10 ms·

>> This was the aircraft the airlines really needed and the aircraft the manufacturers wanted to build. This is largely revisionist history. The reality was th

>> 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Why did airlines want Concorde to be expensive?
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    The airlines didn't. The aircraft makers did.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      Nobody 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.
      - gsnedders 6y ago
        In 1972, at list prices, 24M for a 747-100 and 34M for a Concorde, which is a fair bit more expensive… and then that's _vastly_ more expensive per seat.
        rbanffy 6y ago
        If the plane can fly twice as often, it has, effectively, double the capacity. Still, supersonics will need some major breakthrough in operational cost.
- selectodude 6y ago
  The priority for people was never getting somewhere supersonic. BA needed to fly what amounted to subway service between JFK and LHR in order to make SST worthwhile to the very, very small subset of people who could afford it. However, due to how small that subset was, they were flying a dozen half-full flights per day. If they cut back on the number of flights, they removed the time savings of the Concorde and it was cheaper and far nicer to just fly an overnight flight on a 747. Didn't help that it had the hourly mx requirements of a fighter jet.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Yup. There is a reason why Boom Supersonic is only targeting a plane that comfortably seats 50.
- notahacker 6y ago
  The Concorde wasn't what the airlines, aircraft makers, and the public wanted by the stage the followup project was cancelled because airlines wouldn't buy it, the aircraft maker hadn't sold any and some of the few routes of the first gen aircraft kept open flew mostly empty.
- jariel 6y ago
  "The Concorde was what the airlines, aircraft makers, and the public wanted. It was fast. It was expensive. It was a trophy project. " There's a difference between aspiration and market reality. 'The Public' never actually wants a 'Trophy Project' to the extent that they are not willing to actually pay for it out of their own pockets. Yes, they might like the idea, but what matters is "are people willing to pay the price"? I suggest there was probably a lot of hubris in the project, that said, there's probably a lot of demand these days for such a thing. There are a lot of hyper-rich people and they desperately need status. Also, in Finance, there are a lot of 'important people' who's time is actually valuable. With long-flight times what they are, doing an Atlantic or Pacific run 'very fast' actually is just 'worth it' even for the company paying for it.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    There's a difference between aspiration and market reality It was a market reality for 27 years — longer than most of the companies that employ people who post on HN.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      The market reality was that it had only two customers operating only two routes for much of that time whilst most of the aircraft those customers had essentially been given sat on the ground. And it wasn't for lack of unsuccessful experimentation with other routes.
    - jandrese 6y ago
      It was propped up by governments for 27 years as a source of national pride. One can argue that they got a lot more value out of it than the equivalent amount of money spent on fighter jets and bombers though, and those are just as much prestige projects.
      - HPsquared 6y ago
        The R&D probably also was somewhat shared with the supersonic nuclear bombers of the same era. Much like spaceflight and ballistic missiles.
- WWLink 6y ago
  Were you a business executive flying on a corporate flight? I was under the impression that the vast majority of concorde passengers were flying on behalf of their employer and had a very high position at their company. Eg the kind with escorts and possibly white powder being served up at their business meetings. o_O Didn't know average people flew it.
  - lb1lf 6y ago
    -'Average' people got to fill the seats not taken by the rich and famous on occasion. (I flew it once - BA 747 LHR-JFK, Concorde JFK-LHR, mid-nineties. The round trip was organized by an aviation magazine, once the ‘wow, I’m on the Concorde’ novelty wore off (a couple of minutes after going supersonic), the experience was rather underwhelming. Glad to have experienced it, though.
