19 ms·

Singapore Airlines Concorde

230 points by qsi 3y ago

simonbarker87 3y ago
Concorde’s failure makes me very sad. I understand that the economics didn’t stack up but it feels like we’ve given up trying to reach for the space age style future envisaged 70 years ago and instead are settling for “the same but a fraction nicer or a bit cheaper” in many areas.
- deleted 3y ago
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- Dalewyn 3y ago
  The phenomenon that ultimately put down the Concorde is actually seen all the time everywhere in everyday life: Bleeding edge performance and tech is almost never economically practical, it's always the stuff well within the margins with room to spare that ultimately define the space. See for other examples: The 500 Kei Shinkansen, literally every Intel Core i9 and AMD Ryzen 9 CPU, sports and luxury cars, Boeing 747 "Queen of the Skies" Jumbo and Airbus A380, the Space Shuttle, the F-22 Raptor, and more. All very impressive pieces of tech and their achievements shouldn't be discounted, but all ultimately an interesting footnote in history as significantly more inferior and practical pieces of tech dominate.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    Not forgetting the Apollo program.
  - pavlov 3y ago
    The 747 was manufactured for 50 years and over 1,500 of them were made. It’s difficult to put it in the same category with Concorde and the Space Shuttle.
    - noarchy 3y ago
      The 747 still has demand as a cargo plane. I bet we see them flown for a long time to come, with most remaining passenger configs gradually being converted to cargo.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        They do get replaced by (converted) B777s and cargo A350s so. The 747 still will have a place, especially for long and heavy loads so.
  - haunter 3y ago
    > literally every Intel Core i9 But today’s i9 is tomorrow’s i7 and the i5 the day after tomorrow. So it has its place in the story
    - alwayslikethis 3y ago
      Given they are sold every generation, they must be practical to enough people. There are quite a lot of multithreaded tasks that can use so many cores.
    - rsynnott 3y ago
      I haven't been keeping track lately, but these used to be "the i7, but squeeze out an extra 500MHz by adding another hundred watts", usually; has this changed?
      - haunter 3y ago
        Yeah pretty much that. They usually have the same amount of performance cores but there are more efficient cores and hence threads and on top of that they run on higher frequency too i7-14700K: 20 cores (8 performance, 12 efficient) 28 threads 5.6 Ghz i9-14900K: 24 cores (8 performance, 16 efficient) 32 threads 6 Ghz It's like ~10% performance difference
  - aredox 3y ago
    It was not just not economically practical: it wasn't practical. Yes, the flights were shorter, but between 9 hours cramped in a tight fuselage with little entertainment and 12 hours in a comfortable chair with headroom and entertainment, I would have taken the latter. There's a sweet spot abive the even more comfortable but vastly slower passenger liners, but Concorde was too extreme - and I guess the suborbital flights imagined by Musk are too far too.
    - jnsaff2 3y ago
      It is incredibly cramped inside. I stepped into one in Duxford museum and especially the windows are tiny, the looking at the curvature of the earth thing would have been pretty hard. https://external-preview.redd.it/K5Z9Kd7AkxJz-eQm5I97pZYIDTarvgUMacdk2DBLDo8.jpg?auto=webp&s=b44b87e22f5e90de20705c98dd2103290420e0d3 https://external-preview.redd.it/K5Z9Kd7AkxJz-eQm5I97pZYIDTa...
    - ghaff 3y ago
      My dad traveled to the UK all the time through JFK. He got upgraded to the Concorde once and his reaction was that he actually preferred first class on a 747--and that was at a time with less comfortable seating than exists today. Very few people really benefit from the faster flight time, especially if it doesn't have the range to do trans-Pacific. As you say, ocean liners are mostly too slow for anyone who is working but I was surprised to learn recently that they're not necessarily much more expensive than a business class flight.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    Comparing chips in this context doesn't work, especially with Ryzen, where, due to chiplets, the effect of yields on price is mitigated significantly. They're higher margin products, not products that cost so much to make that they'd have to be priced so high.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Concorde is in the "faster horse" category. It's a fair bit faster then regular planes at substantially increased cost, and it couldn't do long distances (max range 4143 miles), kind of removing the speed advantage where it would have really helped, i.e. very long trips. Suborbital spaceflight would be the ultimate: UK to Australia in an hour.
  - mananaysiempre 3y ago
