I’d tweak that slightly based on Concorde’s actual experience:
It basically just saved Boeing the US taxpayer from losing its shirt developing its own SST. We (smartly) let the French & UK taxpayers do it instead.
Not just prohibited supersonically over the US, but over pretty much any land anywhere. Had they been allowed to dash around the Americas, and all over Europe, Africa, and the Mideast, Concorde’s potential market would have been easily 10x the size it was. And the market for a longer-ranged, higher capacity SST would have been larger yet. Especially once enough folks had sampled the world-shrinking speed.
Yeah. The oil embargoes came at an especially bad time for them.
Boom of course is betting the company on rescinding the regs against supersonic flight over land after they demonstrate it’s possibly to operate supersonically with a less than annoyance-level sonic boom.
Taking this back to a more factual question, considering the curiosity that prompted my OP: how much of a pain in the butt is it, operationally speaking, to have a decommissioned semi-derelict aircraft like this just sort of floating around an airfield, especially one as busy as Heathrow? It’s obviously not as big as a modern passenger jet, but it’s not a Piper Cub either.
I guess it depends whether they have a big flashing light at Heathrow saying “sorry, lot full”. In fact, on Google Maps I see Heathrow is devoid of planes other than the Concorde, which has its own parking space off the regular ramp.
(Is joke, yes I know Google has removed aircraft from airport views - but seriously, the Concorde seems to be parked in a spot specifically intended to put it out of the way, that seems to be purpose built for it)
“ But none of these plans were released for various reasons, and in the end BA gifted Concorde G-BOAB, along with its log to BAA, the owner of Heathrow on 21st January 2004, which was the 28th anniversary of Concorde’s entry into service on condition that it remained at Heathrow as symbol that this was once the British home of supersonic travel, were people once flew from and crossed the Atlantic in just over three hours.”
In terms of day to day operations, not much; it just sits there.
But every square foot of an airport is valuable, and Heathrow more than most. The Concorde is now simply a white elephant PITA that must be planned around, taking valuable real estate that could be used for something else.
OTOH, there’s almost always some awkward corner you can’t really use for anything. Too tight to move planes into and out of every day safely, too far from the terminal to become a taxi waiting lot, etc. So oddball crap large and small accumulates there.
What’s going to get difficult is when the airplane can’t be towed because brakes or bearings have seized, no more appropriate tires can be had, etc. The good news is they probably removed the brakes years ago to forestall that problem, and now that the tires don’t have to fit into the wheel wells or endure the very high takeoff & landing speeds, more generic airplane tires of close-enough-good-enough size might be fitted.
A dead airplane (or railroad locomotive) can be a real albatross for whichever enthusiast manages to be gifted with a retired one. The public’s enthusiasm for any such thing has a half-life too. About the time the initial endowment runs out is about when the public (except retirees) no longer cares about the [whatever], and the spiral of inadequate maintenance leading to ever-spiraling restoration costs, even for a mere cosmetic restoration. Soon the public might donate a pittance while a proper restoration to a museum piece somebody might pay to see is a King’s ransom. Then the proponent himself (always a him for some reason) retires or dies and the albatross is sold to a scrapper.
I wish them well, I truly do. But it’s a difficult proposition.
It happens. There used to be a De Havilland Comet beside the main runway in Miami, a Navy Constitution in Ft. Lauderdale and a Burnelli CBY-3 sat at the Baltimore airport for about 10 years.
Las Vegas had a C-124. Somebody tried to make a tourist trap which failed pretty quickly after it opened, and there it sat for decades before being chopped up & hauled off.
It was painted white and was huge so was a white elephant in two ways, not just one.
I wondered what happened to that aircraft. I remember the guy working on it, in what looked like a parking lot, when I was based at Nellis AFB in 1956.
It was on airport or airport-adjacent property. Right there on Trop in the NW corner of the airport. It was a derelict hulk there when I moved to Nellis in 1986 but was gone when I left in 1994.
See, now, this is genuinely interesting to me. I had no idea there were any number of derelict planes scattered across the airports of the world, but it does make sense: if an aircraft falls through the ownership cracks for some reason, it takes only a relatively brief period of neglect before its airworthiness suffers, at which point moving it anywhere becomes a complex proposition; and since airports are where the airplanes are, of course it’s the airports that often find themselves stuck with a dead one.
Never thought about any of this before. I’m glad my curiosity was sufficiently piqued by the sighting at Heathrow that I decided to ask the question.
Assuming the airport owner doesn’t want to be burdened by a metal hulk forever, what’s the financial picture in terms of getting rid of it? Chopping it up for scrap was mentioned upthread; what’s the potential recoverable value in a derelict aircraft? Is it enough that the airport can call a scrapper and offer an even trade, to wit, “it’s all yours if you can haul it away”?
There must be a different saga for each aircraft. The original owner was probably a company or just an incorporated group and the craft was abandoned until somebody expressed an interest in it - whether to acquire it or to dispose of it. And then it suddenly has value and the value of the years of storage becomes an issue and the right of way required to move it etc.
I believe the Comet went back to a collection in England. There were attempts to save the Constitution, one of only 2 built, but they failed and it was scrapped. I Googled the Burnelli and found that it’s story has not yet ended.
A bit off topic, but when I was at Nellis a few of us chipped in ten bucks each and bought a 1934 Ford pickup that was on somebodies lot out in the desert. We never got it to run and lost interest. Sure wish I had it now.
We had a CRJ200 sitting at Providence for years after it had a fire in the nose while parked overnight.* It was owned by a regional under Delta, I forget which one. They wrote off the hull within a week or two of the fire, pulled the engines off, and parked the plane in a runup pad.
We used it for training for years. As long as we didn’t damage anything, it was game on. Delta took ownership of the plane a few years after the fire when the regional went bankrupt, and offered to give us the plane for free. Airport management shut that down in a heartbeat - what will we do with it once your done training with it? Well, we’re going to use it for as long as we can, it’s too valuable of a training tool than scrap metal. When we’re eventually done in a few decades you can sell it for scrap for profit, or we can cut it up into 8.5x11 pieces (more training!) and you can mail them somewhere.
Pilots used to commonly ask the ATCT what the story was while taxiing out. The two best responses: there were snakes on the plane, and they’re waiting for an EDCT to Newark.
A couple months after we were offered the plane and said no thanks, a small excavator showed up with a 30 yard dumpster. Two hours more and the plane was gone forever. No, I’m not bitter at all…
My largest fire loss as an incident commander - over $12 million in one fell swoop. We had it completely out in less than 10 minutes and used about 10 gallons of water. That’s efficiency right there.
For many years there was a Dassault Caravelle in United Airlines colors sitting on a pad near the terminal access road in Dayton Ohio. There it sat, just out amidst the grass near the road split for cars meeting arriving or departing flights.
UAL had very few of them very briefly. I always wondered how and why that one ended up in Dayton of all places.
Now of course Dayton is home of the Wright Brothers, the Wright aircraft and engine companies way back in the day, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and the USAF museum, etc. So it’s not like Dayton and airplanes are unacquainted. But AFAIK Dayton, Dassault, & UAL have tenuous connections at best.
There’s a Russian plane I saw sitting in the Toronto airport a few months ago. It had been seized when the war started (I think) and of course a Russian-built plane has minimal value here.