- kortilla 6y ago
  The “public” isn’t people willing to put on business suits to travel. The “public” wanted to be able to afford to travel and that’s not what the Concorde brought. The “public” you’re referring to is the small 0.1% of the population that gets annoyed when Delta One is sold out.
  - HPsquared 6y ago
    Those people are a section of the public.
    - kortilla 6y ago
      Every person is a section of the public. It becomes pointless to talk about what “the public” wants if what you really mean is a tiny slice of the market.
- lumberingjack 6y ago
  They used to advertise Concorde in movies with lines like "did you know the Concorde will get you there in half the time?"
- Someone 6y ago
  Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde, it was partly the world changing, but also budget overruns and the sonic booms. Also, part of “the world changing” was that the 747 appeared, a plane that Concorde couldn’t really compete with, economically. Also, it seems the bill for development of the Concorde was paid for by the governments of Great Britain and France, and wasn’t fully accounted for in the unit price. If so, that made it a much more attractive proposition. I also would think some airlines placed pre-orders in a defensive move (if it had become wildly successful, airlines flying slow planes could get in trouble) I doubt any manufacturer would have dared to design and build a supersonic plane if they had to have to pay for all development (Boeing had a competing project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707), but that, too, seems to have been heavily government sponsored)
  - ghaff 6y ago
    In some ways, the 747 was also designed for a different world. The hump housed a first class lounge originally. https://www.pinterest.com/nickverreos/747-upper-deck-flying-in-style/ https://www.pinterest.com/nickverreos/747-upper-deck-flying-... But when business class came in, it got converted into an upper deck of business class seats in most configurations.
    - craz8 6y ago
      British Airways equipped that section as Economy for many years. It was like flying in a short 737 up there!
  - eternalban 6y ago
    The Shah flew the Concorde and apparently liked it so much, ordered 3 (Condorde 'B') on the spot. Typically ahead of his time, his vision was for making Iran a major hub along the lines of what Dubai and Qatar have done in the interim. Interesting to note that China apparently also ordered Concordes. https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/29/archives/shah-of-iran-reported-to-shift-to-firm-orders-for-concordes.html https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/29/archives/shah-of-iran-rep...
bjarneh 6y ago
> 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. Doesn't government still bankroll the whole airline industry? I read about some massive handouts to both Lufthansa and The Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) due to the coronavirus; perhaps it was even more extreme 50 years ago.
- the_watcher 6y ago
  The government doesn't bankroll air travel, at least not in the same way. I believe the quoted statement is referring to propping up the prices of flights via the pre-deregulation era. The government no doubt supports airlines in plenty of other ways, but the mechanism has changed, as have the behaviors it incentivizes.
notahacker 6y ago
Yep. The routes look like flights of fantasy rather than reality. A stopover in the Soviet Union? Flights crossing large parts of a US that had banned supersonic flight? Regular all business class flights between Lisbon and Caracas? [the actually-built generation of Concordes can and did fly Paris/Caracas with a stopover in Lisbon... just not very frequently] The improvements to fuel economy, range and sound would have made little difference to the commercial viability of a niche of aircraft that already spent most of the time on the tarmac because the tiny handful built and basically given away weren't allowed to fly most routes or remotely approach economic viability for most others. The governments threw their money at a project later called the Airbus A320 instead. Difficult to say they were wrong...
mopsi 6y ago