    > UK to Australia in an hour. That would be an improvement, I guess, but Amdahl’s law still says you’re going to spend at least a day on the trip. Couple of hours to get to the airport, arriving to the airport three to four hours in advance to account for the variance in check-in, security, and immigration times and to get through the overpriced mall itself, then anywhere between ten minutes and over an hour for immigration and customs depending on what flights arrive at the same time, then something like half an hour waiting for your luggage unless you’re very lucky, then again a couple of hours to get from the airport to wherever you actually want to be. I’ve seen very few efforts to reduce any of this over the last two decades, and basically none as far as the things happening inside the airport are concerned. (Well, OK, automated immigration checks are a thing, but if you are one of a flight of people ineligible for them, fuck you, here are one or two border control officers that every one of you will be funnelled through.) So while I can appreciate the idea of less miserable long-haul flights, I don’t think “in an hour” is worth anything but a sad chuckle. And I haven’t even accounted for the time you’ll need to spend searching for prices and rearranging your schedule to work around the price discrimination machine. Air travel just sucks, and I don’t think neat aerospace engineering alone can get around that.
    - alvah 3y ago
      I agree with the general point but "couple of hours to get to the airport" you must live a long long way from the airport if this is normal.
      - manquer 3y ago
        With poor public transit as well perhaps . These days even if the airport is far off (newer airports usually are ) they are typically connected via public transit pretty well. Munich is a good example - airport is good 30+km from the city but there is fairly cheap and frequent train service.
- loudmax 3y ago
  YouTube channel Real Engineering released a video recently on aviation startup Hermeus, which is developing a ramjet ultimately intended for commercial air travel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyKtxsdI0z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyKtxsdI0z8 The thumbnail is a bit click-bait, but the video itself has a lot of depth. They give Hermeus space to present itself in a very positive light. As a non-expert having watched the video, it does seem at least plausible that this company may yet succeed. They mention fuel costs in passing, but they don't talk about carbon emissions. That's probably fair, since carbon is a much broader issue than just aviation. It's probably more productive to focus on shutting down coal plants than stifling innovation in air travel. But it's worth bearing in mind that positive things like hypersonic air travel do have a cost.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    What people always underestimate is the amount of time, and money, it takes to get anything developed, built and certified in aerospace. And that is for even small modifications done on existing design by the major players. Starting from scratch, already a new design is hard enough not to talk about a new company, is even harder. Just timeline wise, realistically you talk about around 5 years for something new, start to finish. That's millions upon millions for existing companies, if everything goes well. And hardly ever goes well, delays and tecjnical issues are common. Again, for proven tech don eby established companies. Something like a commercial ramjet engine developed by a start-up is not even the same solar system: there we talk, realistically, billions and closer to a decade, if it works technically. And then you need a market for that engine, which means demand (doubtfull, but who knows) and more importantly, an aircraft. And the last bit again is aroubd a decade and another couple of billions. Engine and aircraft development can, and has, been done in parallel. It still takes longer so, as both development projects depend on each other, the A400M would be a recent example of that approach. If Hermeus doesn't have a development partner for the airframe, realistically, if everything (!) goes well, we talk about at least 15-20 years from now. Not sure if VC funding is the right model for stuff like this.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      5 years is pretty sort. Looking at A220, which I think took closer to 10 years. Which I think is realistic timeline for new modern design, not just modernising old one. A350 and 777X also show similar timelines... That is from planning to deliveries. And these are the players with experience building to specific segment of market... Throw in enough novel ideas and it might double...
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  > it feels like we’ve given up trying to reach for the space age style future envisaged 70 years ago We forget now that Concorde was a politically-motivated attempt to demonstrate that the UK and France were still relevant in the aerospace industry and the project itself was plagued with costly development inefficiencies due to the desire to split the work between the UK and French participants. E.g. working in both metric and imperial units. Building parts in multiple factories. The Soviet equivalent (Tu-144) crashed and burned at the Paris air show and never had any economic justification. The Boeing 2707 was cancelled before it even flew because of cost overruns following the failure of an abortive swing-wing design. Concorde itself only became profitable to operate when the govt wrote off the development costs in 1983 in a deal described as "among the most disastrous conducted by a government minister" [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#British_Airways_buys_its_Concordes_outright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#British_Airways_buys_...
