Expanding on an earlier question about using concorde for troop movements, why weren’t there more concordes and why were no more made after the 1970s? It’s hard to believe that the only supersonic passenger jets are over 30 years old! Is it just too expensive to make and run them…not economically viable? I would have thought that by now, the cost of the materials would have gone down and the advances in technology would mean that all jets were supersonic…what’s the SD?
My understanding was that they were expensive to maintain, could carry only a fraction of the passengers that other slower airplanes could, and basically, no one besides Air France and BOAC were buying them.
Too expensive. Not large enough to be economical, not that much of a demand, limitations on where they were allowed to fly supersonic due to the noise.
The development and early years of the Concordes were subsided to an enourmous degree by the British & French governments. Like all publically funded money-pits throughout history, both Governments kept shovelling the cash in rather than admit an embarrassing mistake.
But you’ll not find anyone else likely to repeat the same mistakes, well, not in the field of supersonic passenger flight anyway.
Ultimately, it was the Energy Crisis of the 70’s, & the higher fuel costs that killed them.
Well, if you pick up almost any recent issue of Popular Science or Popular Mechanics, you’ll find plans for a suborbital superplane that would make the Concorde look like an antiquated piece of junk. It’ll probably turn out the same way, though. The time savings over a conventional jet aren’t that great, and anyone rich enough to take regular SST flights is probably rich enough to arrange for a private jet, which may be slower but at least it operates on your schedule, not the airline’s.
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- I heard it said by none othere than Milton Freidman that the only country that had an energy crisis during that time was the US, and the reason was because they US passed laws preventing gas stations from raising prices, while at the same time rationing the amount of fuel they were allowed to sell. He pointed out that no other country in the world suffered the same types of sudden shortages the US did. Worldwide, the price of fuel went up, but the only shortage was in the United Stated, and that was because of US gov’t mismanagement.
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- As to the Concorde, it was basically a make-work “hallmark” project for French and British aerospace companies. It never turned a profit, and wasn’t expected to. It used no new major technologies or materials, it was just a sleek cargo plane that used jet fighter engines instead of cargo/passenger jet engines. The consortium couldn’t afford to develop new engines from scratch, and it was predicted early on that the fuel economy would be poor. The reason no more had been built was because operating the jets lost money, and the Brit/French gov’ts didn’t want to lose any more money on more of the same.
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I’ve heard that British Airways insists that the Concordes were profitable. I’ve also heard that noone believes them. Are these claims true? If so, what did Air France say about the plane’s profitablility?
Actually the time savings are very significant. A working hypersonic jet is expected to make the trip from New York to LA in 30 minutes (compared to 5+ hours now). London to Sydney would be about 90 minutes (compared to nearly 23 hours now). CITE
This of course doesn’t mean it will be economical. The real question is how much more will someone pay to only spend 1.5 hours on a plane versus nearly a day. I just looked at Qantas and a flight one-way from Chicago to Sydney (via Los Angeles) would cost $2,950 and take 20+ hours. That’s already pretty damn steep for me. Would I pay $5,000 to get there in 90 minutes? Probably not. Would I pay $4,000…maybe. Would I pay $3,500? Definitely.
Whoops…I wrote that before I saw the non-stop flights. The time and money I quoted is for non-stop from Chicago to Sydney. Transferring at LAX would lower the cost by $50 and increase the travel time by 4 hours (give or take).
You’ve heard it said right here by none other than Exapno Mapcase that if you believe this, you’ll believe anything.
From this I would say the plane was maybe only just profitable in its heyday but mostly has been a money loser and is considered to be moreso in the future.
Too bad really because I had always hoped to ride on one someday. Of course the roughly $12,000 ticket probably meant it would never happen for me. A first-class ticket to London costs less than $6,000. In first-class I would enjoy the flight so much I wouldn’t want to get there faster (I’ve been lucky enough to fly first-class a few times by lucking out and it is a real treat on a wide-body jet).
The British Concorde fleet was sold for a price of £1. Richard Branson, owner of Virgin Atlantic, recently offered to pay BA £1 for the fleet, after the announcement that Concorde flights are to stop.
The offer was rejected.
Well, we have a different take on the word “significant”, then. Even if you saved 4.5 hours on the flight itself, when you factor in the time required to get to the airport in New York (this could be as short as a half-hour if you drive from some place close to the airport or as long as several hours if you’re not actually in New York and have to fly there on conventional jets) and the time to get from Heathrow to your appointment in London, that time saving may be overall minor.
The longer runs, I’ll admit (i.e. NYC to Sydney or Tokyo) could benefit from some form of SST travel, but I don’t think anyone even considered putting the Concorde on such a run and with a range of about 4300 miles, it couldn’t have made a transPacific flight anyway. The newer ultra-SST designers are kicking the idea around, though, and with a semiballistic path they could probably do it.
By “significant”, I meant a difference of several days or weeks, as in changing from ocean liner to airship to prop plane to subsonic jet, though each level of improvement shows diminishing returns. Going from jet to supersonic jet was never so huge an improvement that the Concorde could be profitable.
Paying $2000 to save 20 hours is only $100 per hour. I can think of plenty of people who valie their time far more than that.
Back in the '60s when the various SST designs were on the drawing board, the industry assumed that if they built faster planes, people would pay a premium to get there faster. Of course, the premium would be substantial for the first few years, but as demand increased and more planes were built, the premium would eventually go away as the supersonic plane became the norm.
It didn’t happen that way. It turned out that what people really wanted was to fly as cheaply as possible, even if it took twice as long. What’s an extra five hours or so on a trip that once took several months?
And I notice that when I was quoting Whack-a-Mole, I was confusing his numbers for a theoretical hypersonic plane with actual numbers from the Concorde.
Anyhoo… the Concorde is not enough of an improvement over conventional jets to be economically viable, but a hypersonic craft with a very long range might be.
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- Well, actually I saw it, it was a videotape of him shown on television a few years ago. I don’t know when it was filmed.
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- Well, actually I saw it, it was a videotape of him shown on television a few years ago. I don’t know when it was filmed.
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Well, that will probably come as a shock to the Germans I know who grew up in the 70’s. They tell stories of the Autobahn being closed on Sundays to limit gasoline usage because of the shortages. A secretary that worked for us when I was in the USAF told of riding her bicycle and going roller skating on the Autobahn on Sundays when she was a little girl.
Nobody else had shortages. Snork
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- Hmmmm, this page:
http://www.wtrg.com/prices.htm
…says that the increase during the 1972 period was from 3 to 12 dollars… but it also points out that just a few years later, between 1978 and 1982, the price went from 14$ to $35 a barrel… and yet there was no “shortage” in the US, no gas stations running out of fuel. Why is this? What was the difference between these two increases, only about six years apart?
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- Hmmmm, this page:
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- Also I find no mentions of similar shortages in non-US countries for the time period of 1972-3. Granted I am not searching in native languages of Germany, Italy or France, but still it would seem to be some English record of such events. I have found pages that talk about “changes in response to the OPEC fuel embargo”, often mentioning the US “shortage” as some sort of justification, but not pages talking of “fuel shortages” in those other countries themselves… (-by the by, if the German government closed the roadways down to save gas, then what you had there was not a fuel shortage, but a roadway shortage). <:D
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I think it’s called “learning from experience.”