33 ms·
Concorde ‘B’ (2014)
- billclerico 6y agoBoom is a YC company building a modern, supersonic passenger airliner: https://boomsupersonic.com/ https://boomsupersonic.com/
- tbrock 6y agoThe name is both great and awful at the same time.
- lostlogin 6y agoWill it be the passengers or the employees that get referred to as ‘Boomers’?
- tupac_speedrap 6y agoI feel like they are playing themselves here. The NIMBYs only need to look at the company name and know they don't want that near their back yard.
- raldi 6y agoThe plane will be known by the product name, not the company name. >99% of the public couldn't tell you the name of the company that built the Concorde.
- speedgoose 6y agoIf the name of one of the companies making the concorde was Boom, I'm very sure people would know it.
- bb611 6y agoIn fairness to the public, the two companies involved in producing Concorde have each changed names 3+ times after merging with other major aircraft and industrial concerns, and are each now fading memories as part of the two largest European aerospace & defense conglomerates. I'd actually wager a significant portion of the population would correctly say Airbus, but for the wrong reasons - it's the only French aerospace company they can think of. I did a straw poll among some friends and got a lot of "I don't know what that is. Do you mean the grape?"
- rbanffy 6y agoIt's reminiscent of an ancient sci-fi series, Fireball XL-5. Who names a rocket "Fireball"?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rplnt 6y ago> Window or aisle? No need to choose This is a realtor talk right here. Selling limitations as benefits.
- runarberg 6y agoCall me a pessimist, can we really afford to lunch new “modern” supersonic airplanes when the climate crisis has reached an irreversible turning point, with no solution in sight. I think efforts like these suffer from serious disconnect at best, or some criminal lack of ethics at worst.
- baybal2 6y agoUnless the engine question is solved, I don't see any of the new wave of civilian SSTs (Boom, Spike, Aerion) going anywhere. The airplane talk, let alone an SST, is pretty much all about the engine. So, with none of them putting an engine on the table, whatever else they do is, honestly speaking, pointless. Be sceptical.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoI'm not involved in aerospace. What is "the engine question"?
- baybal2 6y agoThere is simply no civilian engine out there for an SST. Even original Concorde engines are not what they need today. Even the best military engines today will barely work for the role. They need around 20t of dry thrust at speeds at speeds around Mach 1.7-2.0, and big enough fan for takeoff at the same time.
- makerofspoons 6y agoWould range have mattered as much to make the Concorde more palatable for airlines and travelers? I have always been under the impression the main reason the Concorde didn't see more commercial success was because the cabin was small. It seems like what was really needed was a design that could hold more passengers.
- TylerE 6y agoIt was very successful (if not wildly profitable) for most of it's life. It was a great example of a halo project. Then the Air France crash happened in 2000. That hurt. Then They were brought back into service a bit over a year later, on September 11th, 2001. Talk about bad timing. Even after BA retired them Richard Branson wanted to buy (and operate) the entire fleet.
- valuearb 6y agoIt was never profitable on an accounting basis. Only if you ignore cost of construction.
- pmyteh 6y agoThere's a lovely LRB piece by Francis Spufford that covers (amongst other things) the accounting and procurement shenanigans required to avoid Concorde getting prematurely scrapped in the 80s, after it was clear it was a dead-end: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n11/francis-spufford/love-that-bird https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n11/francis-spufford/lov... [paywall]
- cameldrv 6y agoI don't think that the cabin size per se really made that much difference. Supersonic flight is always going to cost a lot more than subsonic, so you're targeting the segment that wants the speed/prestige of going Mach 2 and is willing to pay. There aren't that many of these people, and they tend to be sensitive to schedule, so you have to run the service fairly often. That means that you either run a small airplane or give away a lot of seats (even with 100 seats, at least towards the end, British Airways was giving free upgrades to Concorde for a large fraction of the seats). I think that today the supersonic airliner market is still quite tough, because first class has gotten so good. For transatlantic, you only save four hours, and you can spend that sleeping fairly comfortably or using your computer with provided power and pretty good Wi-Fi. Where there is more legitimate value is transpacific, where supersonic might shave 10 hours. However, due to the higher fuel burn, there's almost no way to avoid stopping for gas, which erodes the advantage both in time and comfort.
- mikepurvis 6y agoWasn't it the ticket price and crowded cabin that killed the Concorde? With even business travelers having to arrive 90+ minutes early to the airport for international travel anyway, the value proposition of being in the air for a shorter time just isn't really there, especially if the longer flight puts you on a lie-flat bed in a widebody.
- donalhunt 6y ago"the average supersonic flight time on the transatlantic routes was just under 3.5 hours." (NYC -> Paris) Flying subsonic requires you to be at the airport 60-90mins before the flight too (though i know some airports have that as low as 45mins). Still a considerable reduction to the "in the air" time.