> 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. This is a little bit unfair. Among other innovations, Concorde was the first production airliner with fly-by-wire controls (first flown March 1969!). The people who worked on it carried their experience to later highly successful designs such as the Airbus 300 and Airbus 320 series, which is a backbone of modern air travel. The 737 MAX fiasco shows that Boeing still hasn't caught up with what Airbus was doing in the 1980s.
- edmundhuber 6y ago
  > The 737 MAX fiasco shows that Boeing still hasn't caught up with what Airbus was doing in the 1980s. The Air France 447 accident demonstrated to me that Airbus hadn't really thought things through either. Pilots entered conflicting inputs and the plane averaged them out instead of giving (good, actionable) feedback. Side question: is fly-by-wire an obviously good idea for passenger airplanes? It's ubiquitous in e.g. fighter jets because of the inherent aerodynamic instability of those platforms, making them hard or impossible ("Hopeless diamond") to fly without computer assistance. Passenger jets have different goals and are built to have stable flight -- the plane wants to fly level. My takeaway from Air France 447 was that I want more Boeing-style (linked, mechanical) controls in passenger airplanes than I want fly-by-wire. Am I off base?
  - skoskie 6y ago
    I would argue that removing humans from all but oversight is a good goal, even though there may be growing pains along the way. What we don’t have data for is how many accidents would have happened if not for the systems that prevented them. But we should be able to compare incidents of aircraft with and without such systems and get an idea of the (no pun) impact fly-by-wire has had on safety. In other words, the answer is, show me the data.
  - jagger27 6y ago
    > Passenger jets have different goals and are built to have stable flight -- the plane wants to fly level I can think of a particular passenger jet that doesn't.
mpweiher 6y ago
> revisionist history. Not revisionist, speculative, as the B never came into being. > logistics of flying the Concorde .. expensive and just not that desirable Research revealed that passengers thought that the fare was higher than it actually was, so the airline raised ticket prices to match these perceptions. (Wikipedia) > routing Hmm...vastly improved routing was one of the main benefits touted for Concorde B discussed in the fine article. > plane was conceived in the era of big government bankrolled air travel It is reported that British Airways then ran Concorde at a profit. (Wikipedia) Furthermore, it was actually (American) government that had a significant hand in killing the Concorde, by imposing overflight restrictions that made it far less useful. Of course this had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the US competition to Concorde never took off. > doesn't have a role in the reality of flying buses we see today. Concorde was operating profitably at time of its retirement, which came after an accident and issues with keeping the fleet in the air.
nimbius 6y ago
This, exactly. i know its a controversial post but its right for more reasons as well. Concorde was economically advantageous as long as fuel represented a small percentage of operational costs it launched in 1973 during the oil crisis and all the way through the OPEC embargo, and almost immediately became the most expensive plane any airline could choose to operate. Airlines also had to contend with when and where to execute supersonic flight, as a boom over a populated city would immediately draw negative publicity. pushback in some cities in europe reduced the Concordes routes and speeds significantly in 1976 Concorde produced nitrogen oxides in its exhaust, which, despite complicated interactions with other ozone-depleting chemicals, are understood to result in degradation to the ozone layer at the stratospheric altitudes it cruised. while concord was a small fleet, 500 of them could become an ecological disaster. Concorde's high cruising altitude meant passengers received almost twice the flux of extraterrestrial ionising radiation as those travelling on a conventional long-haul flight. the flight deck had a radiometer and an instrument to measure the rate of decrease of radiation. If the radiation level became too high, Concorde would descend below 47,000 feet. to my knowledge we still havent produced a SST that solves the radiation concern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde

reaperducer 6y ago

I 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 ago
Why did airlines want Concorde to be expensive?
- reaperducer 6y ago
  The airlines didn't. The aircraft makers did.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Nobody 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.
    - gsnedders 6y ago
      In 1972, at list prices, 24M for a 747-100 and 34M for a Concorde, which is a fair bit more expensive… and then that's _vastly_ more expensive per seat.
      - rbanffy 6y ago
        If the plane can fly twice as often, it has, effectively, double the capacity. Still, supersonics will need some major breakthrough in operational cost.
selectodude 6y ago
The priority for people was never getting somewhere supersonic. BA needed to fly what amounted to subway service between JFK and LHR in order to make SST worthwhile to the very, very small subset of people who could afford it. However, due to how small that subset was, they were flying a dozen half-full flights per day. If they cut back on the number of flights, they removed the time savings of the Concorde and it was cheaper and far nicer to just fly an overnight flight on a 747. Didn't help that it had the hourly mx requirements of a fighter jet.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Yup. There is a reason why Boom Supersonic is only targeting a plane that comfortably seats 50.
notahacker 6y ago
The Concorde wasn't what the airlines, aircraft makers, and the public wanted by the stage the followup project was cancelled because airlines wouldn't buy it, the aircraft maker hadn't sold any and some of the few routes of the first gen aircraft kept open flew mostly empty.
jariel 6y ago
"The Concorde was what the airlines, aircraft makers, and the public wanted. It was fast. It was expensive. It was a trophy project. " There's a difference between aspiration and market reality. 'The Public' never actually wants a 'Trophy Project' to the extent that they are not willing to actually pay for it out of their own pockets. Yes, they might like the idea, but what matters is "are people willing to pay the price"? I suggest there was probably a lot of hubris in the project, that said, there's probably a lot of demand these days for such a thing. There are a lot of hyper-rich people and they desperately need status. Also, in Finance, there are a lot of 'important people' who's time is actually valuable. With long-flight times what they are, doing an Atlantic or Pacific run 'very fast' actually is just 'worth it' even for the company paying for it.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  There's a difference between aspiration and market reality It was a market reality for 27 years — longer than most of the companies that employ people who post on HN.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    The market reality was that it had only two customers operating only two routes for much of that time whilst most of the aircraft those customers had essentially been given sat on the ground. And it wasn't for lack of unsuccessful experimentation with other routes.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    It was propped up by governments for 27 years as a source of national pride. One can argue that they got a lot more value out of it than the equivalent amount of money spent on fighter jets and bombers though, and those are just as much prestige projects.
    - HPsquared 6y ago
      The R&D probably also was somewhat shared with the supersonic nuclear bombers of the same era. Much like spaceflight and ballistic missiles.
WWLink 6y ago
Were you a business executive flying on a corporate flight? I was under the impression that the vast majority of concorde passengers were flying on behalf of their employer and had a very high position at their company. Eg the kind with escorts and possibly white powder being served up at their business meetings. o_O Didn't know average people flew it.
- lb1lf 6y ago
  -'Average' people got to fill the seats not taken by the rich and famous on occasion. (I flew it once - BA 747 LHR-JFK, Concorde JFK-LHR, mid-nineties. The round trip was organized by an aviation magazine, once the ‘wow, I’m on the Concorde’ novelty wore off (a couple of minutes after going supersonic), the experience was rather underwhelming. Glad to have experienced it, though.
kortilla 6y ago
The “public” isn’t people willing to put on business suits to travel. The “public” wanted to be able to afford to travel and that’s not what the Concorde brought. The “public” you’re referring to is the small 0.1% of the population that gets annoyed when Delta One is sold out.
- HPsquared 6y ago
  Those people are a section of the public.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    Every person is a section of the public. It becomes pointless to talk about what “the public” wants if what you really mean is a tiny slice of the market.
lumberingjack 6y ago
They used to advertise Concorde in movies with lines like "did you know the Concorde will get you there in half the time?"
Someone 6y ago
Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde, it was partly the world changing, but also budget overruns and the sonic booms. Also, part of “the world changing” was that the 747 appeared, a plane that Concorde couldn’t really compete with, economically. Also, it seems the bill for development of the Concorde was paid for by the governments of Great Britain and France, and wasn’t fully accounted for in the unit price. If so, that made it a much more attractive proposition. I also would think some airlines placed pre-orders in a defensive move (if it had become wildly successful, airlines flying slow planes could get in trouble) I doubt any manufacturer would have dared to design and build a supersonic plane if they had to have to pay for all development (Boeing had a competing project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707), but that, too, seems to have been heavily government sponsored)
- ghaff 6y ago
  In some ways, the 747 was also designed for a different world. The hump housed a first class lounge originally. https://www.pinterest.com/nickverreos/747-upper-deck-flying-in-style/ https://www.pinterest.com/nickverreos/747-upper-deck-flying-... But when business class came in, it got converted into an upper deck of business class seats in most configurations.
  - craz8 6y ago
    British Airways equipped that section as Economy for many years. It was like flying in a short 737 up there!
- eternalban 6y ago
  The Shah flew the Concorde and apparently liked it so much, ordered 3 (Condorde 'B') on the spot. Typically ahead of his time, his vision was for making Iran a major hub along the lines of what Dubai and Qatar have done in the interim. Interesting to note that China apparently also ordered Concordes. https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/29/archives/shah-of-iran-reported-to-shift-to-firm-orders-for-concordes.html https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/29/archives/shah-of-iran-rep...

bjarneh 6y ago

> 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. Doesn't government still bankroll the whole airline industry? I read about some massive handouts to both Lufthansa and The Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) due to the coronavirus; perhaps it was even more extreme 50 years ago.

the_watcher 6y ago
The government doesn't bankroll air travel, at least not in the same way. I believe the quoted statement is referring to propping up the prices of flights via the pre-deregulation era. The government no doubt supports airlines in plenty of other ways, but the mechanism has changed, as have the behaviors it incentivizes.

