a dramatic effect. People hate planes and airports because of noise[1] so having very quiet aircraft would reduce opposition and allow longer operating hours for airports.
[1] among other reasons.
Being productive onboard and immediately on arrival (which, for domestic routes, is actually more about the airport than the aircraft) would make up for a lot.
But it's very likely that the price will be paid for the representatives to vote for it. I could see it being rolled into a bill meant to eliminate some red tape for commercial space entrepreneurs. (And tha would be a good thing n the whole.)
EDIT: Fuel costs made the Concorde uneconomical. Is there a way we can eventually get around this? What about using beamed power to launch vehicles above the atmosphere on ballistic trajectories? There would be tremendous infrastructure and R&D costs up front, but eventually, such a system would blow way aircraft for very high speed personnel and package transport over long distances.
There ya go.
If the Sabre engine does ever get used on a passenger plane, it will not be until after it has proven itself at getting into space, as getting into space is the job it is designed for.
Personally I think whoever wrote the article did almost no research and just conflated the Skylon and Concorde in their heads, then just wrote down why what they had imagined did not make any sense without realising that it was not in fact what was being proposed.
edit - thinking about it, they also only used the mach 5 number in the article. The Skylon is designed to go five times that fast to get to low earth orbit, the mach 5 figure is just the speed while air breathing.