- ghaff 6y agoWhen the Concorde was flying, my dad was flying first class from JFK to Europe on a regular basis. He told me that at one point he got upgraded to a Concorde flight which was normally something like a 30% premium over first class at a time when tickets tended to cost more than today. (So probably something equivalent to maybe a $10K ticket today.) He told me that it was a cool experience once. But now, rather than having a relaxed first class meal on an overnight flight [EDITED: He may have taken daytime flights], he was getting into London in the middle of rush hour. He could probably have flown the Concorde had he wanted to but didn't have any real interest in taking it again. And, today, with modern lie-flat business class and entertainment systems, there's even less reason to fly supersonic IMO, unless you're a CEO, lawyer, investment banker etc. flying from NY to London to have lunch with someone, seal some deal, and be back home for dinner.
- Scoundreller 6y agoOn the eastward leg, I guess it’s a difference of sleeping on a lie-flat seat vs. sleeping at home (unless you get one of the few daytime flights). But if you arrive in the morning in London, isn’t that rush-hour too?
- gavribirnbaum 6y agois the site down?
- mnw21cam 6y agoLooks like a page with fluffy clouds and nothing else over here.
- CalChris 6y agoThe only person I ever met who'd flown on the Concorde was the executive secretary for a startup CEO who had important meetings in Paris. Yes, this was a Dot Com.
- rjsw 6y agoMy Father has flown on it once. It was after the flights restarted following the Air France crash and prices had been reduced a bit.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoI worked for a company that did those sort of things. It was bought by three crooks who then spent a ton of VC money on themselves. Porsches in the carpark and flights to New York on Concorde. Needless to say it didn't last long. The only other person I know who flew on it was my wife (before we were married).
- melling 6y agoThe addition of the Pacific routes might have helped. Those are some long flights. LA to Tokyo or Beijing in half the time, with a quick stop in Hawaii.
- Scoundreller 6y agoLA to Tokyo would allow for more supersonic flight too. They avoided that over landmass to avoid sonic booms over inhabited areas. Which covers a good chunk of territory if they take the shortest route: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=lhr-jfk http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=lhr-jfk
- lisper 6y agoI had to stop reading before getting to the end because the cloud animation was too distracting. Web site designers please take note: just because you can doesn't mean you should. Animated backgrounds are the <blink> tag of the 21st century.
- detritus 6y agoIt's funny for me to read you berating 'web designers', presumably as a profession, because I can't think of ever having seen a professionally-designed website deploying an animated background as egregiously as this site here has. I can sort of vaguely recall a few 'subtly animated geometric backgrounds' over the years, but usually in an experimental context. The site here looks to my eye to be the product of an enthusiast looking to make their own site and present their own voice - which they have every right to do - not a 'web designer' per se trying to be fancy.
- lisper 6y ago> presumably as a profession No, I just meant: people who design web sites. Whether the person who designed it got paid for the work is of no concern to me. And my comment was intended more as venting of steam than well-considered critique.
- rplnt 6y agoVideos on background are way too common on product pages - you must have seen many.
- detritus 6y agoI genuinely don't recall ever seing any full background videos on product pages. Large embedded videos, sure. There was tha fad many years ago for having fairly low quality, low contrast greyscale video set under halftone or pixellated filters to make the apparent quality better, but I'd still class that as not-so intrusive. They tended to be on multi media or 'design'-centric sites anyway.
- whoisthemachine 6y ago
- hivacruz 6y agoI'm always sad when I think about the Concorde. It was such a great plane ahead of its time when it came out. I wish I had the chance to fly on it once.
- jansan 6y agoIn the Technical Museum Sinsheim (Germany) you have the Concorde A next to the Tupolev Tu-144 on display. This is quite a spectacular view, and you can enter both and take a look at the inside. https://sinsheim.technik-museum.de/assets/uploads/images/27/tupolev-tu-144-2.jpg https://sinsheim.technik-museum.de/assets/uploads/images/27/...
- andi999 6y agoCoincidentally I went there last sunday. I was surprised about the large amount of dials and gauges in the cockpit.
- PaulHoule 6y agoSomething like the Boeing 2707 might have had a better chance of success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707 Part of the pitch for Concorde was that an SST would have greatly reduced capital costs since it could fly at least twice the number of flights in the same unit of time. It wasn't really fast enough to do this on the routes that it flew, so this benefit wasn't realized. A Mach 3 airliner (SR-71 class!) is fast enough to realize better capital efficiency, and can do better on fuel consumption than a Mach 2 airliner. Some fuel is spent fighting air resistance, but some is fighting "induced drag" which produces lift. If you spend less time in the air you need less lift, and fuel efficiency improves. The only problem is that aluminum would melt in a Mach 3 airliner so you need some revolution in materials to make it practical.
- nogabebop23 6y ago>> This was the aircraft the airlines really needed and the aircraft the manufacturers wanted to build. This is largely revisionist history. The reality was that logistics of flying the Concorde (routing, timing, airport services) combined with the experience (speed over comfort) made it expensive and just not that desirable. The plane was conceived in the era of big government bankrolled air travel and doesn't have a role in the reality of flying buses we see today.
- reaperducer 6y agoI think you've just illustrated revisionist revisionist history. The original text is true. The Concorde was what the airlines, aircraft makers, and the public wanted. It was fast. It was expensive. It was a trophy project. All things that appeal to one or more of those segments. What changed was that fuel got too expensive, deregulated airlines started cutting corners everywhere, and people's priorities changed. The world went from people wearing their Sunday suits to embark on a flight to people piling into Southwest air buses in their pajamas without bathing. So the history is correct. It's just that the world has changed. /Flew on the Concorde in the mid-1990's.
- michaelt 6y agoWhy did airlines want Concorde to be expensive?
- reaperducer 6y agoThe airlines didn't. The aircraft makers did.
- rbanffy 6y agoNobody wanted. It's just that the technology to make it less expensive didn't exist. Better engines and more range could help a bit, but it'd still be more expensive than cramming a lot ot people inside a 747.
- ISL 6y agoHow different are the fuel efficiencies per passenger-km for the Concordes (A and B) and modern aircraft?
- jjk166 6y agoThe concorde was woefully less efficient than modern aircraft but this wasn't because it flew supersonically but instead because it used turbojets. Modern aircraft use turbofans which are far more efficient. The concorde was actually designed to save fuel as supercruise is more efficient than transonic flight for a given engine. Unfortunately turbofans for supersonic flight weren't developed until the late 80s, by which point there was little demand for a new SST.
- trboyden 6y agoBased on the trends in at least the US passenger industry, airlines seem to be moving more towards smaller planes and shorter hops. I don't think a new Concorde would have had any impact on that at all. If the airlines wanted a long-range, faster plane, a manufacturer would have come along and built it by now. But like the computer industry, air travel is driven to low-price commodity service, and luxury high performance air travel doesn't fit in that business model.
- ghaff 6y ago>more towards smaller planes and shorter hops Probably more precisely, they're moving towards more direct routes rather than routing almost everything through some specific hubs.
- kingkawn 6y agointeresting that the routes they were listing halfway through the article had none that went over the arctic circle like they do today for flights from NYC -> Beijing
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoYears ago I saw a nice comparison between optical computing and supersonic flight. The gist of it was that they would both only ever be widely used by the military/government. The specific benefits of both are real, but very costly and thus the use tends to be reserved where you absolutely need it. For the general public, electronic computing and subsonic flight both work fine, are not tremendously expensive and don't require ongoing complex maintainance and engineering. I would guess this analysis is still mostly true today.
- LyndsySimon 6y agoTo put it a slightly different way: existing technology is such that it is not profitable for them to be deployed at scale. I expect supersonic travel will eventually supplant our existing infrastructure (at least for long routes), but it's just not going to happen while it's multiple times more expensive to operate and has significant downsides like sonic booms over populated areas. I believe the sonic boom problem has been at least partially solved, but the economics still don't work out. One day, they will. Likewise with optical computing - either ownership costs will fall to the level that they're acceptable for general use or advancements in parallel fields will make it impractical.
- selectodude 6y agoEven with all the technology in the world, the laws of thermodynamics hold. Going faster raises friction losses requiring either a smaller plane or a larger amount of fuel. Either way, the price goes up. SST will never supplant subsonic transport on a large scale level, even accounting for the elimination of sonic booms.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago> but the economics still don't work out. One day, they will. This sounds like magical thinking to me. Supersonic travel will always be at a huge cost disadvantage to conventional airlines, and for the vast majority of people the benefits are not there. I'm more curious about optical computing. I didn't realize there were costs in optical computing that make it fundamentally (i.e. at a physics level) more expensive than electronic computing; I thought the issue was mainly just that there was already over a half a century invested in electronic computing. What are the aspects of optical computing that make it inherently more expensive?
- dang 6y agoIf curious see also 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17012995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17012995
- valuearb 6y agoThis seems to ignore the fact that on a passenger mile basis the Concorde was one of the most unsafe passenger jets of all time.
- redis_mlc 6y agoI don't think going Rain Man based on a single accident is useful. But the reason behind the accident is significant - fragile fuel tanks.
- gorgoiler 6y agoGosh, from Wikipedia’s section on Concorde design there is this set: - Concorde - Mini Cooper - Miniskirt - Spitfire - Tube Map - Jaguar E-Type What could be added to this list to induce total industrial design hysteria? InterCity 125? Instamatic? Mellor traffic lights?
- ggm 6y agoBelisha Beacon Bowler Hat Wellington Bomber (geodesics) Sinclair Calculator
- brian_herman__ 6y agoThe background to this website is amazing!
- forgotmypwbctbi 6y agohttp://archive.is/E4QT8 http://archive.is/E4QT8