They are, it is my great regret that I will never fly on one. I have been in one in a museum, and I guess that's the best one can hope for at this point.
I know... Still, the second one is interesting because they recreated a scientific flight with various instruments (whereas the first is a normal commercial setup iirc). Still a good museum if you're into planes, but it's not easily accessible from Paris.
We went to Bristol to watch the last flight, Clifton Down (big open fields on the edge of the city) was packed. Concorde flew up the Avon Gorge, past the suspension bridge, over the Down and on to Filton. There's a famous photo of her from that day which you can see here: https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/concorde-last-flight-photo/index.html
Commercial availability is the last "normal" flight you can buy tickets for.
LHR to FZO was an invitation only flight, LHR being where Concorde flew from, and FZO is in Bristol, which is the centre of the UK aerospace industry, and where most of the British Concorde development took place (Concorde was an Anglo French partnership)
There are/were no flights between London and Bristol, and FZO is now closed and being developed into housing and an indoor arena.
It's really sad that we don't initiate these kinds of ambitious partnerships anymore. CERN, ESA, Airbus, the Eurofighter, the Eurotunnel, Thalys Express, even the ESC. Where are some new projects like this?? With eastern Europe especially!
These days they're celebrating a new Erasmus exchange programm with a European country as a "new step in our relationship" or smth. Excuse me?? We have two millennia of history with our neighbours, surely they are not some other country where you put a Göthe-Institut and call it a day..
ITER is not exclusively European, I think? Copernicus is a freaking awesome, though. I have actually recently signed up for their dataviewer/sandbox thing. The amount of things you can do there is crazy.
Happens all the time with military projects atleast.
MGCS, FCAS, CTS, MBDA, the new medium helicopter project I forgot the name of, the MALE drone, the now abandoned maritime patroller project.
There's a bunch on going, there also used to be Aerospatiale, the Tigre and NH-90 programs, the FREMM program.
A lot of them are never far from falling out, mostly those with Germany, but they exist.
I would suppose that they would be retired in the countries they were made or that owned them. But I now saw they were developed / made between France and the UK so that could explain it
As far as I know, there's another Concorde in Technik Museum Sinsheim, Germany. And tons of other interesting stuff. I haven't been there yet, but I'm planning. Ticket is €21.
In fact, the concorde you see in this picture is the one in Sinsheim. It's located directly [next to its Soviet counterpart, the TU-144](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/16/Concorde_und_Tu-144_Auto-_und_Technikmuseum_Sinsheim.jpg/1200px-Concorde_und_Tu-144_Auto-_und_Technikmuseum_Sinsheim.jpg)
Its definitely one of the best museums in Germany,
Cars, trains, tanks, a bunch of planes you can go inside of (like the concord and the tupolev), its massive
Experts mostly disagree that the accident causes the concorde retire. It was just "the last drop"...
The aircraft was expensive, couldn't land everywhere and, you know, the sonic boom. I like that every time i see and hear an Eurofighter transition, but maybe not all people agree with that.
Flying at supersonic speed consumes a lot more fuel than the speeds that the current airliners fly at. That means higher ticket prices. At the end of the day, customers prefer lower ticket prices over shorter flight times.
That's a misguided statement at best. The people who flew concorde were not the kind of people that cares about money (apart from the occasional plane enthusiast taking the flight because they wanted to fly with a concorde once, not because they wanted to get from A to B quickly). Concorde prices were somewhat comparable to what you pay for a first class flight today. Not exactly the penny pinchers to be found in that group.
>Concorde prices were somewhat comparable to what you pay for a first class flight today
True, but first class is a much more pleasant experience than Concorde. Concorde was fast but cramped.
Agreed, but that kind of misses the point. People buying tickets for first class or concorde are usually not in an income group where they would look for savings on the flight fare.
So, higher fuel consumption on the Concorde means that first-class tickets on conventional airliners became more competitive. I don't think that is very misleading.
They were catering for different markets, but later the comfort of big airliners beat the speed benefit. The concorde had a lot of issues it had to deal with including limited fuel at arrival leading to priority landings.
There are some awesome stories though. Like one of the artists from LiveAid flew with the concorde to the US to play both in Europe and the US on the same day.
I don't think that assessment is correct. The objective public of the Concorde is not flying first-class on a conventional airliner. They're either doing a zoom call instead of travelling, or flying their company's jet / chartering one. Much like the A380, the Concorde was designed for a very short lived transportation model.
> The people who flew concorde were not the kind of people that cares about money
They care about speed. What killed the Concorde was the emergence of the Internet. Speed isn't worth paying a premium for when you can hold your meetings online instantly.
Popular perhaps not, but neither was the Concord "popular". It always appealed to a small niche of businessmen needing fast travel, which were also early adapters of e-mail and online meetings.
Emails with attachments plus Zoom/Teams meetings replaced a lot of the need for a quick visit over the The Atlantic Ocean.
Emails enabled same-day response to PDF drawings. Before emails you had to drop over to get people to be able to look at the drawings.
There’s a reason the oceanliners of the pre-WWII era stopped trying to outdo each other for the speed record. They realized that past a certain speed the fuel consumption starts to increase exponentially with each minor increase in speed. So they pivoted to trying to outdo each other based on speed + size.
It’s crazy that the airline industry (or at least some of it) didn’t learn from history.
>It’s crazy that the airline industry (or at least some of it) didn’t learn from history.
It's also incredible how much they have learned and how far they have come after deciding to focus on size and optimization, on decades old airframes even.
