I am assuming that the Concorde is the only SST that flies commercially.
What is with this? It seems to me the technology is 60s. (didn’t it first appear in the early 70s) so that the limitations that made it so unpopular (Limited flying range, small cabins to carry too few passengers etc) should be able to be overcome by new technology.
Or is this a bad assumption?
Have you checked out this thread? http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=30136 "What’s the deal with SST’s ? Do they pay their way? Will they ever make more? "
I thought due to the crash today I’d bump this up and see if anyone has any additional comments.
I heard them talk on NBC how this will spell the death of the SST.
I think the existing SSTs will continue to fly. The crash might be a “wake up call” that results in improved maintenence that could extend the lifespan of the airframe for years.
I think the SST is an evolutionary dead-end. It’s much more efficient to build bigger aircraft that carry more people. They’re subsonic, but they cost a lot less per seat-mile. “You know what makes an airplane fly? Money.” If there could be an SST that carries 300 or 400 people, and does it without a very large increase in costs (vs. subsonic aircraft), it might be viable. But right now the demand isn’t there.
Actually, the wake-up call might say “Get them the hell out of the air!” Those planes are 25 years old, and I read online today that every single one of them has 2-inch cracks near the rear of the fuselage. I’m not saying that the Concordes are unsafe, but their lifespan is winding down rather quickly.
BTW, did anyone else get “hijacked” by this news story? I was surfing the web idly, when all of a sudden my browser took me to MSNBC.com automatically! Granted, the Concorde crashing is a pretty major story, but this ‘feature’ is kind of Big Brother-ish and creepy, IMO.
There are some new designs for ASTs (Advanced Supersonic Transport), but I kind of doubt they will see production. http://www.airlines2.freeuk.com/sst.htm
Seems like Paris is a bad place to fly SSTs. One of the Soviet Tu-144s crashed at an air show there in 1973.
For the full story on cracks in aircraft and the Concordes in particular, follow this link to the BBC.
It would be depressing if the SST’s ended at the Concorde. They are cool planes, even if they don’t fit into Big Airline’s plan. They are expensive, noisy, and put out more exausts than modern planes.
But I think they always fly full. Seems like there’s a market to me.
Diceman wrote:
You shouldn’t think about it like that. As long as a plane (or any machine for that matter) is maintained they can run indefinitely. There are still B-17 bombers and DC-3’s flying. The problem is they can often become more expensive to maintain than it’s worth to fly them but that doesn’t mean they can’t continue indefinitely if the effort is put in.
Saint Zero wrote:
Clearly there’s a market but I think Johnny L.A. mentioned (and he’s right) that even at the current exhorbitant cost of a Concorde ticket the airline still loses money operating them. They are kept flying via subsidies from the government which provides the cash out of a notion of national pride.
Bibliophage wrote:
IIRC the French caused this crash. The Tu-144 was a blatant rip-off by the Russians (literally…they copied the plans). The Russians did, however, improve a bit on the French/British design and wheeled out their pride and joy at the Paris air show. While the plane was flying for the show the French put up another plane to get in close and take pictures. Apparently the recon plane got too close and the Tu-144 did a violent maneuver to avoid an accident. As cool as those planes look they are still merely commercial and not military class jets. The plane was too low to recover easily so the pilot had to be more drastic on his attempts at recovery…the airframe wasn’t up for that kind of stress and the plane broke apart.
That was basically the death knell for the Tu-144 and it never sold commercially (AFAIK). I did hear, however, that a few of them have been revived for special testing purposes but again I’m not sure.
That’s not true. Some large aircraft are certified with finite airframe lives, and at the end of it are decertified. This is especially true of pressurized aircraft. Each pressurization cycle causes the fuselage to expand and contract, and if you do that to metal long enough it will work harden and start to fail. Some aircraft have had their original airframe lives greatly extended after metallurgical tests have shown that they are safe to continue flying, but many others are simply de-certified and sent to the boneyard.
In the case of the Concorde, it’s doubly difficult to keep them flying, because not only do they expand and contract from pressurization cycles, but the airframe goes through extreme temperature changes and expands and contracts even more. The metal will eventually fatigue and start to fail, and nothing short of rebuilding the entire airframe would keep them flyable. The cracks they are starting to experience is a sign of this, and even the optimistic engineers maintaining the aircraft say that the airframes won’t be safe after about 2007.
Reading about the crash, I just realized something. According to MSNBC, 15 concordes were built. Before the crash, the British had seven of the jets and the French had six. What happened to the other two? Were they taken out of service for some reason?
source: Wall Street Journal, July 26, page A8.