Concorde

[JustBen]

With recent news about development of several supersonic aircraft, I still wonder why they ever stopped Concorde.

I've read all the guff about economic downturn, safety issues etc but it was an engineering marvel and was never replaced.

It's such a shame. A step backwards.

The figures for the new aircraft being developed show that it could do the Atlantic crossing in a time slower than Concorde!

Slower?!

And carries less passengers...

How can 40 years of engineering and technology advancements produce a slower aircraft?

I do wish that I had travelled on Concorde before they stopped it. I'm sure it would have been fantastic.
Sadly age played a big part in that.

Were any of you lucky enough to travel on it?
Was it how you had imagined?

Just though I'd share my ponderings.

 

[pebbles]

I agree that it's very sad and seriously odd that they stopped flying it, didn't it actually make a profit and shore up the rest of BA?

I remember the first time I saw it in the air - somewhere over Kew in about '76 - quite stunning. Just stood open-mouthed, entranced.

Never flew in it, but did have the good fortune to walk through one on display at the '85 Paris air show. All seats had been stripped out, the main impression I had was that it was absolutely tiny inside - almost felt like you could span your arms to touch each side - and the cockpit was miniscule.

Very sadly missed.

The image of the new one in today's news was sort of impressive - no windows, just screens showing what cameras were seeing. Bit space-agey though rather than sleekly elegant.

 

[Mike.S]

Never travelled on it but did have a tour around one whilst it was parked at Heathrow, arranged by my BA engineer neighbour. Smaller than I had imagined and the cockpit must have been cramped for the pilots.

My dad was a fan and did take a short but supersonic flight (over the South Coast I think) on it just before it was taken out of service. He was mightily impressed.

In the late 1970's, when I worked for NatWest, we used to print up cheque books in the branch. Most customers had the plain pink cheques but 'pictorial' chequbooks were available for a nominal fee - one option being pictures of concorde. One customer was so enamoured with Concorde that just in case they were withdrawn (they were) he pre-bought a box (approx 100 chequebooks) of these which we printed up with his name etc and stored in our vaults.

'Tis a shame that it's no longer about (and the Hawker jump-jet) but I believe it was purely down to economics - maintenance and fuel costs, combined with limited capacity.

 

[Cheshirechappie]

Concorde was a technological marvel, but it was a commercial disaster. It certainly didn't prop BA up financially - rather the other way round. Remember it could only go supersonic over the seas, because the damage done by sonic booms made it impossible over land. So whilst it could be used on the transatlantic route, flying London - Moscow (say) it would have had to operate sub-sonically, which would rather have defeated the object. So it's available routes were always very limited, and the resuling small fleet consequently didn't have the advantages of the economies of scale available to the sub-sonic passenger jets for spares and maintenance.

Back in the days when the Concorde project was conceived, the political fashion (and given the post-war financial constraints on industry, this may well have been pretty much a necessity at the time) was for close government control of industry. That meant politicians and senior civil servants making the big decisions, rather than the captains of industry. There were a number of 'big' projects ongoing, one being the Blue Streak rocket programme. At some point, lack of available finance meant a choice of which of the big projects got government backing, and thus public cash. The government (be it politicians of whatever stripe, or civil servants, matters not a jot) decided that the future lay not with rockets and satellites but in supersonic air travel. We thus left the field of space development, GPS, sat phones, satellite TV etc. for the Yanks to exploit, and backed supersonic air travel.

Oh well...can't win 'em all...

 

[CHJ]

Had some dealings with 002 flying testbed when supporting the Canberra chase aircraft, if you think the passenger version looked small you should have seen it with cabin full of monitoring consoles and wiring.

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[Terry - Somerset]

I used to live about 12 miles west of Heathrow under the flight path. A magnificent sight on a clear day (11.00 if I recall) but it was the only aircraft whose engine noise was clearly audible at that distance from the airport.

Terry

 

[RogerP]

Too noisy, too small, sonic boom, uneconomic and the US was anti.