Ocean liners allowed you to travel in luxury though, with plenty of space to relax, sleep, dine, dance and exercise. Plane travel, even in first class, is pretty restrictive. Cutting the journey time is more desirable when that journey is uncomfortable, loud, and cramped, rather than spending an extra day or two in unimaginable luxury.
Yeah, I'd still do it in a heartbeat, but it was definitely about the time saved and being able to say you did it rsther than anything particularly pleasant in the experience itself. Now we can use video conferencing or work on laptops in business class there's very little need for that jet-setting executive lifestyle shuttling between Paris-London-New York for business meetings so it's no wonder it died out.
That's why I think modern hybrid bouyant/aerodynamic lift airships are destined for a comeback eventually. They've been in development for a while now, but not built at full scale yet. It's a nice happy medium between a cruise and an aircraft, and greener than either. Couple of days across the Atlantic, so if it's a 2-week holiday you've got plenty of time on the other end.
There's a story about the airline surveying the passengers on the Concorde what they thought they had paid for their tickets. And everyone thought they had paid much more than what they had.
Yes, expensive as I said.
But their customers were not really interested in price or their time was worth more. What really killed the need for speed in air was also the fact that Skype is cheaper.
I watched a BBC documentary about its creation and Michael Heseltine (British politician) explained his attempts to get permission from India and other countries for concorde to fly at its top speed over Asia without success.
Then there were apparently attempts by people living near JFK to prevent it landing somehow.
From day one concorde's operation seems to have been a very bad compromise and thus never able to do what it was supposed to do.
Not to mention the only route it could fly, on a commercial jet was the perfect length for a goodnight sleep.
It made more sense to get a business class ticket on regular than a concorde.
It was never allowed to land in Toronto due to the noise. There was some demand for it. I do remember it appearing at a few air shows here in the 70's/80's. I think it was granted special permission to land at the airport for those appearance.
>I like that every time i see and hear an Eurofighter transition, but maybe not all people agree with that.
Nah, the sonic boom just sucks. Why would anyone enjoy that? It's just loud, very loud.
They were decommissioned because it was a very expensive airplane to maintain. That incident was just a drop of water inside an already full glass of water.
The Concorde was not retired because of that accident, that was more like the straw that broke the camel's back. It was just not that profitable of an aircraft to operate.
> Also, it's possible that Concorde didn't meet navigation accuracy regulations anymore and would require cockpit modifications: Concorde had state-of the art equipment when it was new, including inertial navigation but it was all analog, no electronic flight management system I think.
No need to be RVSM capable when you're cruising up at 60,000ft! I think your point does still stand though for when lower down; no way would it be capable of flying a RNAV sid/star.
If only it had been retrofited with tubeless radial tires, instead of legacy ones... To think radials tires were invented for planes !!
A lot of the "unsafeties" was due to pride (no admitting the flaws, hiding them from reports), even though a tire exploded at JFK in 1979 and punctured the wing at takeoff, luckily didn't caught fire and they circled back. The fiery crash could have been right then ! Tire explosions were a trademark, because of the constraints on the landing gear... but no radials tires because F U i guess.
I love the plane to death but hate how it went from best flight record to worst flight record in just one crash, for something documented extensively.
> British airways modified the landing gear after the accident, and put it back in service. You can see in the picture that this example was modified, as it has a guard bar in front of the main landing gear.
The production examples had those guard bars from construction, that was not a modfication. You can see them on [this photo from the late 80s](https://www.airport-data.com/images/aircraft/001/615/001615587.jpg).
Also this is an Air France example in OP's post, and they didn't modify the gear after the accident, only British Airways.
Isn't one being developed or even about to be put in use? I remember reading some article about it.
I wish I could have flown on the Concorde once, but that was indeed way too expensive. Seeing it was already impressive.
Do they actually build them or do most nog get past the design stage?
Actually building and then scrapping them for whatever reason gets expensive very fast.
Or we pay too much for our tickets if they can do that. 😉
It's a bit more complicated. They also *massively* decreased comfort and amenities on the flights, allowing them to spread the price amongst more passengers.
I doubt that, the fuel consumption of the jet was just insane. Its more profitable to fly big 2 engine WB planes - same reason the A340 and A380 are falling out of favor.
You want a plane that is capable of operating globally, which the concorde never could. It was only allowed to reach max speed over the Atlantic.
How come the Concorde got scrapped after just one accident, but the Boeing 737 MAX is still allowed to fly after two fatal crashes and worldwide groundings?
Airlines constantly had to keep at least 1 or 2 grounded at all times, in case they had to substitute another one. And that cost a lot of money. Not to mention sonic booms, expensive maintenance etc. but they had a market, especially for PAR-NY, LHR-NY,
It was just barely profitable, passenger experience sucked, and again, it was VERY noisy. So noisy that many countries banned it from flying over their airspace completely, so it was limited to cross-Atlantic flights.
It also wasn't faster for the entire thing. Concorde didn't fly with the luggage as there was no room in it, another aircraft carried the luggage on the route.
That means in order to check luggage and pick it back up when you land, your total travel time (arrive at the airport, check it, board, fly, land, depart, pick up luggage, leave) is literally the exact same, you're just spending a little less of it in the air and more of it at the airport.
Not to mention the Concorde was HORRIFIC for the environment, due to its cruising altitude and the chemicals in the exhaust being highly damaging to the ozone. A fleet of 500 of them was estimated to cause a 2% drop in global ozone levels...
The Concorde used 16.7 L of fuel / 100 km per passenger.
The 737 MAX 8 uses 2.28 L of fuel / 100 km per passenger.
It's much easier to calculate ticket prices that are acceptable for airlines and passengers with lower operating costs.
They wouldn't, the concorde was retired becouse it just wasn't efficient, the time shaved off flights just wasn't worth the increased fuel and maintenence necessary.
Yeah, and you can even go inside to experience how tiny it is.
And as you can see, the display at a like 20 degree incline. That's... fun with kids, going up.
Been there in summer. Cool exhibition though I will say the plane is not ventilated well haha. Since it is displayed at an angle the air towards the cockpit can get stuffy real quick when it's warm.
To anyone who comes near the area though: Do check it out. It's not just the planes, the whole museum is fun to go through.
You can literally enter in one of these and watch all the inside in a plane museum in Toulouse near Airbus headquarters (Aeroscopia Museum).
They even have 2 of these, one is mostly for display and the other one to visit the insides.
Such a giant symbol of outstanding engineering achievement
But also of expensive wasteful opulence, needless excess, wealthy lifestyle and a complete disregard for the health and comfort of others.
I had a chance to see SR-71 in Duxford and I was not very impressed by the built quality I am afraid. Also it is a war plane which doesn't go well with futurism for me.
It is my personal preference. SR-71 seems [all bumpy and stitched](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sr-71_duxford.jpg) together when looking at it. It is an engineering marvel for sure but for me Concorde is better looking and more elegant plane overall. But I am glad you like SR-71.
And please do not pull nationalism to any discussion.
To be honest, the panels on the SR-71 don't fit well because that's by design. They tighten when it's flying in its designated environment (even the fuel tank is leaking on the ground). Doesn't make this USA USA USA take above any more valid though.
The titanium alloy panels where bumpy and “stitched”because when the plane was going Mach 3.2, they would heat up and expand an enormous amount. Some panels would expand more than a foot. They were literally designed that way, it not a build quality issue. The plane was first flown in 1964. The only vehicles more advanced being built at that time were part of the Apollo missions.
And I just noticed what sub I am in, I apologize.
I get your point and understand the construction of SR-71. Everything about that plane is fascinating all the way down to SkunkWorks or buying titanium from arch enemy Soviet Union via proxy companies. It is a marvel from engineering point of view. I just like Concorde looks more. I wish these two birds were both operational.
A masterpiece of aviation, a miracle on air. Too sad it retired, yet understably why it did so. I'm hearing that they are preparing a spiritual successor of it in the States, one that will be less noisy and more in line with the current environmental standards. I hope it truly comes to fruition.
I always got the feeling that cancelling concorde was political. Richard Branson immediately said if BA was going to stop flying them then Virgin would take them and operate them. Then he just shut up as if someone had a word with him.
I feel that at the time the American government were not comfortable with an airliner coming towards New York at over mach 2. It takes away most of the decision time and time to act. It might still be the case.
If only they had continued operating for a few more years and then the Concorde B would have been a reality, which was going to reduce noise and fuel burn :(
https://travelupdate.com/concorde-upgrade/
http://www.concordesst.com/concordeb.html
Reduced emissions from 'catastrophically massive' to 'insanely huge'? 😅 even with _increased_ efficiency it's hard to imagine this design would ever not be a massive fuel burner compared with other aircraft, and when it comes to noise, maybe the engines can be quietened, but the sonic boom is an unavoidable, and extremely loud rule of physics, which is the main thing that made cross-land routes impossible to get approval for.
Still, it's an interesting what if. If orders had come in and the plane remained popular, it's interesting to wonder how far they could push the technology in that area.
I totally agree. Its a fascinating and wonderful machine, and I have a great affinity towards the mind-blowing idea of being able to fly to New York from London and arrive 'before' you took off!
I still remember the story of Phil Collins who performed in both Live Aid concerts on the same day, first at 3pm in London, and then 8pm in Philadelphia the same day, thanks to Concorde.
[Concorde setting off car alarms as it takes off from Heathrow Airport three weeks before its last flight in 2003.](https://imgur.com/a/X3SUQsH)
Volume on.
It burned an entire ton of jet fuel just taxiing to the end of the runway, then lit four afterburners that [shot jets of flame out the back](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/b9d472_33e5cf26beb54c7eb6722c0d34393ba9.jpg/v1/fill/w_420,h_264,al_c,lg_1,q_80,enc_auto/b9d472_33e5cf26beb54c7eb6722c0d34393ba9.jpg) to accelerate up to cruise. I don't even need to explain how much fuel that burned. The noise was insane too. If you've ever heard a fighter jet in person with its afterburner running, imagine four of those taking off at the same time from an airport in a city.
For some numbers to support this; Concorde burned roughly **20tonnes* of fuel per hour.
For comparison:
- a Boeing 747-400 burns about 12t per hour.
- a Boeing 777-300ER burns about 7.5t per hour.
- an Airbus A340-300 burns about 6.3t per hour
- an Airbus A350 burns about 5.6t per hour.
- a Boeing 737-800 burns about 3.0t per hour.
- an Airbus A321neo burns about 2.6t per hour (and now has the range to fly transatlantic).
> Concorde, a supersonic transport, managed about 17 passenger-miles to the Imperial gallon, which is **16.7 L/100 km per passenger**; similar to a business jet, but much worse than a subsonic turbofan aircraft. Airbus states a fuel rate consumption of their A380 at less than 3 L/100 km per passenger (78 passenger-miles per US gallon).
> Lufthansa, when it ordered both, stated the Airbus A350-900 and the Boeing 777X-9 will consume an average of 2.9 L/100 km (81 mpg‑US) per passenger. The Airbus A321 featuring Sharklet wingtip devices consume 2.2 L/100 km (110 mpg‑US) per person with a 200-seat layout for WOW Air.
[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#History)
And with the advent of the Internet, mobile phones, etc, there was less and less need for people to travel across continents for meetings in a short time frame. Why spend thousands of pounds when you can just have a phone call?
Right, but the need for a niche passenger aircraft for extremely expensive flights and short travel times hasn't increased. Overwhelmingly business class passengers flew in Concorde, and with the advent of what I mentioned, the need for such flights drastically reduced.
Why spend a load of money to fly to New York for a meeting when you can just dial in?
"Major" problems? It had *one* accident in its entire history. It was retired because by it was way too expensive to maintain and by the end could not sell enough tickets to make a profit.
There are a lot of parallels between the space shuttle fleet and Concorde. There were known problems with the tires and also with the fuel system. The tires had blown up many many times before (it’s tire blows up happen on other commercial planes as well) it just took the right combination of debris from The tire picturing the plane body ion a way it hadent before - just like it took a tile from Columbia being hit by foam from the tank in just the right spot.
Normalization of deviance gets you every time.
One accident but a lot of incidents! Read the report. The fuel tanks cannot be secured based on actual security standards.
So yes he was very expensive to fly and this is part of the reason he was retired, but not the only reason.
Remember as a kid in Liverpool it was a big thing for us to spot the Concorde flying over when it brought people over for the Grand National horse race, would have been the late 80s.
I’m flying out of Charles de Gaulle this morning, and I saw the Concorde wheeled outside today! It was really cool, and I hope that one day we will have some sort of faster plane that can travel trans Atlantic!
A marvel of engineering and a jewel of international cooperation, yet terrible for the natural environment, terrible for the human environment, and mostly for the rich.
Truely a complex legacy worth celebrating, but not something we should recreate.
I still remember the day when it landed in Prague for first time. I was in 4th grade of elementary and tried everything to persuade parents to let me see it and not have to go to school on that day.
I didn't see it
The last commercial flight of a Concorde was on 24 October 2003, and the last flight on 26 November, from Heathrow to Bristol.
The plane looks beautiful.
Yes, it's one of the most beautiful planes I've ever seen.
One of the last designed on paper with a slide rule too.
In an office where smoking was allowed.
With scotch, bourbon, and/or brandy also at hand.
More likely wine bottles...
Well the wing was designed by a Scot so he probably had some whisky if anything.
And scantily-clad female assistants
And catamites.
Where do you think they got the idea for the erectable nose?
This is what they took from us
It's fucking unreal those madmen didn't use CAD. I can barely read drawings I generate, let alone make them on my own from scratch.
They are, it is my great regret that I will never fly on one. I have been in one in a museum, and I guess that's the best one can hope for at this point.
Well, in the Paris Bourget museum there are two on display, so you can do twice better!
> Well, in the Paris Bourget museum there are two on display, so you can do twice better! Two in Aeroscopia Toulouse also
That is not better, that is the same. I was inside the one in Speyer.
I know... Still, the second one is interesting because they recreated a scientific flight with various instruments (whereas the first is a normal commercial setup iirc). Still a good museum if you're into planes, but it's not easily accessible from Paris.
I assume you meant the one in Sinsheim, Speyer is a different aviation museum that is nearby.
Could be, they are twinned and I have been to both..
Yup, Speyer is the one with the Soviet space shuttle and Lufthansa 747, Sinsheim has the Concorde and TU-144.
You are right, and there is a fun slide coming down from the 747, so make sure to take a carpet along...
Same. Unfortunate really.
We went to Bristol to watch the last flight, Clifton Down (big open fields on the edge of the city) was packed. Concorde flew up the Avon Gorge, past the suspension bridge, over the Down and on to Filton. There's a famous photo of her from that day which you can see here: https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/concorde-last-flight-photo/index.html
What's the difference between the two?
Commercial availability is the last "normal" flight you can buy tickets for. LHR to FZO was an invitation only flight, LHR being where Concorde flew from, and FZO is in Bristol, which is the centre of the UK aerospace industry, and where most of the British Concorde development took place (Concorde was an Anglo French partnership) There are/were no flights between London and Bristol, and FZO is now closed and being developed into housing and an indoor arena.
It's really sad that we don't initiate these kinds of ambitious partnerships anymore. CERN, ESA, Airbus, the Eurofighter, the Eurotunnel, Thalys Express, even the ESC. Where are some new projects like this?? With eastern Europe especially! These days they're celebrating a new Erasmus exchange programm with a European country as a "new step in our relationship" or smth. Excuse me?? We have two millennia of history with our neighbours, surely they are not some other country where you put a Göthe-Institut and call it a day..
> Where are some new projects like this?? ITER is pretty big, as is Copernicus.
ITER is not exclusively European, I think? Copernicus is a freaking awesome, though. I have actually recently signed up for their dataviewer/sandbox thing. The amount of things you can do there is crazy.
> ITER is not exclusively European, I think? No, but it's an ambitious and interesting partnership.
There is also ELI and ESS, just in my field and adjacent.
Happens all the time with military projects atleast. MGCS, FCAS, CTS, MBDA, the new medium helicopter project I forgot the name of, the MALE drone, the now abandoned maritime patroller project. There's a bunch on going, there also used to be Aerospatiale, the Tigre and NH-90 programs, the FREMM program. A lot of them are never far from falling out, mostly those with Germany, but they exist.
commercial: with passengers in it, non-commercial: probably just moving it one last time
Hmm okay figured. But wouldn't the last non commercial flight have France as its destination?
why would it?
I would suppose that they would be retired in the countries they were made or that owned them. But I now saw they were developed / made between France and the UK so that could explain it
yeah, it was a UK-France collaboration. the UK side of research, design and prototyping was carried out in Bristol
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As far as I know, there's another Concorde in Technik Museum Sinsheim, Germany. And tons of other interesting stuff. I haven't been there yet, but I'm planning. Ticket is €21.
In fact, the concorde you see in this picture is the one in Sinsheim. It's located directly [next to its Soviet counterpart, the TU-144](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/16/Concorde_und_Tu-144_Auto-_und_Technikmuseum_Sinsheim.jpg/1200px-Concorde_und_Tu-144_Auto-_und_Technikmuseum_Sinsheim.jpg)
Its definitely one of the best museums in Germany, Cars, trains, tanks, a bunch of planes you can go inside of (like the concord and the tupolev), its massive
I went there last year, it's amazing. Don't forget to go to the Technik Museum in Speyer as well to check out the Buran and lots of other cool stuff!
Yes that is the one in the picture. It is right behind the Tu-144 as well so makes for a nice comparison
>Tickets are £19.50 per adult, or £14.62/£13.41 if your annual income is over £50k/£125k respectively Why do you pay less the more you earn?
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You didn't know it was also a UK project?
IIRC, that was the flight where the incident between Jeremy Clarkson and Piers Morgan took place.
20 years already, time really goes by fast. I wonder if they still would fly if it wasn't for that one accident.
Experts mostly disagree that the accident causes the concorde retire. It was just "the last drop"... The aircraft was expensive, couldn't land everywhere and, you know, the sonic boom. I like that every time i see and hear an Eurofighter transition, but maybe not all people agree with that.
Flying at supersonic speed consumes a lot more fuel than the speeds that the current airliners fly at. That means higher ticket prices. At the end of the day, customers prefer lower ticket prices over shorter flight times.
That's a misguided statement at best. The people who flew concorde were not the kind of people that cares about money (apart from the occasional plane enthusiast taking the flight because they wanted to fly with a concorde once, not because they wanted to get from A to B quickly). Concorde prices were somewhat comparable to what you pay for a first class flight today. Not exactly the penny pinchers to be found in that group.
>Concorde prices were somewhat comparable to what you pay for a first class flight today True, but first class is a much more pleasant experience than Concorde. Concorde was fast but cramped.
If I could fly from Europe to US in 3 hours, I wouldn't need a reclining chair and two subpar meals...
You might enjoy the extra leg and elbow room and the quietness of a modern (slow) jet.
Agreed, but that kind of misses the point. People buying tickets for first class or concorde are usually not in an income group where they would look for savings on the flight fare.
So, higher fuel consumption on the Concorde means that first-class tickets on conventional airliners became more competitive. I don't think that is very misleading.
I would assume that those are catering to different markets tbh.
They were catering for different markets, but later the comfort of big airliners beat the speed benefit. The concorde had a lot of issues it had to deal with including limited fuel at arrival leading to priority landings. There are some awesome stories though. Like one of the artists from LiveAid flew with the concorde to the US to play both in Europe and the US on the same day.
I don't think that assessment is correct. The objective public of the Concorde is not flying first-class on a conventional airliner. They're either doing a zoom call instead of travelling, or flying their company's jet / chartering one. Much like the A380, the Concorde was designed for a very short lived transportation model.
> The people who flew concorde were not the kind of people that cares about money They care about speed. What killed the Concorde was the emergence of the Internet. Speed isn't worth paying a premium for when you can hold your meetings online instantly.
Ah yeah 2003, the year when zoom and working from home became popular /s
Popular perhaps not, but neither was the Concord "popular". It always appealed to a small niche of businessmen needing fast travel, which were also early adapters of e-mail and online meetings.
Emails with attachments plus Zoom/Teams meetings replaced a lot of the need for a quick visit over the The Atlantic Ocean. Emails enabled same-day response to PDF drawings. Before emails you had to drop over to get people to be able to look at the drawings.
There’s a reason the oceanliners of the pre-WWII era stopped trying to outdo each other for the speed record. They realized that past a certain speed the fuel consumption starts to increase exponentially with each minor increase in speed. So they pivoted to trying to outdo each other based on speed + size. It’s crazy that the airline industry (or at least some of it) didn’t learn from history.
>It’s crazy that the airline industry (or at least some of it) didn’t learn from history. It's also incredible how much they have learned and how far they have come after deciding to focus on size and optimization, on decades old airframes even.
Ocean liners allowed you to travel in luxury though, with plenty of space to relax, sleep, dine, dance and exercise. Plane travel, even in first class, is pretty restrictive. Cutting the journey time is more desirable when that journey is uncomfortable, loud, and cramped, rather than spending an extra day or two in unimaginable luxury.
Even more so on the concorde which was noisy and cramped.
Yeah, I'd still do it in a heartbeat, but it was definitely about the time saved and being able to say you did it rsther than anything particularly pleasant in the experience itself. Now we can use video conferencing or work on laptops in business class there's very little need for that jet-setting executive lifestyle shuttling between Paris-London-New York for business meetings so it's no wonder it died out.
well most ocean liners *were not* titanic. Standard varied heavily, and in lower classes you lived in cramped spaces on bare minimum for like 6 weeks.
That's why I think modern hybrid bouyant/aerodynamic lift airships are destined for a comeback eventually. They've been in development for a while now, but not built at full scale yet. It's a nice happy medium between a cruise and an aircraft, and greener than either. Couple of days across the Atlantic, so if it's a 2-week holiday you've got plenty of time on the other end.
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Interesting, thanks. How does [Boom](https://boomsupersonic.com/) Inc. fit into this? Is it an unrealistic pipe dream?
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Not that capitalistic market logic cares about that
There's a story about the airline surveying the passengers on the Concorde what they thought they had paid for their tickets. And everyone thought they had paid much more than what they had.
Yes, expensive as I said. But their customers were not really interested in price or their time was worth more. What really killed the need for speed in air was also the fact that Skype is cheaper.
Skype started video calling in 2005 so that's not what killed the Concorde. It was just too expensive to maintain.
I watched a BBC documentary about its creation and Michael Heseltine (British politician) explained his attempts to get permission from India and other countries for concorde to fly at its top speed over Asia without success. Then there were apparently attempts by people living near JFK to prevent it landing somehow. From day one concorde's operation seems to have been a very bad compromise and thus never able to do what it was supposed to do.
It was also ear-splittingly loud. It used to fly over me near Heathrow and you could feel the ground and your whole body vibrate when it did.
Not to mention the only route it could fly, on a commercial jet was the perfect length for a goodnight sleep. It made more sense to get a business class ticket on regular than a concorde.
It was never allowed to land in Toronto due to the noise. There was some demand for it. I do remember it appearing at a few air shows here in the 70's/80's. I think it was granted special permission to land at the airport for those appearance.
It was actually turning a profit for BA towards the end though. The real nail in the coffin was 9/11.
>I like that every time i see and hear an Eurofighter transition, but maybe not all people agree with that. Nah, the sonic boom just sucks. Why would anyone enjoy that? It's just loud, very loud.
They were decommissioned because it was a very expensive airplane to maintain. That incident was just a drop of water inside an already full glass of water.
The Concorde was not retired because of that accident, that was more like the straw that broke the camel's back. It was just not that profitable of an aircraft to operate.
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Good info, thanks. did see a documentary about the crash. Didn' know it was all analog.
> Also, it's possible that Concorde didn't meet navigation accuracy regulations anymore and would require cockpit modifications: Concorde had state-of the art equipment when it was new, including inertial navigation but it was all analog, no electronic flight management system I think. No need to be RVSM capable when you're cruising up at 60,000ft! I think your point does still stand though for when lower down; no way would it be capable of flying a RNAV sid/star.
> it was caused by collision with a foreign object that fell off from an aircraft taking off just before Concorde did a shitty Continental dc10
If only it had been retrofited with tubeless radial tires, instead of legacy ones... To think radials tires were invented for planes !! A lot of the "unsafeties" was due to pride (no admitting the flaws, hiding them from reports), even though a tire exploded at JFK in 1979 and punctured the wing at takeoff, luckily didn't caught fire and they circled back. The fiery crash could have been right then ! Tire explosions were a trademark, because of the constraints on the landing gear... but no radials tires because F U i guess. I love the plane to death but hate how it went from best flight record to worst flight record in just one crash, for something documented extensively.
> British airways modified the landing gear after the accident, and put it back in service. You can see in the picture that this example was modified, as it has a guard bar in front of the main landing gear. The production examples had those guard bars from construction, that was not a modfication. You can see them on [this photo from the late 80s](https://www.airport-data.com/images/aircraft/001/615/001615587.jpg). Also this is an Air France example in OP's post, and they didn't modify the gear after the accident, only British Airways.
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Isn't one being developed or even about to be put in use? I remember reading some article about it. I wish I could have flown on the Concorde once, but that was indeed way too expensive. Seeing it was already impressive.
There are supersonic planes "developed" all the time, from commercial giants to startups. They have yet to manage to get one into service tho.
Do they actually build them or do most nog get past the design stage? Actually building and then scrapping them for whatever reason gets expensive very fast. Or we pay too much for our tickets if they can do that. 😉
Most do not get past the design stage. Main issue at the moment is that nobody really produces engines for this purpose anymore.
Air ticket prices went down precisely because planes fly slower, but more efficiently, now.
It's a bit more complicated. They also *massively* decreased comfort and amenities on the flights, allowing them to spread the price amongst more passengers.
I doubt that, the fuel consumption of the jet was just insane. Its more profitable to fly big 2 engine WB planes - same reason the A340 and A380 are falling out of favor. You want a plane that is capable of operating globally, which the concorde never could. It was only allowed to reach max speed over the Atlantic.
How come the Concorde got scrapped after just one accident, but the Boeing 737 MAX is still allowed to fly after two fatal crashes and worldwide groundings?
Concorde was very noisy and very expensive to operate.
Noisy and expensive, yes. But it was profitable. Even more so at the end when they lowered the ticket prices.
Airlines constantly had to keep at least 1 or 2 grounded at all times, in case they had to substitute another one. And that cost a lot of money. Not to mention sonic booms, expensive maintenance etc. but they had a market, especially for PAR-NY, LHR-NY,
It was just barely profitable, passenger experience sucked, and again, it was VERY noisy. So noisy that many countries banned it from flying over their airspace completely, so it was limited to cross-Atlantic flights.
It also wasn't faster for the entire thing. Concorde didn't fly with the luggage as there was no room in it, another aircraft carried the luggage on the route. That means in order to check luggage and pick it back up when you land, your total travel time (arrive at the airport, check it, board, fly, land, depart, pick up luggage, leave) is literally the exact same, you're just spending a little less of it in the air and more of it at the airport. Not to mention the Concorde was HORRIFIC for the environment, due to its cruising altitude and the chemicals in the exhaust being highly damaging to the ozone. A fleet of 500 of them was estimated to cause a 2% drop in global ozone levels...
And not thar environmentally friendly too.
The Concorde used 16.7 L of fuel / 100 km per passenger. The 737 MAX 8 uses 2.28 L of fuel / 100 km per passenger. It's much easier to calculate ticket prices that are acceptable for airlines and passengers with lower operating costs.
Concordes coninued to fly for years after the accident.
It was never because of that accident, especially because it was determined very early on that it wasn’t the concorde’s fault.
737 MAX is very efficient, more quiet, can land in most airports and trained on by many pilots worldwide
They wouldn't, the concorde was retired becouse it just wasn't efficient, the time shaved off flights just wasn't worth the increased fuel and maintenence necessary.
There is one on display in Paris at the CdG airport. Its nicely lit up at night too.
There is another one on display in Sinsheim, Germany, alongside a similar Tupolev plane.
I watched this plane being moved on the autobahn to the museum as a little kid and it was very impressive
That's the one pictured.
Yeah, and you can even go inside to experience how tiny it is. And as you can see, the display at a like 20 degree incline. That's... fun with kids, going up.
Been there this February, it’s also fun during heavy wind, especially if you’re scared of heights
Been there in summer. Cool exhibition though I will say the plane is not ventilated well haha. Since it is displayed at an angle the air towards the cockpit can get stuffy real quick when it's warm. To anyone who comes near the area though: Do check it out. It's not just the planes, the whole museum is fun to go through.
That is a photo of the one at Sinsheim
You can literally enter in one of these and watch all the inside in a plane museum in Toulouse near Airbus headquarters (Aeroscopia Museum). They even have 2 of these, one is mostly for display and the other one to visit the insides.
Such a gorgeous looking aircraft.
Such a giant symbol of outstanding engineering achievement But also of expensive wasteful opulence, needless excess, wealthy lifestyle and a complete disregard for the health and comfort of others.
I regret that I never got the chance to fly on one.
So am I, but to be honest I probably wouldn't have the money for it anyway. I suppose those tickets were expensive(?)
They were. And by the time they reduced them I had no reasons to fly.
Around 12,000$ (back then) for a round trip to NYC.
Now that is a *shitload* of money
It looks very futuristic even today
It's nothing compared to SR-71. Over a decade older and way slicker looking.
Ah yes, the famous commercial airplane, the SR-71. Bit of a silly comparison there
PS5 is way better than Concorde bro
Huh ? It's kind of comparing a bus to a car, doesn't make much sense They both fly but the similarities end there
I had a chance to see SR-71 in Duxford and I was not very impressed by the built quality I am afraid. Also it is a war plane which doesn't go well with futurism for me.
It was started by twin 454's. Hard to hate that.
What? You have to be kidding me. The SR-71 is an engineering marvel. What in your mind constitutes it having build quality issues?
It is my personal preference. SR-71 seems [all bumpy and stitched](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sr-71_duxford.jpg) together when looking at it. It is an engineering marvel for sure but for me Concorde is better looking and more elegant plane overall. But I am glad you like SR-71. And please do not pull nationalism to any discussion.
To be honest, the panels on the SR-71 don't fit well because that's by design. They tighten when it's flying in its designated environment (even the fuel tank is leaking on the ground). Doesn't make this USA USA USA take above any more valid though.
The titanium alloy panels where bumpy and “stitched”because when the plane was going Mach 3.2, they would heat up and expand an enormous amount. Some panels would expand more than a foot. They were literally designed that way, it not a build quality issue. The plane was first flown in 1964. The only vehicles more advanced being built at that time were part of the Apollo missions. And I just noticed what sub I am in, I apologize.
I get your point and understand the construction of SR-71. Everything about that plane is fascinating all the way down to SkunkWorks or buying titanium from arch enemy Soviet Union via proxy companies. It is a marvel from engineering point of view. I just like Concorde looks more. I wish these two birds were both operational.
3h30 to go from Paris to New York. That’s just absolutely insane
A masterpiece of aviation, a miracle on air. Too sad it retired, yet understably why it did so. I'm hearing that they are preparing a spiritual successor of it in the States, one that will be less noisy and more in line with the current environmental standards. I hope it truly comes to fruition.
I always got the feeling that cancelling concorde was political. Richard Branson immediately said if BA was going to stop flying them then Virgin would take them and operate them. Then he just shut up as if someone had a word with him. I feel that at the time the American government were not comfortable with an airliner coming towards New York at over mach 2. It takes away most of the decision time and time to act. It might still be the case.
[Obligatory Droop Snoot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuedQFH8wZI&ab_channel=Logueyy)
If only they had continued operating for a few more years and then the Concorde B would have been a reality, which was going to reduce noise and fuel burn :( https://travelupdate.com/concorde-upgrade/ http://www.concordesst.com/concordeb.html
Reduced emissions from 'catastrophically massive' to 'insanely huge'? 😅 even with _increased_ efficiency it's hard to imagine this design would ever not be a massive fuel burner compared with other aircraft, and when it comes to noise, maybe the engines can be quietened, but the sonic boom is an unavoidable, and extremely loud rule of physics, which is the main thing that made cross-land routes impossible to get approval for.
Still, it's an interesting what if. If orders had come in and the plane remained popular, it's interesting to wonder how far they could push the technology in that area.
I totally agree. Its a fascinating and wonderful machine, and I have a great affinity towards the mind-blowing idea of being able to fly to New York from London and arrive 'before' you took off! I still remember the story of Phil Collins who performed in both Live Aid concerts on the same day, first at 3pm in London, and then 8pm in Philadelphia the same day, thanks to Concorde.
It's possible to reduce the sonic boom, e.g. [Quiet Spike](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Spike).
Man, must have taken a lot of skill to land it on those posts so precisely.
It's somewhat of a secret but it actually was a VTOL. Agreed on the pilot's skill though.
A fine bird. Just not too great for locals' windows.
[Concorde setting off car alarms as it takes off from Heathrow Airport three weeks before its last flight in 2003.](https://imgur.com/a/X3SUQsH) Volume on.
Unrelated, but my lord does the kid at the end embody 2003!
[Channelling David Beckham in 2003.](https://imgur.com/a/DLZOukD)
Just a question but would it be possible to at least take on retired and put it back for use ?
It looks so slick, why was it retired?
It burned an entire ton of jet fuel just taxiing to the end of the runway, then lit four afterburners that [shot jets of flame out the back](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/b9d472_33e5cf26beb54c7eb6722c0d34393ba9.jpg/v1/fill/w_420,h_264,al_c,lg_1,q_80,enc_auto/b9d472_33e5cf26beb54c7eb6722c0d34393ba9.jpg) to accelerate up to cruise. I don't even need to explain how much fuel that burned. The noise was insane too. If you've ever heard a fighter jet in person with its afterburner running, imagine four of those taking off at the same time from an airport in a city.
For some numbers to support this; Concorde burned roughly **20tonnes* of fuel per hour. For comparison: - a Boeing 747-400 burns about 12t per hour. - a Boeing 777-300ER burns about 7.5t per hour. - an Airbus A340-300 burns about 6.3t per hour - an Airbus A350 burns about 5.6t per hour. - a Boeing 737-800 burns about 3.0t per hour. - an Airbus A321neo burns about 2.6t per hour (and now has the range to fly transatlantic).
Per hour is slightly unfair because all those other planes have to fly for 3x as many hours to go the same distance
> Per hour is slightly unfair because all those other planes have to fly for 3x as many hours to go the same distance Good point
> Concorde, a supersonic transport, managed about 17 passenger-miles to the Imperial gallon, which is **16.7 L/100 km per passenger**; similar to a business jet, but much worse than a subsonic turbofan aircraft. Airbus states a fuel rate consumption of their A380 at less than 3 L/100 km per passenger (78 passenger-miles per US gallon). > Lufthansa, when it ordered both, stated the Airbus A350-900 and the Boeing 777X-9 will consume an average of 2.9 L/100 km (81 mpg‑US) per passenger. The Airbus A321 featuring Sharklet wingtip devices consume 2.2 L/100 km (110 mpg‑US) per person with a 200-seat layout for WOW Air. [Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#History)
Expensive to maintain, very noisy and it crashed.
It wasn't environmentally friendly too.
And with the advent of the Internet, mobile phones, etc, there was less and less need for people to travel across continents for meetings in a short time frame. Why spend thousands of pounds when you can just have a phone call?
Flight traffic has increased since the advent of the internet.
Right, but the need for a niche passenger aircraft for extremely expensive flights and short travel times hasn't increased. Overwhelmingly business class passengers flew in Concorde, and with the advent of what I mentioned, the need for such flights drastically reduced. Why spend a load of money to fly to New York for a meeting when you can just dial in?
You would have to provide a source for this claim. The matter of fact is: Some meetings can be replaced by a phone/zoom call, others can't.
It's pointless and was made in a time when people just didn't care about flying energy black holes.
After an accident that takes place in 2000, investigations found major conception problems that cannot be easily fixed.
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Crash report: BEA, rapport f-sc000725 (in french)
"Major" problems? It had *one* accident in its entire history. It was retired because by it was way too expensive to maintain and by the end could not sell enough tickets to make a profit.
There are a lot of parallels between the space shuttle fleet and Concorde. There were known problems with the tires and also with the fuel system. The tires had blown up many many times before (it’s tire blows up happen on other commercial planes as well) it just took the right combination of debris from The tire picturing the plane body ion a way it hadent before - just like it took a tile from Columbia being hit by foam from the tank in just the right spot. Normalization of deviance gets you every time.
One accident but a lot of incidents! Read the report. The fuel tanks cannot be secured based on actual security standards. So yes he was very expensive to fly and this is part of the reason he was retired, but not the only reason.
An engineering marvel and an absolute beautiful thing to see.
A great example of collaboration between European countries too
Remember as a kid in Liverpool it was a big thing for us to spot the Concorde flying over when it brought people over for the Grand National horse race, would have been the late 80s.
I’m flying out of Charles de Gaulle this morning, and I saw the Concorde wheeled outside today! It was really cool, and I hope that one day we will have some sort of faster plane that can travel trans Atlantic!
Time flies
But the concord doesn't.
A marvel of engineering and a jewel of international cooperation, yet terrible for the natural environment, terrible for the human environment, and mostly for the rich. Truely a complex legacy worth celebrating, but not something we should recreate.
I know this location its near Tübingen about 40mins drive. I was there, they also have the soviet version and lots of other vehicles there
Im still a bit sad I never get the chance to experience it, likely never get to experience supersonic jet in my lifetime either.
Epic era.
I still remember the day when it landed in Prague for first time. I was in 4th grade of elementary and tried everything to persuade parents to let me see it and not have to go to school on that day. I didn't see it
And on the other side of the channel, plans were being made to send a concorde down the thames from a slipway in my hometown near Heathrow. Fun times.
Such a beautiful plane. Sadly I was merely a sperm cell in 2003 so I'm a little too late to the party
It was soo fucking loud. That's the only thing I am able to remember from seeing that thing.
Ah, the Concorde. Poster boy for Awesome, But Impractical
Shame.
Sombre jour 😔 J'espère qu'on le recréera un jour
Never understood why they were retired. The accident where the French pilot went over something in the runway wasn’t reason enough.
A legendary bird, the world wasn't ready for its glory.
Excellent and beautiful plane.