Most expensive chair in the world? Concorde pilot's seat.

Factual Questions
1

Nova tonight was about the history of the Concorde. Early in the show, they interviewed people who had designed the plane, one of whom said that the pilot’s seat for Concorde was estimated to cost £6 million but ended up costing £80 million. (I didn’t mis-hear it: the speaker emphasized “eight-zero million.”) But they didn’t explain why the seat should have been so expensive or why it went so far over the estimate. (I would have thought six million 1960s pounds would have been just plenty for a chair!)

Shortly after this, the narrator said the total cost of developing the plane was £1.1 billion.

So putting these two facts together, we find that the pilot’s chair accounted for **7.2% of the cost of the entire plane. ** I’m sorry, I’m sure it’s very comfy and all, but this just doesn’t seem right to me. Revolutionary supersonic engines, fly-by-wire technology decades in advance of most other aircraft, and on and on. How could the pilot’s seat have been that large a percentage of the total cost?

I’ve looked over the Nova Web site and have Googled on Concorde pilot’s seat, but haven’t found anything that verifies these numbers or explains the mystery.

Does anyone know anything about this?

2

I dunno, I found this site, http://www.concorde-jet.com/e_actualite.php?deb=12 , which says, in part:

(Bolding mine)

While this proves nothing, one would think that British Airways would try to recoup more than 35,000 pounds from an 80MM pound investment.

3

The profits from the Concorde sale are for charity, so they’re not trying to recoup anything. There’s nothing to recoup from something that’s given decades of service - it depreciated to nothing long ago.

4

Is there any chance that the program was talking about the flight deck with the droop snoot? I am not claiming that you translated that into “seat,” but wonder if they used a term that included the word “seat” and their meaning got garbled.

If we do not come up with an answer, you might try the Concorde message board (registration required, of course), at http://p077.ezboard.com/fconcordesstfrm2

5

Now that you mention it, that would seem to be the only plausible explanation. But if so, the filmmakers either completely misunderstood what the plane’s designer was talking about (he actually said the “seat,” not the whole cockpit, cost £80 million) or they unintentionally created a very confusing message, because as he was speaking about it, they showed a picture of the pilot’s chair, outside the cockpit.

But that would make sense: he used the term “the pilot’s seat” as shorthand for the whole droop-nose mechanism. If I can catch the show again I’ll see if maybe I missed some bit of context, or if the filmmakers blew it.

Thanks for the suggestion, tom.

6

I watched the **NOVA[/b[ program last night (before seeing this thread), and although my jaw dropped at first when I heard the “£80 million seat” remark, I then parsed it to mean “chair plus all fly-by-wire electronic controls”. The Concorde was years ahead of its time in fly-by-wire technology, and the development of this was not only expensive, but subject to huge cost overruns (over 13 times origianl estimate in the case of the “seat”). Not too surprising given the envelope-pushing required.

I see it as being similar to the use of “seat” in high-end software licensing; a particular application may cost several thousand dollars per “seat” (i.e. installed unit) per year, even though one can go to one’s local office supply store and buy a chair for $50.

[I wouldn’t think that the “seat” necessarily includes the whole cockpit with the droop snoot, just the chair and – more expensively – the technology that translates the pilot’s wishes into control surface movement.]

7

Okay, I recorded the program, and here’s my transcript of the relevant section:

I think the filmmakers have made at least two serious errors here. First, as I mentioned above, I strongly suspect that in the context of the full interview with Mr. Benjamin, he was speaking about some larger system, possibly the droop snoot, possibly the fly-by-wire system, and used the shorthand term “the pilot’s seat” to refer to it. The former is hinted at by the quick cut just before the quote in question, and the latter is discussed a little later in the program.

But it seems as if the filmmakers misunderstood him to literally mean the chair, because they inserted two shots of the chair, out of the cockpit, over his quote. It simply strains credibility to imagine a chair that expensive.

Their second mistake hints at why they might have made the first, namely, they were innumerate (i.e. numerically illiterate). Did you catch the second error in the transcript?

Eighty million 1960s pounds sterling equals 140 million 2004 US dollars??? I don’t think so. That’s roughly today’s exchange rate.

In the 1960s the pound was worth about US$2.40, and the dollar then had about six times the buying power of today’ s dollar. (These are all rough numbers based on some very hasty Googling. If you have better ones, please chime in, but these will illustrate my point for now.)

So £80 million x 2.4 x 6 = $1.152 billion, not a measly $140 million.

So I think some people who didn’t understand math (or historical exchange rates) very well didn’t realize that £80 million was a ludicrous amount of money for a chair, took Mr. Benjamin too literally, made a bad editing choice, and then capped it off with some sloppy math on the conversion.

I may stop by the Concorde forum tomndebb linked to and see what they can tell me about the cost of the pilot’s chair. And if I find some time, I may write to Nova and give them a hard time about this. I know some people there.

8

Airline pilot here …

What everybody else said. No way developing a chair alone could cost that.

I tend to refer to my “seat” as the whole area of the cockpit that’s mine. My controls, my instruments, my half of the stuff in the middle, from overhead to down behind my inboard hip. That array of (very expensive) goodies constitutes my workbench, my 'seat" in the shop.