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Concorde was a fantastic technological achievement; It's beautiful and revolutionary. My heart really wants it to be successful. However, my head tells me that
by JanSolo 8y ago
Concorde was a fantastic technological achievement; It's beautiful and revolutionary. My heart really wants it to be successful.
However, my head tells me that no amount of tweaking or tuning will change the fundamental problem with Concorde.
The root problem with this aircraft is that people prefer cheaper flights over faster flights.
The real success that we can take from the Concorde program was that some of the technology found its way into the A300 program and its derivative, the A320.
Cheap, reliable aircraft are what people want. Fast, expensive ones are cool, but not really economic.
- clarkenheim 8y agoAccording to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc First/business class seats are where the airlines make all of their money, so Concord would be economically viable today.
- adolph 8y agoWouldn’t a more costly to produce product eliminate the large margin of existing first/business class?
- londons_explore 8y agoIf true, concord alone would be viable, but a combination of concord and regular planes on the same route would lead to all the business passengers taking concord, and the economy ones left in standard planes, which would no longer be viable.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoIn that case you could raise the price of Concorde tickets to push surplus business customers back to regular planes. But this raises the question, why would you even want to bother with Concorde in the first place? It only makes sense if you could attract new business class customers, who would take the faster trip but wouldn't take the slower one at all.
- euyyn 8y agoBecause you take them off the competition.
- mshook 8y agoAt the same time, when Concorde stopped flying after the accident in 2000, people who used to fly on her, flew on other things, so these passengers weren't lost revenue wise.
- euyyn 8y agoA significant share of those customers must have been lost by the two companies that flew the Concorde, as the alternatives to it are commoditized and offered by many other companies.
- lmm 8y agoSome people didn't fly at all when they would've flown if a Concorde had been available. And those who did fly on other planes paid significantly less.
- jonknee 8y agoThat was also the case back when Concord was in service...
- darkmighty 8y agoWhile I'm sure most profits/margin come from first/business class, I think that's only viable because the large number of economic class passengers help marginalize the cost per passenger. To give a concrete example, suppose the airline is flying 20 business seats per flight. The cost of those seats to the airline if it had no economy class, and it were forced to allocate an entire plane for them would be immense -- marginal the cost per seat would be (illustration) ~Airplane_Cost/20+Accomodation_Cost. Now suppose a current airline will carry perhaps 200 economy class passengers where it makes 0 profit. The marginal cost of the business class seats to the airline now will be much lower, something like ~Airplane Cost/(200+20)+Accomodation_Cost. So the airline don't need economy class to make profit, they need them to create economies of scale that bring down their cost for the high margin customers.
- ggg9990 8y agoI have been on a 747 that was business class only (Singapore Airlines). But the economy class passengers are definitely required for scale on most flights.
- samstave 8y agoYeah but they lack hammocks!
- Fomite 8y agoAnd yet a number of "First/Business Class Only" airlines have failed.
- zone411 8y agoBut most of them failed because a jump in oil prices in 2006-2014. We're below these levels now.
- Retric 8y agoI don't think it's that simple, if you asked someone if they would pay 50$ to save 8+ hours off a long flight I think a significant portion would say hell yes. So, it's more a question of cost vs. saved time. 50$ seems crazy as supersonic flight is going to use far more fuel, but it also means the aircraft, pilot, and flight attendants can make more trips. So, a minimal cost increase might be possible.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoI think there are thresholds there. Reducing a 12-hours long flight to 8-hours long flight makes no practical difference to people traveling. Cutting it down to 6 hours might start. Cutting it down to 2-3 hours (or under an hour, as SpaceX is proposing) enables new use cases for which people might be willing to pay premium. Suddenly, a company can send someone to a meeting/conference on the other side of the world and have them back the same day.
- sambe 8y agoAlmost everyone I know who flies recreationally would pay to reduce 12 to 8, and I have done so myself. Maybe those routes/budgets are not a big enough proportion of the overall flight volume?
- briandear 8y agoI don’t know, I fly Marseille-Frankfurt-SFO every month and cutting my 11.5 hour leg down to 8 would be a big win for me. I’d pay a business class fare for an economy seat if it cut 4 hours from my travel time. Tourists probably wouldn’t care so much, but for business travel — I’d definitely be interested.
- w0m 8y ago30% more for a plane ticket to add an extra half day to vacation (landing at noon vs 3-4pm) is something i'd do; I already do with minimizing legs and length of layovers. How many* people willing to pay more are the key as the flight needs to be filled.
- 8y ago
- ggg9990 8y agoAs the wealth gap widens, the Concorde becomes more economically viable.
- Thaxll 8y agoIf it's faster then more people will use it then it will get cheaper, people buy smartphone at $900 nowdays ...
- fjsolwmv 8y agoLithography had much more low-hanging fruit for optimization than jet fuel. Even that is improvement is coming to an end nowadays.