notahacker 6y ago

Yep. The routes look like flights of fantasy rather than reality. A stopover in the Soviet Union? Flights crossing large parts of a US that had banned supersonic flight? Regular all business class flights between Lisbon and Caracas? [the actually-built generation of Concordes can and did fly Paris/Caracas with a stopover in Lisbon... just not very frequently] The improvements to fuel economy, range and sound would have made little difference to the commercial viability of a niche of aircraft that already spent most of the time on the tarmac because the tiny handful built and basically given away weren't allowed to fly most routes or remotely approach economic viability for most others. The governments threw their money at a project later called the Airbus A320 instead. Difficult to say they were wrong...

mopsi 6y ago

> 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. This is a little bit unfair. Among other innovations, Concorde was the first production airliner with fly-by-wire controls (first flown March 1969!). The people who worked on it carried their experience to later highly successful designs such as the Airbus 300 and Airbus 320 series, which is a backbone of modern air travel. The 737 MAX fiasco shows that Boeing still hasn't caught up with what Airbus was doing in the 1980s.

edmundhuber 6y ago
> The 737 MAX fiasco shows that Boeing still hasn't caught up with what Airbus was doing in the 1980s. The Air France 447 accident demonstrated to me that Airbus hadn't really thought things through either. Pilots entered conflicting inputs and the plane averaged them out instead of giving (good, actionable) feedback. Side question: is fly-by-wire an obviously good idea for passenger airplanes? It's ubiquitous in e.g. fighter jets because of the inherent aerodynamic instability of those platforms, making them hard or impossible ("Hopeless diamond") to fly without computer assistance. Passenger jets have different goals and are built to have stable flight -- the plane wants to fly level. My takeaway from Air France 447 was that I want more Boeing-style (linked, mechanical) controls in passenger airplanes than I want fly-by-wire. Am I off base?
- skoskie 6y ago
  I would argue that removing humans from all but oversight is a good goal, even though there may be growing pains along the way. What we don’t have data for is how many accidents would have happened if not for the systems that prevented them. But we should be able to compare incidents of aircraft with and without such systems and get an idea of the (no pun) impact fly-by-wire has had on safety. In other words, the answer is, show me the data.
- jagger27 6y ago
  > Passenger jets have different goals and are built to have stable flight -- the plane wants to fly level I can think of a particular passenger jet that doesn't.

mpweiher 6y ago

> revisionist history. Not revisionist, speculative, as the B never came into being. > logistics of flying the Concorde .. expensive and just not that desirable Research revealed that passengers thought that the fare was higher than it actually was, so the airline raised ticket prices to match these perceptions. (Wikipedia) > routing Hmm...vastly improved routing was one of the main benefits touted for Concorde B discussed in the fine article. > plane was conceived in the era of big government bankrolled air travel It is reported that British Airways then ran Concorde at a profit. (Wikipedia) Furthermore, it was actually (American) government that had a significant hand in killing the Concorde, by imposing overflight restrictions that made it far less useful. Of course this had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the US competition to Concorde never took off. > doesn't have a role in the reality of flying buses we see today. Concorde was operating profitably at time of its retirement, which came after an accident and issues with keeping the fleet in the air.

nimbius 6y ago

This, exactly. i know its a controversial post but its right for more reasons as well. Concorde was economically advantageous as long as fuel represented a small percentage of operational costs it launched in 1973 during the oil crisis and all the way through the OPEC embargo, and almost immediately became the most expensive plane any airline could choose to operate. Airlines also had to contend with when and where to execute supersonic flight, as a boom over a populated city would immediately draw negative publicity. pushback in some cities in europe reduced the Concordes routes and speeds significantly in 1976 Concorde produced nitrogen oxides in its exhaust, which, despite complicated interactions with other ozone-depleting chemicals, are understood to result in degradation to the ozone layer at the stratospheric altitudes it cruised. while concord was a small fleet, 500 of them could become an ecological disaster. Concorde's high cruising altitude meant passengers received almost twice the flux of extraterrestrial ionising radiation as those travelling on a conventional long-haul flight. the flight deck had a radiometer and an instrument to measure the rate of decrease of radiation. If the radiation level became too high, Concorde would descend below 47,000 feet. to my knowledge we still havent produced a SST that solves the radiation concern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde