Years after investigating the blown-out tires of the Concorde, they found debris on the runway caused this as opposed to the extreme stress on the tires of the Concorde. That was good news for SST flight! So, since all planes need a clear runway, so why doesn’t SST flight return?
Supersonic transport - Wikipedia
WAG - There is no commercial business sense to bring back the SST.
Jinx are you talking about SSTs in general or Concorde in particular?
If the former I’ll leave this to others, but if you’re talking about Concorde she was allowed to fly after the Paris incident [and subsequent grounding]. There were special modifications in the form of kevlar linings to her fuel tanks that made her less vulnerable to this kind of accident, and indeed she was permited to fly for a couple of years afterwards. Not only were the fuel tanks reinforced, but in the BA fleet she was completely refurbished - new seats and everything!
The problem my friend was 9/11. Let’s not say any more about that tragedy other than it destroyed numbers - it’s familiar ground and not unique to Concorde by any means. But she kept on soldiering on for a bit…
What actually stopped her was Airbus, who had inherited it, revoking her type certificate. There were all kinds of theories at the time and maybe there is some truth to them that Airbus being Toulouse based [and French multinationals generally being corrupt and incestous] removed it because Air France was losing money (note that it was harder for AF to make money than BA with Concorde for two obvious reasons - firstly, far more peole want to go from JFK-LHR than they do JFK-CDG, and secondly the Paris-New York supersonic flight path is more complex than the London-New York one, at least for Concorde - Paris often needed lower loadings and it took long, this due to a slightly greater distance and a significantly greater distance overland.
Oddly enough I was talking about this in the pub today and I still wish the fooker had been retired a year after I had a (proper) job. I would much rather have had a Concorde flight than a holiday. I don’t think any machinery can bring the emotions in me that Concorde can. I love that aircraft.
The market served by the Concorde would probably be better served by charter supersonic business jets and it seems several companies are working on them.
I’d put advances in video conferencing and laptops as probably as high in the demise of Concorde as anything else, there’s just less need for face to face meetings at short notice anymore, and people flying business class can do useful work while traveling, so there’s just not as much need to get them there 4 hours sooner for 8 times the price.
Most of the people that had the means to pay for it and the reason to use it to cross the Atlantic that quickly died on 9/11.
Most?
I’m pretty sure many those would also want to use it for one reason or another.
Just because someone is rich, doesn’t mean they’re not frugal. I’m too lazy to dredge up a cite, but even to someone that is loaded, it’s not worth thousands of dollars to save a few hours.
Missed the edit window.
From Supersonic Dreams:
I was mostly pointing out that you claim that “most” of the people who used it died on 9/11; also, your link says that it was because 40 people who regularly used it died, which seems to me like a really small number to have such a big impact, perhaps because I had the impression that more people used it (how much business can they get from 40 people, even if they flew every day; the Concorde could hold over 100 passengers). Wikipedia gives several reasons for the retirement, but only mentions a general slump in air travel after 9/11 (which also affected other airlines) and the 2000 crash; they also give greater profit from regular planes as another reason for retirement, plus a lack of upgrades to the Concorde (1970s technology, with high maintenance costs).
I think I’ll blame Bain Capital instead… 
Seriously, the leveraged buyout craze and other “cut to the bone” Wall Street activities made most businesses take a serious look at their bottom line. Add to that, private jets and especially first class were seen as luxuries; and the airline industry changed its pricing structure radically before and after 9-11.
It used to be (my experience) people flew business class, which was a significant proportion of Concorde pricing, because the cheap seats had all sorts of restrictions - book 2 weeks ahead, stay over a weekend, etc - anything to prevent the business traveller from using them. Nowadays, the only problem is - are there still cheap seats, and rescheduling the flight is not free. In return, the price of a flight is about a third or less of a regular ticket that even cattle-class business travellers got.
As cost-conscious businesses switched a lot of their travel from, say, a $4,000 flight to a $1,000 no-frills flight (unless you were the CEO) it became harder to justify a $8,000 flight even for the CEO. Multiply this by almost every company in America except investment bankers, and you see the problem.
I think this and the explosion teleconferencing/telepresence solutions are both huge factors. At my last employer, the corporate policy stated that ALL employees (including the CEO) fly cattle-class. Anyone wishing to travel business class had to pay out of their own pocket. Mind you, as the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, I wouldn’t be surprised if he just chartered private flights (gotta’ have space for your security detail). But he’d still be paying out of pocket.
Even before 9/11, I’m pretty sure passenger confidence in Concorde was shaken pretty badly by the Paris crash. People woke up to the fact that these were old aircraft and they might not be all that safe.
The other issue is that saving 3 hours in a transatlantic flight was not that big a deal - especially today where going to the airport is a 3-hour endeavour at least figuring in traffic and the TSA, and add another hour or two at the other end; plus the hub-and-spoke plan means that you probably have another leg to fly after that. If the whole trip involves 12 hours or more, a 3 hour saving for 5 times the cost is not that much of a bargain.
