Lord and master of foolish questions, reporting in.
Anyway, I was wondering…if one were to convert a Concorde for use as a troop transport, how many troops could you fit onboard? With all their personal gear, I’d assume.
And, obviously, it’s not “exactly” the kind of aircraft you’d want to use for dropping guys off at a forward base.
Yeah, you could get 'em there fast. But where could you get them to? Paris? I doubt there are many airports that have enough runway for a Concorde. What are its landing requirements?
If the Concorde can land at the airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin (largest runway 8002 x 150 ft. / 2439 x 46 m), it can land at a lot of airports.
Well, I can see how that would help if you wanted to deliever a spec. ops team/platoon from the US to London/Paris quickly…but I can’t really see why you would need to. Maybe if you were doing a Rainbow 6 type operation.
According to this page it can carry a maximum of 144 passengers, 100 to 128 being typical. If I’m reading this page correctly, the luggage allowancw as 12 kg per passenger. So you can do the math once you find out (or decide) how much gear each troop needs to carry.
Of course, most of the time troops are useless without thier HMMWV’s, 2-1/2 ton trucks, troop transports, tanks, and the like. They’d get to the battle fast, but have to stand around taking pot shots until thier non-personal equipment showed up.
Wow! I never realized Concordes were so small, passenger-wise.
The first time I ever saw a Concorde, it was parked next to a 747. They’re tiny!
Here’s a photo like that.
Park anything next to a 747 and it looks tiny
Small but perfectly formed. 
I regularly pass an air museum which has the first prototype Concorde parked outside, right by the roadway … it’s so beautiful it always brings a lump to my throat.
Julie
It’s not the size, mate, it’s how you use it.
It’s kinda hard to picture a crisis that was small enough that it could be resolved by, say, a single Ranger company (~100 men) yet was desperate enough that saving a few hours by sending them on an SST would matter. If it was that hairy, it would be faster to send in some F-16s and just bomb the crap out the trouble zone and disrupt operations long enough for the special forces to arrive by conventional transport.
Of course, giving each Ranger company its own personal Concorde would be cool in a ridiculously expensive kinda way.