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Concorde was ine of the precusers of modern day Airbus so. As an aircraft, despite being gorgeous and an engineering marvel, it was kind of pointless, I agree.
  - zoeysmithe 3y ago
    Also, it only existed via extreme subsidizes. So working class French and UK people were subsidizing rich people farting in 1st class seats going mach 2. Its funny how its beloved by the "free market" types when it was just a welfare flight for those who thought themselves too self-important to fly a few more hours between major far-away cities. 113 people died in 2000. It wasn't exactly the safest plane out there either. With teleconferencing and modern technology, the need for the business class to show up to far-away places should go down. But a lot of it is entitlement, that is to say, show up for a meeting then enjoy a free vacation while "working." Everything about the Concorde was corrupt if not classist. It was a mistake even if the engineering was impressive. Imagine if that money would instead have gone to public transportation. We'd have the Chunnel in the 70s instead of the 90s.
    - 3y ago
- eru 3y ago
  The 'space age' was ahead of its time. And I don't mean that in a positive way: 'putting a clown on the moon' (to quote Tom Lehrer) was an enormously expensive project with 1960s technology for at best questionable utility. (Apart from winning a pissing contest with the Soviets.) Similar for the Concorde. Nowadays, we would be much better placed to put people in space. But fortunately we are perhaps wiser (or perhaps forced to be wiser against our own impulses), and are still not lining up to re-ignite manned space flight. I'm all for space exploration, but manned space exploration does not (yet?) make sense, and neither does space tourism so far.
  - emchammer 3y ago
    I disagree with that cynicism, though. I saw Apollo 11 three times when it came out, and I still get excited when I see the sense of purpose and detail in everybody involved. It was a singular event that occurred at this conflux of technology and hubris, like Christopher Columbus' landing. It took so long for everybody to sort out their feelings on what this meant, that an entire subculture sprung up based on the idea that it was all faked by a contemporaneous sci-fi director. It's okay to appreciate those kinds of wins from time to time. And anyway the astronauts brought back a moon rock to give to the Soviets.
    - zabzonk 3y ago
      not sure what this means - perhaps 13 rather than 11?
      - emchammer 3y ago
        No, Apollo 11 is a thrilling big-screen documentary about the successful moon landing, all original film without narration.
        zabzonk 3y ago
        thanks, i've just bought it on amazon!
    - 3y ago
- paxys 3y ago
  It is more than "a bit" cheaper. Air travel would have continued to be reserved for the elite had there not been a decades-long effort to reduce costs. You can get a transcontinental round trip today for <$500 vs $10K minimum in the 70s.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I'm not sure the differences are quite that stark--especially if you control for other factors. But I won't disagree that air travel is much more democratized today.
zabzonk 3y ago
i loved concorde. i can remember them flying over my flat in south east london on their approach to heathrow in the early 1980s. beautiful.
- moystard 3y ago
  I love the Concorde but it had the reputation of being noisy. Living in SE London, I find already some planes incredibly noisy, so cannot imagine what it must have been.
  - zabzonk 3y ago
    it was landing, so it wasn't much noisier than say a 747, but a bit noisier. or perhaps i was just used to it - my dad was an RAF vulcan captain (same olympus engines as concorde, minus reheat) and if you had a squadron of them taking off on QRA you learned the real meaning of noise!
    - postexitus 3y ago
      Had the honour of seeing Vulcan on its last flight. A majestic beast. All the respect to your dad and colleagues.
    - martinclayton 3y ago
      We used to live under the flightpath for the departures from Heathrow to the US, not far from Reading. The evening flights would go over, which you could feel in your body, then moments later catch the light of the setting sun as they headed west. It was quite inspiring. The Vulcan is (or was!) my favourite plane sound, beating out the Merlin-engined stuff and even Concorde. Four Olympus engines, plus the howl. Can't be bettered! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_ARSE8jEHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_ARSE8jEHQ
      - zabzonk 3y ago
        glad you enjoyed the howl, but, sorry, it didn't have afterburner (reheat). i still probably prefer merlins - the BoB flight Lancaster flies over me here in Lincoln occasionally. and also the Red Arrows!
laborcontract 3y ago
This should be labeled (2021), as evidenced by the comments. This blog is doing a weird thing where it's re-dating old posts to today, presumably to try to trick Google into thinking that it's fresh content, for SEO purposes.