The real money to be made is trans-Pacific, especially with today’s China-centric economic activity - turn a 12-hour flight into 6 hours. However, the Concorde can’t fly that distance. New tech is needed. The expense of that development is a pricetag nobody wants to spend … yet.
I won’t argue the point that people were disturbed by the crash. But the fact that people were rattled was a shame because:
-the age of the plane was not a factor in the crash
-the plane was not the primary causative factor in the crash (it was runway debris left by a previous plane)
-the Concorde overall had an excellent safety record
In any event, I am doubtful about the return of supersonic commercial airliner service. The Concorde was prestigious, but was not a moneymaker in its day. Further, as noted upthread, the modern advent of effective video/internet conferencing obviates the need for a lot of business travel; when you and your clients can see each others’ faces and share presentation material for just a few dollars instead of several thousand dollars (and a few days of travel/hotel time), supersonic flight seems like a huge waste of money.
For the very few elite people who have money to burn, we may see them buying small supersonic business jets, but that will probably be for pleasure’s sake rather than for any justifiable business purpose.
This the real issue. Nobody really needed to cross the Atlantic at supersonic speeds. And given how expensive the Concorde was to operate, it was always doomed to be a niche product.
The basic problem is that supersonic flight reuires a lot of power. The sonic boom is caused because the air cannot get out of the way fast enough; the aircraft has to push the air much harder. This takes energy, and the major (and rising) cost of even normal subsonic flight is fuel.
The Concorde was 40-year-old technology. Some progress has been made since then, but very few aircraft have the endurance (time plus distance) to cover serious distances efficiently. Simply, air forces are more willing to eat that sort of cost.
You see some research over things like aerospike engines and similar fancy tech to allow much more efficient higher-speed flight. Every so often someone comes up with a new idea or design that will make a quantum leap in speed and cost savings - Reagan’s Orient Express, HOTOL, etc. So far, they are all just paper airplanes.
The Concorde was conceived & built in the late 50s & 60s. It was the heyday of the post-war economic boom & technical ‘onward & upward’ years. Supersonic airliners were seen not so much as being a necessity so much as an inevitability, like the flying cars in Back to the Future or robot maids in The Jetsons. The Cold War certainly helped prop-up interest & investment in it too. In other words, rather than being driven by accurate, realistic predictions of future airline industry markets, demands and/or economics it was primarily driven by technical, political, and national hubris, very much akin to the Space Race.
Consequently, when Boeing took a long hard look at the numbers they saw that, while technically achievable, from a business standpoint an SST was complete & utter folly. The future of the airlines was not in going faster & faster, but in increasing capacity to get cheaper & cheaper. So they abandoned their SST project and instead pursued the high-capacity, widebody concept (i.e. the 747). And they were 100% right. What’s really kind of incredible is that both Britain and France came to the same conclusion, that an SST would probably never be profitable. But, among other reasons, because BOAC and Air France signed a ‘quitter still pays’ agreement, if either of them pulled out of the Concorde project their govts were still legally obligated to continue paying for it. So neither side quit. Consequently the Concorde, magnificent is it was, became a ridiculously over-budget, impractical, govt boondoggle paid for to a large extent by the taxpayers of the UK & France simply because their govts just couldn’t stop throwing good money after bad.
As others have made clear, from a business & technical standpoint, any current or foreseeable future SST is a wholly impractical endeavor because it provides an unsustainable diminishing return. Or put simply, in order for a quarter of the number of passengers of a regular jet to go twice as fast you have to spend ten times as much money. And unless a majority of the world’s airlines all did it, it will never, ever get any cheaper. It will lose money on every single flight.
Wholly impractical with today’s tech, or 60’s tech… The problem being, despite substantial incremental improvements, they are both the same tech.
That’s why research into other options continues. If it is ever going to be practical, SST will consist of a radically new engine design that will be demonstrated first in fighter-sized aircraft, will consist of rocketing (somehow) much higher above the atmosphere where resistance is less… just as turbine jet engines replaced propellers and air travel went from 130mph to 500mph, perhaps we will see aerospike or rockets become practical.
The other point to make is that liquid hydrogen has interesting handling and storage problems, but as a replacement for fossil fuel, it may in the long run be cheaper. One big issue with SST is fuel cost; given the volume of people who want to fly and the dwindling supply and high cost of fuel, it simply is not cost effective to operate an SST, even if the aircraft construction costs were not terribly high.
However, don’t hold your breath. It will be a while.
Learned a delightful new word today: upthread.
In 1997, I heard a Boeing engineer say that once they had extended the non-stop range of airplanes to 12,500 miles there was simply no reason to go further and now all their developmental effort was in fuel efficiency. That is clearly the opposite direction from the SST. I don’t see it coming back without radical new design. As someone said upthread, there is no way I am going to spend five times as much to save 3 hours of flight.
The A2 is an example of a hydrogen fueled, Mach 5 aircraft.