Did a Concorde ever fly under PanAm colors? As I recall, many airlines signed agreements to buy them, but most backed out.
Only four operators: Air France, British Airways, Braniff, and Singapore.
BTW, for anyone who is a fan of the Concorde, here’s a nice internal promotional video from British Airways.
I bet the Concorde and the Boeing SST looked just as good on paper. The proof is in the pudding…
You get more bang for the buck with liquid methane, than H2. The higher boling point for methane means less weight and Mr. Carbon helps increase the energy content relative to dihydrogen.
When it was still in service I actually looked up a Concorde flight on Travelocity, and it was about** $10,000 each way**. Thing is, I also looked up the cost of a First Class seat on a regular transatlantic airline and it was nearly $9,000 each way! Maybe the regular airline fare varied and that was just a highpoint but still, if you’ve got that kind of money, seemed like a good deal to me. 
The difference for our future of flight is that H2 is available wherever you have water and sunshine ( thanks to companies like Solyndra ), while methane or any other hydrocarbon may b suject to higher costs if scarcity becomes a problem.
Yes, there are handling issues, and storage, and liquid hydrogen is very light - so future craft may feature giant thermos bottles occupying part of the fuselage instead… But we’ve gone from powered kites with wing-warping to Mach 3 and orbital tech in 60 years, so who knows?
Some nice pics, and interesting discussion: New SST Jet on the Horizon | SkyscraperCity Forum
Unfortunately, any significant sized aircraft is such a major endeavour that we are talking major costs - tens or hundreds of billions to get a prototype, flight tests, certificate type approval… Look how much effort to get the A380 or the Dreamliner flying.
I read somewhere that the Concorde, and its transatlantic service, were never expected to be truly profitable. The real moneymaking idea behind the Concorde project was to sell the planes to Americans. Since Americans ultimately did not buy them, the whole transatlantic service thing slowly withered on the vine even before the accident and 9/11, marking time in the vain hope that a reversal of American interest would save the day.
The U.S. FAA banned supersonic flight over the U.S. (by civil flights, at least) in 1973, three years before Concorde finally entered service (a ban which is still in place today). Thus, if U.S. airlines were to have purchased Concordes, they would have only been able to really utilize them on foreign flights.
Of all the SST business jet potential producers, these ones seem to ones with an actual development timeline (and who are actually taking deposits)
Production starts in 2015 so yeah anyone with $80 million to spend can have SST back… or anyone with enough cash to charter one.
Hmmm…
Does it have the range to fly trans-Pacific routes at super-sonic speeds? That would be a big deal. When my brother flew to Australia several years ago, it was a 22-hour flight! :eek:
The Concorde was doomed, before it took flight. Its problems were:
-short range (if you flew from London to Australia, a 747 would get there sooner (the Concorde had to refuel 3 times, whilst the 747 stayed in the air).
-high operation cost/small load (it cost 4-5X per mile what a 747 cost, while carrying 1/3 the passenger load).
As was mentioned, all of this was known before the pane went into production-why the thing wasn’t cancelled, who knows.
Yeah, but the Concorde’s development cycle predated the ban. Presumably, if what I read had any truth to it, the consortium could have felt they had too much invested at that point, and perhaps they also gambled on legislative reversal of the ban.
That’s the sort of thing that appears to lend credence to the idea that Concorde was intended more as an item to sell to others, rather than to operate in the way that it did and turn a profit.
Nope, looks like the range is 4200 Nautical miles at mach 1.4, while Sydney-LA is 7500 miles. It doesn’t quite make Sydney-Hawaii, you’d have to find some smaller island to stop on. And for Los Angeles-Tokyo you’d have to stop in Hawaii.
London-Sydney would be 2 refueling stops, London-Dubai-Singapore-Sydney, approx 15 hours flight time vs 22 hours with one stop on a 747.
The XB-70 used compression lift. Would that allow an increase in the range of a supersonic aircraft? Or is it one of those properties that requires a lot more speed, which means more heat, etc.
The A2 I mentioned upthread has a design range of 12,000 miles, half the circumference of the earth. Airlines might not have been impressed much by an SST which goes at a paltry Mach 2.0, but I’d bet there would be a lot of passengers who would spring for a ticket if it went Mach 5.5 like the A2 might.
Curiously the history of the 747 is a little more messy than this. Development of the 747 ran in parallel with Boeing’s SST, and the 747 was considered the Cinderella project, whilst the really bright guys got the work on the SST.
Juan Tripp (CEO Pan Am) and Bill Allen(CEO Boeing) cooked up the 747 as an interim passenger jet that would fill in whilst the SST was developed. A key design point of the 747 was that a passenger version could be adapted easily to become a freighter. (That was one reason for the cockpit in the bulge on top.) Juan expected that his fleet of 747s would be obsolete before they were worn out, and wanted a useful role for them whilst his passengers flew on the new SST. As history shows, the SST died, and indeed the widebody jet became dominant. Indeed the SST died pretty quickly and Bill Allen bet the company on the 747 becoming a success.
There was a very real social aspect to the SST. This was especially true of Britain. Back then, only the rich flew. There was no such thing as budget airlines. The working class holidayed in nasty beachside resorts or took a ferry to Spain. Only the upper classes travelled. We had the invention of “The Jet Set” the rich and groovy, who could afford to travel to exotic destinations. In the early 60’s, the idea that the proletariat would becomes the backbone customer of aviation travel was just not on the radar. Concorde and the SST project were planes that were expected to continue this demographic. Concorde did. At Heathrow Terminal 4 there was a separate BA lounge just for Concorde passengers which was essentially identical to the first class lounge for other international flights. Concorde was a plane that was first class passengers from end to end (although ironically, being such a narrow plane, the seats were no better then most business class.) There were no discounts for Concorde. Tickets were of the order of a month’s wages for an ordinary working stiff. Just as it was always intended. The further irony being that the ordinary working stiffs that filled the back end of the bus of the normal planes were what subsidised the Concorde. Something that would have also been viewed as exactly as it should be by many.
But expectations changed. Even the wealthy realised that there were more places to go than New York or Grand Canary. And of course the flight restrictions made things untenable for many destinations. Now, if you have the money, you travel first class, and get a private mini-cabin. A fold flat bed, beats cutting a few hours of the journey to almost everyone. Especially as the time soaked up at each end of the journey can dominate on hops like LHR to JFK. So nowadays, board a 747 or A380 via the separate front aerobridge entrance (thus avoiding contact with the smelly proletariat on their way to their grubby holiday destinations) and luxuriate with a private mini-cabin, obsequious service, high quality food and drink, and generally enjoy the travel, for about the same price as Concorde would have been. If it flew there at all.
It was similar in the US. I mean, everyone vacationed but up until the 80s (and deregulation) if you weren’t upper middle class or richer you certainly didn’t fly every year. Before that you’d be lucky to take an airline trip once or twice in your life. Not just because flying was so expensive but also because driving, ah, wasn’t, and cars & Interstate Highways are ubiquitous in the US.
Very true, but it helps to explain why no U.S. airline ever bought Concorde.