- deleted 3y ago
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778704921 3y ago
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delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
> Flight times between Singapore and London would be cut from 18 hours on conventional aircraft at the time to just 10 hours. This is very interesting, because current Singapore-Heathrow direct flights are around 13 hours. I wouldn't pay first-class++ fares for a 3-hour flight time reduction in a tiny, cramped cabin with worse pressurisation and ventilation than first class on modern A380s, B777s and A350s that currently ply the route.
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  Currently there are aircraft able to fly that distance without stopovers. That wasn't the case in 70s, including Concorde. Modern version of Concorde that would have the necessary range for that flight would do Heathrow to Singapore in 5-6 h.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    Routing in the 1970s (and until at least 1992) would also likely have been far longer, with most Soviet and Eastern European airspace closed to Western flights. Whether the lack of non-stop service was on account of routing and range or of lack of sufficient travel demand I don't know. Current routing appears to traverse Pland, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. I could see much of that not being advisable in the 1970s. <https://www.airportia.com/flight-img/7760680/sq308-sin-lhr-sq-sia.jpg https://www.airportia.com/flight-img/7760680/sq308-sin-lhr-s...>
    - eigenket 3y ago
      Plenty of that isn't advisable now. I flew Frankfurt to Singapore at the end of 2022 and we flew over the south side of the Black Sea to avoid Ukrainian and Russian airspace. We also avoided Afghanistan and flew over Iran instead which slightly surprised me. Looks like London-Singapore flights do the same https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/sq305#3437e32f https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/sq305#3437e32f
      - 3y ago
gumby 3y ago
I was surprised that SQ was the only third party airline to have its livery on Concorde, as I saw plenty of pictures of Concordes with Braniff livery on on side. Well, I did remember correctly that the service operated from Dallas (to NY or Washington). Subsonic only, and with lots of crazy adaptation to fit the crazy laws, like changing the aircraft registration number on each flight. But all those pictures I saw were advertising drawings: https://www.heritageconcorde.com/braniff-airways-concorde-operations https://www.heritageconcorde.com/braniff-airways-concorde-op...
- buildsjets 3y ago
  Fly the carbonated airways: http://www.concordesst.com/history/events/pepsi.html http://www.concordesst.com/history/events/pepsi.html
  - gumby 3y ago
    Wow! I don’t remember that at all.
- Fripplebubby 3y ago
  This page has some great stuff in it. Today I think about commercial airlines being so _optimized_ for efficiency in everything, I just can't imagine a US airline flying a Concorde overland at subsonic speeds. Assuming they flew Mach 0.95 then that's about at 25% speedup compared to today's subsonic cruise (0.78, although you might get faster than this if you're a big plane going a long distance, up in the low 0.80s). Also, the ticket prices they quote for that flight: > 1979 Feb – May one way – $154 – $169 /Sept – Oct one way – $194 > 1980 Feb – one way – $227 so more than $900 today to fly one way on a flight that today you can have for $40 one way on a budget carrier! I guess I don't mind the extra hour it takes on a 737 or A321. Although the more fair comparison would be to the competing prices at the time, not today's prices - any ticket was quite a bit more expensive in 1979-80, so that factors in.
  - araes 3y ago
    Only adding, since you obviously get this, yet even with what seem like expensive ticket prices, the Concorde was still a difficult economic proposition. Even if you didn't pay for crew, fuel, airport fees, ground crew, maintenance, ect... The Wikipedia article quotes a slightly different number than the article, yet it still amounts to a $200,000,000 plane (in modern $) with only 100 seats that eats fuel. Even at $900 (modern $) you quote, it would still take 2150 full flights to recoup the roll-away cost without anything else. (Interweb says base 737 is $90 million (modern $) with ~160 seats.) And then there's the factor of 30x development program costs to consider (bathed in by Britain/France). The expected 350 orders, got 100, built 20. The decade extended development hell. The huge fuel cost jump on release. The Concorde is neat, it's just Murphy's Law was all over that plane.
747-8F 3y ago
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brcmthrowaway 3y ago
How fast would Boom aero do LDN-Singapore?
- hef19898 3y ago
  If you start measuring today, now? Maybe, if they are extremely lucky, 15+ years?
SergeAx 3y ago
> most popular supersonic passenger airliner I don't understand this passage. There were only two supersonic passenger airliners, and Tupolev 144 was obviously off limits for Singapore Airlines. Is it LLM writing?

