And, of course, the Concorde didn’t have enough range to fly non-stop from LHR–LAX. Its range was about 4500 miles, which starting from Heathrow will get you to most of the Eastern Seaboard and the upper Midwest, but won’t get you to the population centers in California or Texas. Even the first models of the Boeing 747 could do better than that; the 747-100 had a range of 6100 miles, and subsequent redesigns increased the range to 9200 miles.
The positive effect on corrosion of getting ‘baked’ every flight is true.
On air frame life it depends what you mean. The operators extended the original target limit of ‘reference flights’ from 6,700 to 8,500 around 1995. The 8,500 limit would have been reached in the mid/late 2000’s. Articles written well before the retirement said BA was considering an extension to 11,000 (which would have lasted to almost the present) but it would probably require actual rework of parts of the structure. So when the planes were retired they weren’t near the absolute end of their airframe lives, but not that far from the need for significant work to extend it further.
The benefits of private jets were mentioned, for those willing to pay far more than Concorde let alone regular commercial tickets. But as I’m sure has been discussed there are various ongoing projects to try to combine those two things, supersonic business jets or small supersonic airliners, like Aerion (M 1.6 bizjet) and Boom (M 2.2 44 seat airliner). Those projects may or may not come to fruition but it seems there’s some kind of rational business case or the ideas wouldn’t draw the money they do. Boom in fact claims its project would work at normal business class air fares, though I don’t see why you couldn’t command a hefty ticket price premium if such an aircraft panned out technically.
In both cases the designers claim significant efficiency advantages over the Concorde due to technological advance since the 1960’s. AFAIK it’s obscure in either case whether they’d use afterburning, which is very hard to make efficient. The Boom founder is quoted saying the inefficiency of a/b was a big flaw in Concorde, even though that a/c only used it to accelerate to M 1.7 above which it ‘supercruised’ w/o a/b, at least implying the Boom a/c won’t use them at all.
I flew on the Concorde once from NY to London. One thing I recall is by then the Brits had stopped calling afterburning ‘reheat’, pilot actually said “we used to call it…” when notifying the passengers when they were kicking in the afterburners to accelerate through the transonic regime, slight bump. Not a dramatic experience all around, nice to get there a few hours faster.
The positive effect on corrosion of getting ‘baked’ every flight is true.
On air frame life it depends what you mean. The operators extended the original target limit of ‘reference flights’ from 6,700 to 8,500 around 1995. The 8,500 limit would have been reached in the mid/late 2000’s. Articles written well before the retirement said BA was considering an extension to 11,000 (which would have lasted to almost the present) but it would probably require actual rework of parts of the structure. So when the planes were retired they weren’t near the absolute end of their airframe lives, but not that far from the need for significant work to extend it further.
The benefits of private jets were mentioned, for those willing to pay far more than Concorde let alone regular commercial tickets. But as I’m sure has been discussed there are various ongoing projects to try to combine those two things, supersonic business jets or small supersonic airliners, like Aerion (M 1.6 bizjet) and Boom (M 2.2 44 seat airliner). Those projects may or may not come to fruition but it seems there’s some kind of rational business case or the ideas wouldn’t draw the money they do. Boom in fact claims its project would work at normal business class air fares, though I don’t see why you couldn’t command a hefty ticket price premium if such an aircraft panned out technically.
In both cases the designers claim significant efficiency advantages over the Concorde due to technological advance since the 1960’s. AFAIK it’s obscure in either case whether they’d use afterburning, which is very hard to make efficient. The Boom founder is quoted saying the inefficiency of a/b was a big flaw in Concorde, even though that a/c only used it to accelerate to M 1.7 above which it ‘supercruised’ w/o a/b, at least implying the Boom a/c won’t use them at all.
I flew on the Concorde once from NY to London. One thing I recall is by then the Brits had stopped calling afterburning ‘reheat’, pilot actually said “we used to call it…” when notifying the passengers when they were kicking in the afterburners to accelerate through the transonic regime, slight bump. Not a dramatic experience all around, nice to get there a few hours faster.
It was locked out of the trans-coastal USA market for legal reasons, and its limited range locked it out of the trans-Pacific market, two places where shaving hours off a long flight would be welcome to many.
The Concorde’s tires were long a source of problems. The fatal crash was not the first time such a thing had occurred. Several incidents of exploding tires, some fairly serious, had happened before. The problem was Concorde’s extremely high take-off & landing speed (250 MPH). It put much more stress on the tires than with regular airliners. There’s also a problematic trade-off between making the tires thicker or thinner. If you make them thicker they are stronger and more resistant to punctures, but if they do explode the thick fragments from them are as damaging as shrapnel. Obviously if you make them thinner blowouts will be too common.
The main problem with the Concorde was it was an answer to a problem that nobody needed solved. 90% of all airliner routes are under eight hours, so current planes are more than fast enough. In order to fly an airliner that could go twice as fast it cost the airline more than ten times as much to run. Boeing ran the numbers early in the game and came to this conclusion and dropped their SST project in favor of the huge-capacity 747. They were proven very, *very *right economically.
No wonder frat boys are so messed up - they’re guzzling aviation fuel!
Ha! A perfect end to the Concorde discussion.
This information is from the accident investigation: 57 prior Concorde flights had experienced burst tires. Of the 57 prior incidents, 19 were caused by foreign objects and 37 times the tire just failed. Twelve of those tire failures produced debris that damaged the plane, and six times the fuel tanks had been punctured from tire or related debris.
When tires exploded it would sometimes tear off the metal water spray deflector behind each tire, and that debris would strike the aircraft. British Concordes were modified with a retention system to prevent this but French Concordes were not. It is unknown if that modification would have lessened the damage on flight 4590.