 

[pebbles]

I guess it's perfectly understandable about the supersonic issue over land - there are still occasional sonic booms here and everything rattles - takes me back to Suffolk in the sixties.

 

[finneyb]

As a plane it was a disaster too noisy, uneconomic etc on Grand National day it used to fly London the Liverpool a few times a day - it was so noisy I wrote to Harold Wilson my then MP - he didn't reply !!

I am sure that like NASA does now Concorde provided a focus to push the technology envelope and perhaps we need another major project that does not have strict return on investment constraints but serves to push the frontiers. Maybe redirect research money into technological innovation - I can hear the wails of anguish now!! - but you need a major project as a focus.

Brian

 

[JustBen]

Well according to various sites, it was making a profit.
It only had to run at 50% capacity to break even and until 9/11, it was regularly running 75%+

The Americans are anti everything they didn't invent/can't make money from.

You should be proud of the noise. It's the sound of success.
Concorde is the only successful supersonic commercial aircraft in the world.

 

[RogerS]

OK...time to put the record straight. A lot of disinformation here.

For starters, BA were making a profit from Concorde. Air France was not.

To keep Concorde flying required a dedicated team of skilled engineers not only at both airlines but also at Airbus Industrie. As Air France was making no profit, they really wanted to cancel their Concorde. But the French being the French didn't really like the idea of BA (ie an English airline) being the sole airline to fly suoersonic. Various discussions at a senior level between Air France and Airbus Industrie (whose Chairman also happened to be French) put pressure on BA to release Airbus from their commitments to continue supporting Concorde. BA were making a profit on Concorde, as I previously mentioned, but not so much from their First Class seats on their other aircraft. BA reasoned that Concorde passengers would switch to First Class instead and so agreed. More is the pity because it was a fantastic aircraft. It is conjecture whether or not there were any financial sweeteners from Airbus to BA.

Also worth mentioning that there was nearly another crash (again, Air France) on a flight back from the US. Someone had left a fuel cock open and by the time they got over Halifax, Nova Scotia they woke up to the fact that they had lost nearly all their fuel. Emergency landing. If it had happened over the Atlantic .......

And, yes, I am lucky to have had the privilege of flying on it

The food was good as well - shame about the plastic cutlery :lol:

I have to confess to being a bit of a Concorde nut. I was at Heathrow when the last commercial flights of three Concordes all landed one after the other. And also at Filton when the last ever ever flight of a Concorde came into land. And I remember getting very choked as she came in.

 

[RogerS]

......

You should be proud of the noise. It's the sound of success.
Concorde is the only successful supersonic commercial aircraft in the world.

+1 ccasion5:

 

[Cheshirechappie]

So what proportion of BA's turnover was due to Concorde, and what proportion to it's sub-sonic fleet?

If Concorde, and supersonic passenger flight, was such a rip-roaring success, why did nobody emulate it? (I know the Russians tried, but that was more to do with nationalistic willy-waving than hard-headed commercialism.)

I know this would have been extremely unlikely, but what would the commercial consequences have been for British business if government, in making it's decision between Concorde and the British space programme in the late '50s/ early '60s, had gone for space? British businesses could now have been among the world leaders in satellite service provision - GPS, telecoms, television, you name it - with consequent tax revenues to the Treasury that would have rivalled the financial services sector. Instead, they plumped for the safe, but dead end, technology of supersonic air travel. How much did the Treasury benefit from that, in the end?

I'm not trying to denigrate the engineering needed to design, build and operate Concorde. It was - as I said in my post above - a superb achievement technically by British and French engineers. But commercially? Come on, chaps.

 

[Grahamshed]

When it came down to it supersonic flight was no more important then than the HS2 is now.

 

[John15]

I remember well during the late 60's, while working on the M4 construction , the exciting spectacle of Concorde on test flights.

John

 

[chippy1970]

Before I knew her my wife was lucky enough to fly on concorde. She flew to New York did a bit of shopping and flew back. She had Sarah Ferguson on her flight on the way out and Helen Mirren on the way back. She picked up quite a few souvenirs too lol.