230 points by qsi 3y ago

Concorde’s failure makes me very sad. I understand that the economics didn’t stack up but it feels like we’ve given up trying to reach for the space age style future envisaged 70 years ago and instead are settling for “the same but a fraction nicer or a bit cheaper” in many areas.

deleted 3y ago
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Dalewyn 3y ago
The phenomenon that ultimately put down the Concorde is actually seen all the time everywhere in everyday life: Bleeding edge performance and tech is almost never economically practical, it's always the stuff well within the margins with room to spare that ultimately define the space. See for other examples: The 500 Kei Shinkansen, literally every Intel Core i9 and AMD Ryzen 9 CPU, sports and luxury cars, Boeing 747 "Queen of the Skies" Jumbo and Airbus A380, the Space Shuttle, the F-22 Raptor, and more. All very impressive pieces of tech and their achievements shouldn't be discounted, but all ultimately an interesting footnote in history as significantly more inferior and practical pieces of tech dominate.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Not forgetting the Apollo program.
- pavlov 3y ago
  The 747 was manufactured for 50 years and over 1,500 of them were made. It’s difficult to put it in the same category with Concorde and the Space Shuttle.
  - noarchy 3y ago
    The 747 still has demand as a cargo plane. I bet we see them flown for a long time to come, with most remaining passenger configs gradually being converted to cargo.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      They do get replaced by (converted) B777s and cargo A350s so. The 747 still will have a place, especially for long and heavy loads so.
- haunter 3y ago
  > literally every Intel Core i9 But today’s i9 is tomorrow’s i7 and the i5 the day after tomorrow. So it has its place in the story
  - alwayslikethis 3y ago
    Given they are sold every generation, they must be practical to enough people. There are quite a lot of multithreaded tasks that can use so many cores.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    I haven't been keeping track lately, but these used to be "the i7, but squeeze out an extra 500MHz by adding another hundred watts", usually; has this changed?
    - haunter 3y ago
      Yeah pretty much that. They usually have the same amount of performance cores but there are more efficient cores and hence threads and on top of that they run on higher frequency too i7-14700K: 20 cores (8 performance, 12 efficient) 28 threads 5.6 Ghz i9-14900K: 24 cores (8 performance, 16 efficient) 32 threads 6 Ghz It's like ~10% performance difference
- aredox 3y ago
  It was not just not economically practical: it wasn't practical. Yes, the flights were shorter, but between 9 hours cramped in a tight fuselage with little entertainment and 12 hours in a comfortable chair with headroom and entertainment, I would have taken the latter. There's a sweet spot abive the even more comfortable but vastly slower passenger liners, but Concorde was too extreme - and I guess the suborbital flights imagined by Musk are too far too.
  - jnsaff2 3y ago
    It is incredibly cramped inside. I stepped into one in Duxford museum and especially the windows are tiny, the looking at the curvature of the earth thing would have been pretty hard. https://external-preview.redd.it/K5Z9Kd7AkxJz-eQm5I97pZYIDTarvgUMacdk2DBLDo8.jpg?auto=webp&s=b44b87e22f5e90de20705c98dd2103290420e0d3 https://external-preview.redd.it/K5Z9Kd7AkxJz-eQm5I97pZYIDTa...
  - ghaff 3y ago
    My dad traveled to the UK all the time through JFK. He got upgraded to the Concorde once and his reaction was that he actually preferred first class on a 747--and that was at a time with less comfortable seating than exists today. Very few people really benefit from the faster flight time, especially if it doesn't have the range to do trans-Pacific. As you say, ocean liners are mostly too slow for anyone who is working but I was surprised to learn recently that they're not necessarily much more expensive than a business class flight.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Comparing chips in this context doesn't work, especially with Ryzen, where, due to chiplets, the effect of yields on price is mitigated significantly. They're higher margin products, not products that cost so much to make that they'd have to be priced so high.
HPsquared 3y ago
Concorde is in the "faster horse" category. It's a fair bit faster then regular planes at substantially increased cost, and it couldn't do long distances (max range 4143 miles), kind of removing the speed advantage where it would have really helped, i.e. very long trips. Suborbital spaceflight would be the ultimate: UK to Australia in an hour.
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  > UK to Australia in an hour. That would be an improvement, I guess, but Amdahl’s law still says you’re going to spend at least a day on the trip. Couple of hours to get to the airport, arriving to the airport three to four hours in advance to account for the variance in check-in, security, and immigration times and to get through the overpriced mall itself, then anywhere between ten minutes and over an hour for immigration and customs depending on what flights arrive at the same time, then something like half an hour waiting for your luggage unless you’re very lucky, then again a couple of hours to get from the airport to wherever you actually want to be. I’ve seen very few efforts to reduce any of this over the last two decades, and basically none as far as the things happening inside the airport are concerned. (Well, OK, automated immigration checks are a thing, but if you are one of a flight of people ineligible for them, fuck you, here are one or two border control officers that every one of you will be funnelled through.) So while I can appreciate the idea of less miserable long-haul flights, I don’t think “in an hour” is worth anything but a sad chuckle. And I haven’t even accounted for the time you’ll need to spend searching for prices and rearranging your schedule to work around the price discrimination machine. Air travel just sucks, and I don’t think neat aerospace engineering alone can get around that.
  - alvah 3y ago
    I agree with the general point but "couple of hours to get to the airport" you must live a long long way from the airport if this is normal.
    - manquer 3y ago
      With poor public transit as well perhaps . These days even if the airport is far off (newer airports usually are ) they are typically connected via public transit pretty well. Munich is a good example - airport is good 30+km from the city but there is fairly cheap and frequent train service.
loudmax 3y ago