- jlebrech 8y agopeople use phones daily and slowness it frustrating, if you get a cheaper flight (that you use 1-5times a year) you can afford a better phone.
- loeg 8y agoThere are some fundamental properties of aerodynamic drag here that lead to costs that do not necessarily scale down with broader consumer demand.
- samstave 8y agoCheap. fast. good. A constant. Pick two.
- freehunter 8y agoProblem is that cheap and fast and good are all moving targets. Cheap and fast and good meant very different things 30 years ago for planes, 10 years ago for cars, and 2 years ago for technology. There's a fourth variable: time. Want cheaper, faster, AND better? Wait for advancements in technology. I had a 90's truck with 190HP that got 18mpg. Today I drive the same model but 10 years newer with 270HP without trading anything on gas milage and selling for roughly the same price. And the interior of the truck was great in the 90s, but the newer ones are worlds beyond that. All I had to do was wait 10 years for it to be invented. Many failed products are just ideas whose time has not come yet.
- samstave 8y agoand you know what is lovely; its the kids that were riding around in that truck ten years ago that were thinking to themselves " this sucks - i can design better when i am older" that 'invented' that worlds apart truck! old inspires the new. make something great which you saw as mediocre prior.
- jlebrech 8y agowhat if they made a flying hotel and it timed it's flight for you arrive at a convenient time? that way it could be very slow and carry a lot of passengers.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoA "sleeper plane" with bunk beds instead of seats, kind of like a flying capsule hotel? Sign me up!
- ghaff 8y agoThey exist. I’m not sure where there are true sleeping compartments outside of Emirates but international business class seating (and first even more so) with lie flat seats is pretty comfortable
- TeMPOraL 8y agoLike a cruise ship, but in the sky? Sadly, they went out of fashion after the Hindenburg, and never came back.
- JasonFruit 8y agoI would take more vacations just for the chance to take a leisurely flight on a dirigible with a world class chef. In fact, the flight might be the vacation.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoSame here. I dream of taking such a flight. The destination doesn't really matter.
- netsharc 8y agoI guess that's the cruise ship model. Normally you go on a ship to get somewhere, but on a cruise ship, the vacation starts as you board, and end as you disembark (excluding the dockings for day trips of course...). Airshipping to see the landscape of Europe would be kinda awesome (the Alps, or the fjords of Norway, the award-winning fjords)...
- haberman 8y ago> The root problem with this aircraft is that people prefer cheaper flights over faster flights. Agreed. And that's not even mentioning the climate angle of it. I've done some reading lately about the effects of air travel on climate. I was very depressed by what I found. Basically, air travel is terrible for global warming. Besides emissions of greenhouse gasses CO2 and NOx, the trails of water vapor ("contrails") form cirrus clouds that contribute to warming. Unlike the electric car, there is no emerging technology that can save air travel from this environmental impact. Meanwhile, air travel is growing at ~5%/year. At this rate, by mid-century air travel alone will consume the world's entire emissions allowance, if we want to keep global warming to 2 °C or less. And supersonic travel appears to be even worse for the climate. For all the talk about fighting global warming, I almost never hear about this. It seems like the most inconvenient truth of all: if we want to fight global warming, we have to fly less. This is a hard pill to swallow. Tesla is built on the idea that we can have cleaner cars without having to give up anything (because electric cars can be luxury items). But electric airplanes exist only as research curiosities -- they aren't up to the task of their fuel-burning counterparts. Right now it looks like the democratization of fast, world-wide travel might be a late 20th - early 21st century phenomenon that we can't get back. :(
- foolfoolz 8y agomight be an unpopular prediction on this board but i believe climate change will be solved by technology and not reduced consumption. electricity generation also has significant environmental impact and is not a solution in itself
- shin_lao 8y agoThere is a niche of people willing to pay extra to go faster and a number of startups are looking at providing supersonic (Mach 2) commercial flights (Boom is the most famous).
- debt 8y agoI think even more fundamentally than cost is that modern airports aren't design around all the extremes required for supersonic passenger planes.
- vl 8y agoMy guess would be that A380 is more taxing on airport infrastructure than small Concord.
- jedberg 8y agoYou could easily find out if you’re right. Most airlines offer the same routes direct both with and without stops. The non-stop flights usually cost more (sometimes a lot more) and are often full. At least some of those people are optimizing for time. So clearly there is a demand to pay more for shorter flights.
- carlosdp 8y agoHaving fewer stops is more about not having to deal with connections than the travel time for me...
- anyfoo 8y agoI choose direct flights whenever I can. I don’t really care about the time, I care about the hassle, the interruption and the waiting that comes with having to change flights. A lot of the time, I would gladly spend the same amount of hours—sleeping, reading, watching stuff-in the same plane.