Also when her dad worked for BA he was in charge of loading Concorde amongst all the other planes

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

[Jonzjob]

There was a Concord Mk2 well advanced on the boards and if photobucket hadn't fallen in it's own bucket for the moment I could show ypu a couple of photos of it.

There is a big model of Mk2 at the Bristol Aircraft Museum at Kemble. It would have been bigger and quieter than Mk1. The reason the Mk1 was so noisey was because the only engines powerful enough were RR Olympics and they were developed for the military and used on the Vulcan. Noise didn't come in to it for that. Bypass engines just weren'r around when it was developed.

When Boeing couldn't compete they decried supersonc flight. Now they are resurecting the Concordski as a test bed. There was a huge rumour that the Russies were fed tampered Concord plans that would not work and if that is the case then they didn't work and the Concordski fell out of the sky didn't it.

Concord had one spectacular fatal accident. If the Jumbo was grounded for good after its first fatal jobbie then it would be long gone history! But then again, it's a boeing init!

 

[RogerS]

So what proportion of BA's turnover was due to Concorde, and what proportion to it's sub-sonic fleet?

If Concorde, and supersonic passenger flight, was such a rip-roaring success, why did nobody emulate it? (I know the Russians tried, but that was more to do with nationalistic willy-waving than hard-headed commercialism.)

I know this would have been extremely unlikely, but what would the commercial consequences have been for British business if government, in making it's decision between Concorde and the British space programme in the late '50s/ early '60s, had gone for space? British businesses could now have been among the world leaders in satellite service provision - GPS, telecoms, television, you name it - with consequent tax revenues to the Treasury that would have rivalled the financial services sector. Instead, they plumped for the safe, but dead end, technology of supersonic air travel. How much did the Treasury benefit from that, in the end?

I'm not trying to denigrate the engineering needed to design, build and operate Concorde. It was - as I said in my post above - a superb achievement technically by British and French engineers. But commercially? Come on, chaps.

I won't even bother trying to either comprehend or answer this.

 

[Cheshirechappie]

So what proportion of BA's turnover was due to Concorde, and what proportion to it's sub-sonic fleet?

If Concorde, and supersonic passenger flight, was such a rip-roaring success, why did nobody emulate it? (I know the Russians tried, but that was more to do with nationalistic willy-waving than hard-headed commercialism.)

I know this would have been extremely unlikely, but what would the commercial consequences have been for British business if government, in making it's decision between Concorde and the British space programme in the late '50s/ early '60s, had gone for space? British businesses could now have been among the world leaders in satellite service provision - GPS, telecoms, television, you name it - with consequent tax revenues to the Treasury that would have rivalled the financial services sector. Instead, they plumped for the safe, but dead end, technology of supersonic air travel. How much did the Treasury benefit from that, in the end?

I'm not trying to denigrate the engineering needed to design, build and operate Concorde. It was - as I said in my post above - a superb achievement technically by British and French engineers. But commercially? Come on, chaps.

I won't even bother trying to either comprehend or answer this.

I know it's late in the evening, but it really isn't THAT hard to comprehend.

Concorde was a one or two route aircraft. Perhaps, with some willpower, it might have had a few more routes, but since it couldn't go supersonic over land (damage from sonic booms), it wasn't economically viable for any over-land route - it couldn't compete with sub-sonic aircraft on those routes. So - always a small fleet, no economies of scale for parts and maintenance. No other airline than BA and Air France would buy and operate it. Hence, unlike the Boeing and Airbus products, it was a commercial dead-end.

To understand the other part of this post, read my first post in this thread. It really isn't a complex argument.

 

[Jonzjob]

Photobuck revived itself. Here are a couple of photos of the model of Mk2 in the Bristol Aircraft Museum, Kemble. well worth a visit, as is XM496, the very last Bristol Britannia ever to fly and I was an electriction on it for several years both in its R.A.F. life at Lyneham and as a volounteer at Kenble!!





Nice looker init. Sorry about the photo quality.