It is a delight to read a story about progress, rather than the usual stuff about the wonders of wind turbines and green jobs. I have long regretted not having the opportunity to fly in the Concorde. I like the final paragraph
Industry observers believe there is a demand for supersonic planes. Larry Ellison, the Oracle software founder, and the actor Tom Cruise have both said they want to fly one.
Samuel J. also wants to fly in one of these supersonic planes (or even hypersonic, flight which is more than 5.5 times the speed of sound in such proposed technologies as a scramjet). What a change to life in the world would occur once reliable and inexpensive transportation at speeds of this level are deployed. Shall we visit the Great Pyramid this afternoon followed by afternoon tea in Venice and dinner in Melbourne?
aims for the business jet martket first, which is wise.
Jim Rose
24 Jun 12 at 5:05 pm
I clicked the linked and felt awfully confused when I saw the headline “Race to build first supersonic commercial passenger airliner”
What about the Concorde and Tu-144? And lets not forget the first passenger jet to break the sound barrier was a DC-8.
Fred
24 Jun 12 at 5:06 pm
Editorial error I guess Fred!
Samuel J
24 Jun 12 at 5:09 pm
I do think it would be neat to cruise down the Amazon for an hour or two then be home in time for supper, Sadly I am sure to be “wheels up” before that is possible. However, dreams cost nothing, so dream on girl.
Mother G
24 Jun 12 at 5:09 pm
the concorde was not a commercial project. it sold maybe 20 planes.
Jim Rose
24 Jun 12 at 5:10 pm
Sadly inexpensive and economical are not words to be used with supersonic flight, at least not with hydrocarbon powered flight.
I did some sums once on the Concorde but I can’t remember the final numbers, suffice to say it used great scads of juice to get to these speeds, thousands of dollars per passenger in fuel for each transatlantic flight.
Chris M
24 Jun 12 at 6:34 pm
When you put it in those terms it sounds whimsical, but the 26 hours to Europe is a major barrier to travel and tourism and family life, as is the 14 hours to the West Coast. The pointy end doesn’t really help. It’s still a grind.
These are the things our best and brightest might be working on, but for the hidden cost of ‘climate change’.
Big Jim
24 Jun 12 at 6:49 pm
Air travel is moving in the other direction from supersonic towards gigantic fuel efficient buses.
We are regressing as a species and I imagine air travel will soon be banned except to attend climate change conferences.
Infidel Tiger
24 Jun 12 at 6:53 pm
The abandonment of Concorde was indeed regressive. I haven’t seen anything as defeatist in technology and engineering in the last few decades (Whoops, forgot the Space Program). I get that the product was imperfectly structured and commercially doomed; but the norm is replacement by something better, faster, shinier.
Big Jim
24 Jun 12 at 7:06 pm
Jeremy Clarkson on the death of Concorde:
http://www.topgear.com/au/jeremy-clarkson/clarkson-concorde-death-2004-01-01
Infidel Tiger
24 Jun 12 at 7:08 pm
Cold bastard, Clarkson. He compares the bird to a Ferrari . But… These days you can buy a Nissan that performs the Hell out of a 1970 Ferrari or a Corvette Stingray or whatever.
Big Jim
24 Jun 12 at 7:19 pm
I had the pleasure of watching Concorde fly over Farnborough Air Show with Brian Trubshawe at the controls. It was a beautiful bird alright. I also remember there was an awful kerfuffle about sonic booms going off over Oz scaring the kangaroos etc. So it never flew here.
Viva
24 Jun 12 at 7:34 pm
Cheap flights for the average consumer. It’s capitalism.
wreckage
24 Jun 12 at 7:44 pm
This sounds absolutely m-a-a-rvellous, as long as the fares are kept well beyond the reach of the hoi polloi.