- jedberg 8y agoI was talking about direct vs non-stop.
- anyfoo 8y agoOh, I didn't see that important distinction. That makes sense, then, don't see why you would prefer non-stop over stops if it's the same plane you keep sitting in, other than that it takes less time. I never flew in a plane that had stops, so I forgot that they exist.
- jedberg 8y ago> don't see why you would prefer non-stop over stops if it's the same plane you keep sitting in, other than that it takes less time. That's exactly why I prefer them. Because of the time savings. And I'm willing to pay more for that. > I never flew in a plane that had stops, so I forgot that they exist. It's increasingly rare as airlines move to a more direct city to city model, but in the old hub and spoke days, you'd often find planes that stopped in one or two hubs on the way. Southwest still make a lot of stops. If you want to get from the west coast to east cost, there's a really good chance of stopping in Denver, Kansas City, or Texas.
- 8ytecoder 8y agoMy flight to visit family is 21 hours in the air. Add layover - 2hrs, check-in, security and customs, we are looking at 30 hours of travel one way. I'd happily pay 50% more for a faster nonstop flight.
- mkoryak 8y agoexcept that seats on the concorde were no where near 50% more, I think it was probably 500% more.
- rajeshpant 8y agoPeople don't mind paying a small incentive to cut travel time. I don't have analytics data to prove this, but this is how generally people book flights when searching on expedia or any other website: 1. Search flights from A to B, show me the cheapest flights. 2. Then comes time preference(Should fly Friday instead of thursday? morning vs evening) 3. filter results by least no. of hops(This definitely shows people want to cut down on flying time and most people still pay an incentive to reach their destination faster). I feel the world and society had many changes since 60s, 70s. People today are more interested in reaching their destination fast and can pay a small premium. This is a change in economics since the Concorde time. People who are paying for Business class and First class, would prefer paying a premium and reaching the destination faster. People would still want cheap, reliable aircrafts and they should have that option but supersonic commercial flights on certain trans pacific & trans atlantic routes is definitely feasible. Concorde had high maintenance costs - it required special fuel, special tires and other maintainence costs which made it financially non-viable. If any new supersonic flight addresses these costs, then it will open a whole new world of faster air travel.
- lucasverra 8y ago> (This definitely shows people want to cut down on flying time and most people still pay an incentive to reach their destination faster) As we are going with anecdata I will complete : - it's not that i care that much of time when choosing stops, I care about consistent awful airport processes. Just getting off the plane is painfull ("Common people get off quicker pleaase")
- jonknee 8y agoOpposing evidence: carriers continually find new ways to show a lower price and then make it back up in fees (like some US carriers charging for carry on luggage). This is specifically because people sort by price.
- hinkley 8y agoBig airports are already pretty saturated for traffic, and what most of us don't realize is that airplanes create vortices around the runway that the airport has to wait out. So more small planes can take off in an hour than large planes. If you build smaller planes that fly farther, you don't need the hub and spoke pattern as much. If a direct flight cuts two hours off of your trip, makes it so you don't have to board two planes instead of one, that is both objectively faster and at least for me much less stressful.
- Patrick_Devine 8y agoYes, but the bigger planes carry more than twice as many passengers. If we're talking about airport throughput efficiency of A380s vs Embraer 170/190s, the Airbus is going to win every time. That said, most people want to fly point-to-point these days and not Hub/Spoke, and often _are_ willing to pay a few extra bucks to do it (I know I certainly will almost always take a direct flight if I can). This favours being able to use smaller airframes, and if it means avoiding a Hub airport it can be a lot more efficient. Where it gets dicey is trying to cram more and more aircraft through an already busy Hub. That leads to having to build more runways and doing things like double/triple simultaneous parallel landings.
- nraynaud 8y agonot sure, in western Europe I take the bullet train even when the airplane is cheaper, because it's faster and more convenient. But of course the bullet train is generally only slightly more expensive, if we were talking 20x price difference, I might learn patience. A second aspect of speed versus price, is that in airplane travel a lot of time is spent accessing the airports, going through security, waiting in the departure queue, etc. Offsetting those 3-5h with a faster travel time might prove challenging.
- Fomite 8y agoTrains are weird because trains are also, at least in my experience, actively more comfortable and pleasant, regardless of speed issues.
- nraynaud 8y agoyes, and they tend to arrive downtown. But I am happy to annonce that the French rail is catching up, they have started queuing up people in the station to check the tickets before boarding, requiring clients to arrive 20 minutes early, making smaller seats, removing the bars, and building the new train stations in the outskirts with a crappy connection to downtown. Progress!