YouTube channel Real Engineering released a video recently on aviation startup Hermeus, which is developing a ramjet ultimately intended for commercial air travel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyKtxsdI0z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyKtxsdI0z8 The thumbnail is a bit click-bait, but the video itself has a lot of depth. They give Hermeus space to present itself in a very positive light. As a non-expert having watched the video, it does seem at least plausible that this company may yet succeed. They mention fuel costs in passing, but they don't talk about carbon emissions. That's probably fair, since carbon is a much broader issue than just aviation. It's probably more productive to focus on shutting down coal plants than stifling innovation in air travel. But it's worth bearing in mind that positive things like hypersonic air travel do have a cost.
- hef19898 3y ago
  What people always underestimate is the amount of time, and money, it takes to get anything developed, built and certified in aerospace. And that is for even small modifications done on existing design by the major players. Starting from scratch, already a new design is hard enough not to talk about a new company, is even harder. Just timeline wise, realistically you talk about around 5 years for something new, start to finish. That's millions upon millions for existing companies, if everything goes well. And hardly ever goes well, delays and tecjnical issues are common. Again, for proven tech don eby established companies. Something like a commercial ramjet engine developed by a start-up is not even the same solar system: there we talk, realistically, billions and closer to a decade, if it works technically. And then you need a market for that engine, which means demand (doubtfull, but who knows) and more importantly, an aircraft. And the last bit again is aroubd a decade and another couple of billions. Engine and aircraft development can, and has, been done in parallel. It still takes longer so, as both development projects depend on each other, the A400M would be a recent example of that approach. If Hermeus doesn't have a development partner for the airframe, realistically, if everything (!) goes well, we talk about at least 15-20 years from now. Not sure if VC funding is the right model for stuff like this.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    5 years is pretty sort. Looking at A220, which I think took closer to 10 years. Which I think is realistic timeline for new modern design, not just modernising old one. A350 and 777X also show similar timelines... That is from planning to deliveries. And these are the players with experience building to specific segment of market... Throw in enough novel ideas and it might double...
KineticLensman 3y ago
> it feels like we’ve given up trying to reach for the space age style future envisaged 70 years ago We forget now that Concorde was a politically-motivated attempt to demonstrate that the UK and France were still relevant in the aerospace industry and the project itself was plagued with costly development inefficiencies due to the desire to split the work between the UK and French participants. E.g. working in both metric and imperial units. Building parts in multiple factories. The Soviet equivalent (Tu-144) crashed and burned at the Paris air show and never had any economic justification. The Boeing 2707 was cancelled before it even flew because of cost overruns following the failure of an abortive swing-wing design. Concorde itself only became profitable to operate when the govt wrote off the development costs in 1983 in a deal described as "among the most disastrous conducted by a government minister" [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#British_Airways_buys_its_Concordes_outright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#British_Airways_buys_...
- hef19898 3y ago
  Concorde was ine of the precusers of modern day Airbus so. As an aircraft, despite being gorgeous and an engineering marvel, it was kind of pointless, I agree.
- zoeysmithe 3y ago
  Also, it only existed via extreme subsidizes. So working class French and UK people were subsidizing rich people farting in 1st class seats going mach 2. Its funny how its beloved by the "free market" types when it was just a welfare flight for those who thought themselves too self-important to fly a few more hours between major far-away cities. 113 people died in 2000. It wasn't exactly the safest plane out there either. With teleconferencing and modern technology, the need for the business class to show up to far-away places should go down. But a lot of it is entitlement, that is to say, show up for a meeting then enjoy a free vacation while "working." Everything about the Concorde was corrupt if not classist. It was a mistake even if the engineering was impressive. Imagine if that money would instead have gone to public transportation. We'd have the Chunnel in the 70s instead of the 90s.
  - 3y ago
eru 3y ago
The 'space age' was ahead of its time. And I don't mean that in a positive way: 'putting a clown on the moon' (to quote Tom Lehrer) was an enormously expensive project with 1960s technology for at best questionable utility. (Apart from winning a pissing contest with the Soviets.) Similar for the Concorde. Nowadays, we would be much better placed to put people in space. But fortunately we are perhaps wiser (or perhaps forced to be wiser against our own impulses), and are still not lining up to re-ignite manned space flight. I'm all for space exploration, but manned space exploration does not (yet?) make sense, and neither does space tourism so far.
- emchammer 3y ago
  I disagree with that cynicism, though. I saw Apollo 11 three times when it came out, and I still get excited when I see the sense of purpose and detail in everybody involved. It was a singular event that occurred at this conflux of technology and hubris, like Christopher Columbus' landing. It took so long for everybody to sort out their feelings on what this meant, that an entire subculture sprung up based on the idea that it was all faked by a contemporaneous sci-fi director. It's okay to appreciate those kinds of wins from time to time. And anyway the astronauts brought back a moon rock to give to the Soviets.
  - zabzonk 3y ago
    not sure what this means - perhaps 13 rather than 11?
    - emchammer 3y ago
      No, Apollo 11 is a thrilling big-screen documentary about the successful moon landing, all original film without narration.
      - zabzonk 3y ago
        thanks, i've just bought it on amazon!
  - 3y ago
paxys 3y ago
It is more than "a bit" cheaper. Air travel would have continued to be reserved for the elite had there not been a decades-long effort to reduce costs. You can get a transcontinental round trip today for <$500 vs $10K minimum in the 70s.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I'm not sure the differences are quite that stark--especially if you control for other factors. But I won't disagree that air travel is much more democratized today.

zabzonk 3y ago

i loved concorde. i can remember them flying over my flat in south east london on their approach to heathrow in the early 1980s. beautiful.

moystard 3y ago
I love the Concorde but it had the reputation of being noisy. Living in SE London, I find already some planes incredibly noisy, so cannot imagine what it must have been.
- zabzonk 3y ago
  it was landing, so it wasn't much noisier than say a 747, but a bit noisier. or perhaps i was just used to it - my dad was an RAF vulcan captain (same olympus engines as concorde, minus reheat) and if you had a squadron of them taking off on QRA you learned the real meaning of noise!
  - postexitus 3y ago
    Had the honour of seeing Vulcan on its last flight. A majestic beast. All the respect to your dad and colleagues.
  - martinclayton 3y ago
    We used to live under the flightpath for the departures from Heathrow to the US, not far from Reading. The evening flights would go over, which you could feel in your body, then moments later catch the light of the setting sun as they headed west. It was quite inspiring. The Vulcan is (or was!) my favourite plane sound, beating out the Merlin-engined stuff and even Concorde. Four Olympus engines, plus the howl. Can't be bettered! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_ARSE8jEHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_ARSE8jEHQ
    - zabzonk 3y ago
      glad you enjoyed the howl, but, sorry, it didn't have afterburner (reheat). i still probably prefer merlins - the BoB flight Lancaster flies over me here in Lincoln occasionally. and also the Red Arrows!

laborcontract 3y ago

This should be labeled (2021), as evidenced by the comments. This blog is doing a weird thing where it's re-dating old posts to today, presumably to try to trick Google into thinking that it's fresh content, for SEO purposes.