Venice, for instance, used to be such a w-o-o-o-nderful destination before it was invaded by hordes dressed in polyester.
manalive
24 Jun 12 at 7:58 pm
The death of the Concorde was a win for market forces. Samuel might as well be wistful that he never got to fly in the Grey Goose.
m0nty
24 Jun 12 at 8:15 pm
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_transport#Challenges_of_supersonic_passenger_flight
Jim Rose
24 Jun 12 at 8:19 pm
Actually, I remember allowing my class at Brunswick South Primary School in 1975 to run to the windows and watch Concorde fly over Melbourne. And from memory, it did fly supersonically over the outback, although I don’t remember whether that was on it’s way in or out of Oz. But there was plenty of luddite furore about the sonic booms that meant that was the one and only time it flew here. Shame, really.
Megan
24 Jun 12 at 8:56 pm
Actually, I remember allowing my class at Brunswick South Primary School in 1975 to run to the windows and watch Concorde fly over Melbourne. And from memory, it did fly supersonically over the outback, although I don’t remember whether that was on its way in or out of Oz. But there was plenty of Luddite furore about the sonic booms that meant that was the one and only time it flew here. Shame, really.
Megan
24 Jun 12 at 8:57 pm
I flew both the Paris and London/New York legs with the Concorde. In the recession of the early 90′s the firm I worked had a deal with Air France and BA that they would tag on one leg of the flight with the Concorde if they bought a full pay business class ticket. The downside was that you didn’t accumulate any bonus miles if you took this deal, so I rarely took opportunity. The other deal was first class on the regular flight with no points both ways.
The plane was fun. No bigger than a 727 in cabin space and there were freaking 60′s type dials on the wall as you turned right to get to your seat.
There was a pecking order too amusingly enough. The further to the rear of the plane you sat, the less regular Concorde flier you were. In a sense the rear of the plane was the ‘economy” class in terms pecking order. Seat A and B were always reserved for VIP’s. Lol
The great fun was the actual flying. It basically took off at what felt like a pretty steep angle then leveled off prior to reaching the shoreline. The engines sounded like they were being held back until it got to the sea which was when the fun began. The Cap pointed the fucker up again and the engines purred to 1200 k leveling off at 70,000 feet. You were really pushed back in your seat. There was a digital dial that gave the speed at the front of the cabin overhead.
There were a few noticeable differences at 70K feet. There very occasional turbulence felt like a sudden shake. The whole plane sort of vibrated unlike the usual bouncy stuff you get in a regular plane. On a clear day you really could make out the earth was round as the curvature was apparent. You could also see the darkness of space. The blue was also matted with black or much darker shade. The cabin window was also quite warm if you touched it, possibly due to the speed I think.
Lastly, the flight attendants were the best lookers in the business, particularly the frog gals although the brit ones weren’t that far behind. There was never anything less than an 8.5, which was also confirmed by dudes that flew it more often me so it wasn’t an isolated thing due to luck.
JC
24 Jun 12 at 8:58 pm
Can’t blame the iPad for the double post this time. No idea how I did that but I most humbly apologise and will remove myself to a quiet, dark room.
Megan
24 Jun 12 at 9:01 pm
There was a couple of sonic booms over Long Island’s North Fork as the two Air France and BA flights were arriving from Europe in the afternoon. Strange sound. It sounds like muffled gun shots or quick thunder bursts without echo. Every day at around 4.20 PM. You could set the clock by them. No kidding.
JC
24 Jun 12 at 9:03 pm
Oh why, genius. Hit us with one Monster. The makers lost money and the airlines did for a while, however mid life it become profitable and a great marketing exercise for the firms.
Shut up as you have no freaking idea what you’re talking about.
Idiot.
JC
24 Jun 12 at 9:06 pm
Look at it. It would win any catwalk. The ting was perhaps the most beautiful looking contraption ever built.
It’s startlingly gorgeous.
JC
24 Jun 12 at 9:14 pm
If it was such a success why isn’t it still running, JC? You have a problem with reality.
m0nty
24 Jun 12 at 9:15 pm
Missed flying in the concord though I remember the furore over the boom in the outback. Surely the roos would have got used to it.
I think they shut it down too soon.
Daisy
24 Jun 12 at 9:16 pm
Why yes Monster. There is a problem with your.. er thinking.. or lack of thought process which you exhibit in spades here all the time, you dummy.
The makers lost a pile of cash on the Concorde while the buyers, that is the airlines, actually began to make money as they began to figure that the best way to use them, which mostly meant not much more than flight across the north Atlantic in distance.
There was simply not enough buyers of the plane for Aerospatiale to make money on them. That’s why.
You moron.
JC
24 Jun 12 at 9:22 pm
Monster,
Don’t annoy me with your stupid shit tonight, as I’ve had a really bad neck ache and won’t take to it well.
JC
24 Jun 12 at 9:24 pm
JC, your description of a concorde flight was rather good.
It has been long time since flying on a plane was fun.
for a while now, airports and flying have been a boring chore.
in the 70s and 80s, flying was exciting because it was new as was international travel. not the case now.
Jim Rose
24 Jun 12 at 10:12 pm
Evidently, British Airways found out they were making decent cash off their Concorde after they shut it down.
http://www.concordesst.com/retire/faq_r.html
wreckage
24 Jun 12 at 10:47 pm
But weren’t the fuel tanks placed just in the right spot to make them a ready-made bomb with few safeguards? A major design fault? As was eventually shown …?
I can’t be certain about this, but I heard something along these lines, because at the time I knew a rich woman in LA who had an alcoholic nervous breakdown thinking of how many near misses she may have had on Concorde. She had to go to recovery at the Betty Ford clinic in the end. Classic LA lifestyle stuff.
Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.
24 Jun 12 at 10:58 pm
Lizzie,
Concordes flew another three years after the Air France crash which, as is often the case, investigators found was the culmination of a cascade of contributing events. The plane was overloaded, its centre of gravity shifted which caused fuel to transfer between tanks during taxi and overfilled one of them. The plane hit debris on the runway on takeoff which was thrown into the wing. The subsequent pressure wave ruptured the overfilled tank, leaking fuel ignited and there was no recovery.
It was the only fatal accident in close to 30 years of flying which would rank the Concorde as a very safe aircraft. Statistically, that rich woman in LA was far closer to possible death every time she got in her car. Or had a drink.
Megan
24 Jun 12 at 11:27 pm
Lizzie most aircraft have ‘wet wings’ meaning a portion of the wing itself is the fuel tank. This was really a freak accident, the only factor was that part of the wing tank should ideally not have been close to the wheel line in hindsight. Closer to the wing root is normally ideal as there is more strength & more internal space.
As mentioned earlier the Concorde used massive amounts of fuel (I’ve seen figures of 2 tonnes just to taxi) and thus probably required every available portion of wing space for fuel storage.
Chris M
24 Jun 12 at 11:33 pm
The BA and AF Concordes were fully depreciated by the 1990s and therefore were able to make money with zero cost of ownership. When they were grounded in 2003, they were approaching 30 years of age (most aircraft are retired from airline service around 20 years of age when they are either scrapped or converted into freighters) and facing expensive ageing-aircraft maintenance issues. It was never replaced by a commercial design because the noise signature (the sonic boom) couldn’t be overcome, a challenge which is now being tackled more confidently. However, the frontier remains economic: how many customers would it have? At what price? More importantly, what would happen to the existing subsonic fleet if their business cabins emptied as customers switched to the new SST (Supersonic Transport)? Could economy passengers be economically carried by an SST? The development of the only new large transport, the A380, was driven exclusively by low unit costs (costs per available seat kilometre or ASK), as was the development of the 747. Low ASK costs are still king. The airline industry remains worried about these issues, especially the impact on the existing fleet. That is why the new SSTs now on the drawing board are small business jets only. Designers will speak more in the next few weeks about claimed breakthroughs with the noise signature, but, as I was told today, every story so far proclaiming the arrival of a Son of Concorde has turned out to be wrong.
Tom
24 Jun 12 at 11:42 pm
The flight portion of a trip may be short in a SST but what about security, customs, immigration? Ever diminishing returns by flying faster as the fixed parts eat you up.
Now, getting fully reclining seats in economy is a worthwhile goal. There is some work on this and the first airline that figures it out for flights over about 5 hours is on a winner.