Did Russia have a plane like the Concorde?
I thought I saw one on the ice at the top part of the world with a dog sled team.
The Tupolev Tu-144:
It was not as reliable or fuel-efficient as the Concord, and didn’t have much of a career before being withdrawn from service - only 55 scheduled passenger flights ever flew.
Air France and British Airways (the owners of the Concordes) couldn’t operate domestically in the US due to cabotage laws. But apparently Braniff Airways operated a Concorde on a DC-Houston route for a little over a year. However, it couldn’t operate supersonically over land due to noise concerns, which kind of defeats the purpose.
it used reheat (afterburning) during take-off, so calling it “extremely loud” is being charitable 
Yep… Took it JFK-LHR and back, and actually almost landed twice in NY… We were just about to land, and they had to throw on the power and bring us back up because there was something on the runway… :eek: And that thing went up fast!
I was stunned at how small the thing actually was… It was totally amazing flying that fast, and the service was great, but I’ll take Cathay Pacific First or even B.A. First, ANY time…
We flew it right after they announced they were ending service, so it was like a free for all on board - the flight attendants gave us the menus, the emergency cards and the napkin rings to take home as souvenirs… Only time I’ve been on a flight where we got to take things with us that weren’t meant as freebies…
I just remembered a cute story about the Concorde. They had a contest where you could get a ticket for like normal airline ticket prices. And it was something like a radio call in program. Well, this guy won it. And IIRC this guy was a REAL aviation/concorde enthusiast, so this really meant more to him than it would to random man off the street.
Problem was, he was require to pay over the phone at some point. But he had NO credit cards. Apparently he had some trouble convincing the people on the other end of the line to not pass him by. AND he was probably tying up the only phone he had. IIRC he had to go use the neighbors phone and find a friend or a coworker to let him us their credit card.
Or something like that. I’m thinking he was British.
Anyway, he had to scurry a good bit, was sweating it for awhile, but eventually got his dream flight.
When I was a kid in the mid 80s one of the Concordes came to the EAA Fly-In in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. They did at least one flight (with a portion of supersonic flight, I’m guessing) up and back from Oshkosh to Hudson Bay. I have no memory how expensive it was to get on that flight, but I remember the local TV stations all had a reporter and a camera man on it.
Not sure how much air show business Air France/British Airways did with the Concorde back in the day, but apparently they did make some rounds.
The 1976 G7 Summit was held at Dorado, PR, and British PM Callaghan brought a Concorde into SJU as part of a simultaneous promo tour for BA/Concorde/British Trade. Got to see it on part of the approach over the city. At that point in flight not much perceivably louder than the 707s still flying the route but you could tell it was coming in hot (must have been astounding hearing it take off). The roads and streets around the airport were an infernal traffic jam between the security measures for the motorcade and all the people who were trying to position themselves for a glimpse.
Only selected press and tourism/convention bureau board types got a tour, at the time. Finally did a walkthrough in one at the Boeing Field Museum many decades later, and yeah, that was kind of tight. But those lines, man, those lines… “tube and two pods” may be the optimized form factor for economic viability but ho-damn-hum.
The PBS series *NOVA *did an episode about its development. One thing that seems ridiculous today is that well into pre-production both British Airways and Air France knew that it would not be nearly as profitable as had been anticipated. But right from the start there was a clause in both company’s contracts which stated that if either side dropped out of the project they would still be responsible for their share of the costs. In other words neither side wanted to blink first, so instead of them both agreeing to quit they instead wound up spending billions on a plane they knew wouldn’t sell.
Interesting thing about fact number 2:“A one-way fare on the inaugural flight from London to Bahrain cost £356; at the time flying the route in a conventional first-class service cost £309.50” Back when it was still flying as a goof I looked up flight costs on Travelocity. Although a JFK to London seat on the Concorde was $10,000 a first class transatlantic seat on a 747 was still over $8,000! Not much different if you got that kinda dough…
That’s the truth. In the early 1980s I worked occasionally at USCG Station Rockaway on near the Marine Parkway Bridge on the Rockaway Peninsula. The Concorde had a 10:00 flight out of JFK, about five miles away. When the Concorde began its takeoff I would hear this loud roar that no other airplane made. Landing around 5 PM was much better. Impressive looking plane but one smart thing Congress did during the Nixon administration was refuse to fund the Boeing 2707 that he wanted. Caused massive layoffs in Seattle which is unfortunate but SST has proven to be a dead end
Concorde visited Christchurch when I was a kid (can’t remember the exact date but it would have been sometime around 1989-1995ish or so) and my parents took us to go and see it (Dad liked planes a lot too).
I remember it being very cool but also looking like it hadn’t been updated since the late 1960s; and also how cramped the cabin was.
It was still very cool though; I’ve often wondered why the design never ended up in service on something like a Sydney-Singapore route; there’s plenty of demand, plenty of people who would like to get there faster rather than more comfortably, and pretty much the entire trip would be over water or uninhabited desert - ideal places to go supersonic.
Sydney to Singapore is 3,916 miles in a straight line, not including course changes often required by air traffic control. The Concorde’s stated max range was 4,488 statute miles, but that was until the tanks were dry and engines quit. I don’t think it had the range. Concorde could barely make it across the Atlantic. You can’t go by the aircraft’s “max range” specification, which is until the engines quit turning from fuel exhaustion.
Airliners don’t fly in straight lines from origin to destination. Also the regulations require they have sufficient fuel to reach their destination, then an alternate airport (in case the primary is unavailable due to weather), then after reaching the alternate continue flying for 45 minutes. That is the absolute legal minimum, and usually they carry more fuel than this. If you factor in those items, it probably didn’t have the range.