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778704921 3y ago

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delta_p_delta_x 3y ago

> Flight times between Singapore and London would be cut from 18 hours on conventional aircraft at the time to just 10 hours. This is very interesting, because current Singapore-Heathrow direct flights are around 13 hours. I wouldn't pay first-class++ fares for a 3-hour flight time reduction in a tiny, cramped cabin with worse pressurisation and ventilation than first class on modern A380s, B777s and A350s that currently ply the route.

KptMarchewa 3y ago
Currently there are aircraft able to fly that distance without stopovers. That wasn't the case in 70s, including Concorde. Modern version of Concorde that would have the necessary range for that flight would do Heathrow to Singapore in 5-6 h.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Routing in the 1970s (and until at least 1992) would also likely have been far longer, with most Soviet and Eastern European airspace closed to Western flights. Whether the lack of non-stop service was on account of routing and range or of lack of sufficient travel demand I don't know. Current routing appears to traverse Pland, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. I could see much of that not being advisable in the 1970s. <https://www.airportia.com/flight-img/7760680/sq308-sin-lhr-sq-sia.jpg https://www.airportia.com/flight-img/7760680/sq308-sin-lhr-s...>
  - eigenket 3y ago
    Plenty of that isn't advisable now. I flew Frankfurt to Singapore at the end of 2022 and we flew over the south side of the Black Sea to avoid Ukrainian and Russian airspace. We also avoided Afghanistan and flew over Iran instead which slightly surprised me. Looks like London-Singapore flights do the same https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/sq305#3437e32f https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/sq305#3437e32f
    - 3y ago

gumby 3y ago

I was surprised that SQ was the only third party airline to have its livery on Concorde, as I saw plenty of pictures of Concordes with Braniff livery on on side. Well, I did remember correctly that the service operated from Dallas (to NY or Washington). Subsonic only, and with lots of crazy adaptation to fit the crazy laws, like changing the aircraft registration number on each flight. But all those pictures I saw were advertising drawings: https://www.heritageconcorde.com/braniff-airways-concorde-operations https://www.heritageconcorde.com/braniff-airways-concorde-op...

buildsjets 3y ago
Fly the carbonated airways: http://www.concordesst.com/history/events/pepsi.html http://www.concordesst.com/history/events/pepsi.html
- gumby 3y ago
  Wow! I don’t remember that at all.
Fripplebubby 3y ago
This page has some great stuff in it. Today I think about commercial airlines being so _optimized_ for efficiency in everything, I just can't imagine a US airline flying a Concorde overland at subsonic speeds. Assuming they flew Mach 0.95 then that's about at 25% speedup compared to today's subsonic cruise (0.78, although you might get faster than this if you're a big plane going a long distance, up in the low 0.80s). Also, the ticket prices they quote for that flight: > 1979 Feb – May one way – $154 – $169 /Sept – Oct one way – $194 > 1980 Feb – one way – $227 so more than $900 today to fly one way on a flight that today you can have for $40 one way on a budget carrier! I guess I don't mind the extra hour it takes on a 737 or A321. Although the more fair comparison would be to the competing prices at the time, not today's prices - any ticket was quite a bit more expensive in 1979-80, so that factors in.
- araes 3y ago
  Only adding, since you obviously get this, yet even with what seem like expensive ticket prices, the Concorde was still a difficult economic proposition. Even if you didn't pay for crew, fuel, airport fees, ground crew, maintenance, ect... The Wikipedia article quotes a slightly different number than the article, yet it still amounts to a $200,000,000 plane (in modern $) with only 100 seats that eats fuel. Even at $900 (modern $) you quote, it would still take 2150 full flights to recoup the roll-away cost without anything else. (Interweb says base 737 is $90 million (modern $) with ~160 seats.) And then there's the factor of 30x development program costs to consider (bathed in by Britain/France). The expected 350 orders, got 100, built 20. The decade extended development hell. The huge fuel cost jump on release. The Concorde is neat, it's just Murphy's Law was all over that plane.

747-8F 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago
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brcmthrowaway 3y ago

How fast would Boom aero do LDN-Singapore?

hef19898 3y ago
If you start measuring today, now? Maybe, if they are extremely lucky, 15+ years?

SergeAx 3y ago

> most popular supersonic passenger airliner I don't understand this passage. There were only two supersonic passenger airliners, and Tupolev 144 was obviously off limits for Singapore Airlines. Is it LLM writing?