- elidourado 8y agoDisclosure: I'm at Boom, which is building a Mach-2.2 airliner. https://boomsupersonic.com/ https://boomsupersonic.com/ I think it all depends on how much cost savings for how much speed. In today's dollars, a round-trip ticket on Concorde from New York to London was $20,000, or 4x today's business class price. For that, you got a tiny seat in a cramped cabin. What we're targeting at Boom is an improvement over business class. We're making it profitable for airlines to operate the plane at today's business class fares. We're getting you there in half the time. And instead of a cramped two-and-two cabin arrangement, it's a one-and-one configuration (every seat is a window AND an aisle). The seats are similar to today's domestic first class seats, only designed for productivity. So the choice a business traveler could soon face is: Would you like to get from New York to London in 7 hours in a lay-flat bed, or in 3h15m in a comfortable, productive environment? Price is the same either way. We think most people will pick the supersonic flight. It should be noted also that the premium cabin market today is much larger than it was a few decades ago. And finally, premium-cabin economics are only the first step. We think there's a roadmap to making supersonic flight cheaper than subsonic flight is today. It will take a few decades, but that is absolutely the path that Boom is on.
- gerdesj 8y agoDisclosure: I'm a Brit. I wish you all the best and if the concept piccy on your web site is close to reality then we'll see little delta winged flying needles in the skies. Could you give us a very rough idea of say London to New York fare on this thing?
- sjrosen 8y agoTheir website says "Approximately $2,500 each way" for the London–New York route.
- Aloha 8y agoI really hope you guys are successful.
- ghostly_s 8y agoUh-huh. You're delivering seat prices 1/4 of Concorde and halving passenger capacity. So that's about an order-of-magnitude cost reduction through the power of...magic, I guess?
- sand500 8y ago> The root problem with this aircraft is that people prefer cheaper flights over faster flights. I don't think this can be generalized to 100% of the market. There's probably a good percrnt of the personal travel market that would gladly pay more for a non stop flight than save a few bucks with a stop or two. Then buisness travelers whose company pays for their flights will probably not mind the small cost difference for saving of time.
- ghaff 8y agoIt needs to be a big difference in price for me to take a stop vs. non-stop even for personal travel. Every stop is an additional opportunity for missed connections, flight problems, etc. I rarely make stops voluntarily.
- philjohn 8y agoEh, Concorde turned a decent profit for BA of £50m a year or thereabouts. It wasn't for "normal" people, it was for the super rich, captains of industry and movie stars for whom saving 4.5 hours was worth spending the equivalent of a 1st class cabin seat on a slow airliner. [1]There's a great story about the making of the Band Aid "Do they know it's Christmas?" record. The recording session was underway and Boy George hadn't turned up. He was eventually tracked down to his New York hotel, sleeping off a heavy night. He got up, high tailed it to the airport and caught the next Concorde to London - and made it before the end of the recording session. [1] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/making-of-band-aid-20141125 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/making-of-band-a...
- rconti 8y agoAnd there are more of those people today than ever.
- InclinedPlane 8y agoA lot of the original capital investment costs for the Concorde were effectively subsidized by the British government, that would not be the case with a new Concorde most likely so the math on profitability would be substantially altered.
- myrandomcomment 8y agoDepends. In general I would say you are right, but that leaves out the business traveler of today. Concorde was to far ahead of its time and then got 100% screwed on bad luck with the Oil crisis in the 70s. I have done 50K miles so far this year between CA and APAC. The flight is 12+ hours most times. Give me something that is +25-40% $ on a business class ticket today that take the flight time to 3 hours and I will buy it. I think that to be true even for the economy tickets for the long haul flights. I think people in the back of the plan would pay lets say $1200 for that flight to Tokyo over the current $900 for the flight time to be cut by 8-9 hours.
- tajen 8y ago> The real success that we can take from the Concorde program was that some of the technology found its way into the A300 program and its derivative, the A320. Correct, the Concorde program kickstarted the French aeronautic industry. I don’t know for the UK part, but I think UK was pretty advanced already with the De Havailland and DC-3/4 companies. Which, ironically, collapsed for trying to do things too fast and being earlier than others. For example the DC-9 would famously lose parts and doors, one of those which founds its way in the... Concorde, causing the crash in Paris.
- InclinedPlane 8y agoThere are certainly some diminishing returns with high speed air travel. If it takes you, say, at least an hour to travel to/from the airport in the best case (e.g. no security wait or using TSA precheck) then the difference between a Mach 0.8 and Mach 2 flight isn't that huge percentage wise, especially when you factor in the time it takes to get to cruising altitude. On extremely long flights it would make a bigger difference which might result in a more comfortable flight but it doesn't fundamentally change whether or not the flight takes up most of an entire day or not. That doesn't change until you get into extremely fast travel such as ballistic point-to-point transport. When you have flight travel times that are on the order of an hour or two (including overhead like vehicle loading and unloading) then it becomes possible to integrate them into a day where they are just a part, which opens up a lot more possibilities and might justify the expense.