Concorde was a beautiful piece of engineering but also a politically inspired vanity project for the Brit and French governments of the day with no hope of ever succeeding commercially.
Subsonic aircraft will always have higher lift drag ratios and this is the primary economic determinant.
Eyrie
25 Jun 12 at 8:41 am
Like JC,I flew on Concorde several times during the early 90′s as part of a round the world fare.The first trip was a $50 supplement to the round the world first class fare.The lounge and departure gate were combined so that when the call to board was made,you exited out of the lounge straight on to the jetway.
At Kennedy airport there was priority through immigration and customs and then a helicopter shuttle from the TWA terminal to 46th St and a limousine from there to the hotel as part of the fare.
Arrival at New York was 50 minutes before departure at Heathrow.
sabena
25 Jun 12 at 10:09 am
The noise signature raised by Tom is vital.
Trans-Atlantic is the only route where property rights were not violated. even then, important (cost-sensitive) parts of the flight were sub-sonic.
supersonic commercial flight is yet another technology that might work but for the need to respect property rights.
Jim Rose
25 Jun 12 at 10:22 am
some people get all the luck!
Jim Rose
25 Jun 12 at 10:23 am
It’d be nice to see how well the Concorde would go with the current generation of fuel efficient engines.
Winston SMITH
25 Jun 12 at 10:26 am
Instead of seats on long haul runs, it would be nice to have a capsule, stacked in a bank, to lie down in. Individual aircon, not having squawking kids throwing up next to you or kicking the back of your seat from Sydney to London…
Probably been done before, I assume?
Winston SMITH
25 Jun 12 at 10:35 am
Supersonic doesn’t need to mean Mach 2 – even flying comfortably transonic would carve hours off a whole lot of long-haul flights. If you cruised at, say, 700-720mph at altitude (which is still clearly supersonic), that’s subsonic at ground level (760mph) so you don’t have the boom problems, but it’s still much faster than the 550-580mph some long-haul airliners cruise at these days.
Imagine carving 20% off the mind-raping fourteen hour slog across the Pacific. That’s three hours less in the air, and you don’t have to deal in high-temperature alloys and suchlike to do it.
The big problem is that the big, huge fuel-efficient turbofans that drive the A380 and B777 are mostly subsonic propositions – they’re set up to generate most of their thrust by moving huge masses of air slowly, whereas supersonic aircraft need to move it fast. To cruise supersonic you’d need a lower bypass ratio, which means less fuel efficiency than the long-haul buses can manage.
I’m sure it could be done, but give America four more years under SCOAMF the Emasculate Blind Idiot God and all the can-do will have been wrung out of it. It takes a nation with balls to build something like that, and America is in danger of losing its unless it emphatically elects Romney.
perturbed
25 Jun 12 at 10:40 am
The killer for SST is not the boom but the fuel. IIRC Concorde used five times as much fuel per passenger mile as an early model 747, and Jumbos have got far more efficient since then.
Unfortunately, the limit is scientific not technological. Relative drag soars above Mach 0.85 no matter what the aircraft, which is why nearly all commercial jets of the last 50 years go no faster than this. Even the Convair 990, which could go up to Mach 0.91, lost out on costs to the Boeing 707. There is a bit of a lull in the rise in drag from Mach 1.5-2.0, which is why Concorde chose that range.
Any aircraft going faster still would have greater fuel consumption than even the Concorde, probably much greater. Exotic materials compound the capital cost. Only those who already fly in their own private jets could afford to fly in such an aircraft.
braddles
25 Jun 12 at 11:30 am
I think that he meant the Spruce Goose (Hughes H-4 Hercules). Grey Goose is a brand of vodka much favoured by tipplers. Freudian slips are so revealing (snicker).
Heimdall
25 Jun 12 at 11:48 am
what killed the concorde and its small business jet progeny of tommorrow was international waters are the only place it could go supersonic.
this limits destinations to to and from the coasts of USA.
even the northern pacific has a lot of small islands that would require a zig-zag route to the USA from north east asia.
property rights are such as pain for the jet-setting capitalist robber baron.
Jim Rose
25 Jun 12 at 1:17 pm
Yes, Lol, there were all those deals going on. I think the two airlines were trying to get more customers used to the Concorde and later jack up pricing because after the recession the planes really started to make money and fares went straight up.
The thing is perhaps the most beautiful machine man has ever built. In fact if you believe in the after life, it would be close to the sort of machine you’d be traveling in heaven.
Flying it was like being in a Ferrari 70,000 feet up in the air.
It was better than sex when you got to the shore line and the thing accelerated again to get to mach pushing you back in your seat.
Duty free was something else too. I’m right now wearing a watch I bought at cruising speed. hahahahahhahaha True. I have it on my wrist.
JC
25 Jun 12 at 1:27 pm
see http://www.smh.com.au/travel/blogs/travellers-check/son-of-concorde-london-to-sydney-in-four-hours-gets-closer-20120625-20xdm.html
a smaller fuselage sounds like a small business jet that flys in vast expanses of international waters
Jim Rose
25 Jun 12 at 2:31 pm
Well yes. You should have seen her driving. I put my life at risk when my admiration for her car (a vintage Lincoln Continental Convertible) persuaded me to put aside all considerations of my ultimate safety. I am much more grown up now, of course
. My driving companion of choice is known, by my reporting at the Cat, for his sedate approach to life and the pleasures of the wheel. Fortunately, he stays sober when driving, although not always when flying. He once held up a plane when he was lost in transit after a rather bibulous first half through the rigors of the Business Class long-haul to London. Seems he wandered unchallenged rather afar when I momentarily lost track of him. I copped the blame from the flight attendants though, which I thought was a bit rich. They thought he was cute with his charming apologies, but that I was just inattentive.
Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.
25 Jun 12 at 8:10 pm
I think that’s a bit rich as well, Lizzie. Inattention is losing your handbag, or wallet, or failing to hear the flight announcement. An over-refreshed partner taking a long wander around the terminal cannot possibly be considered something you are responsible for, no matter how charming the apologies.
Unless you and the Happy Wanderer were attached by means of one of those wrist tethers/leads for kiddies and you dropped it while reading a trashy magazine in the departure lounge.
And I’m green with envy at those here who managed to fly the Concorde. As JC said up-thread, it is a gorgeous example of a flying machine.
Megan
25 Jun 12 at 8:54 pm
Quite so.
entropy
25 Jun 12 at 9:04 pm
Well, you are half right, Megan. I used to read trashy mags and now I just blog. He wanders away for both. I must investigate tethers. You can get them for littlies attached to tiny monkey-faced smiley backpacks. Wonder if they do a larger-sized King Kong model with secure but unobtrusive attachments?
And I too am envious of the Corcorde flyers. I do love beautiful machinery. Concorde looked more alive than inanimate, with it’s probing beak and sleek sides. It would have been like being in the belly of a particularly dynamic and thrusting raptor, with retro options as noted by our correspondant JC. Perfect!
Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.
25 Jun 12 at 10:08 pm
Sounds like a business opportunity!
Megan
25 Jun 12 at 10:37 pm
I remember reading about proposals for planes mainly powered by Solar Power Satellites beaming down energy from space – meaning they didn’t have to carry much fuel with them. This was supposed to massively drop the cost of plane travel. It might also make the supersonic plane economic.
Tim
25 Jun 12 at 11:13 pm
Tim, it was discussed in jerry Pournelles “A Step Further Out.”
Available here…
Winston Smith
26 Jun 12 at 1:27 am
Winston, that is a fantastic book. Politicians of all stripes should be forced to read and acknowledge it. Dismissing it out of hand should be grounds for ineligibility for high office.
perturbed
27 Jun 12 at 1:29 am
Great memories, JC. I never got onto the Concorde but I have been on several G4s in my time, as well as large jets privately owned. All leather lounges and walnut panelling, with a queensize bedroom and a throne-style lavvy you could swing a cat in. Plus hosties straight off the catwalk of Milan.
Happy times.
Abu Chowdah
27 Jun 12 at 1:43 am