4 ms·
As a french, the Concord was a great thing and I am truly sad that it had to go (especially the way the existing plane were dealt with, what with the airlines r
by nolok 13y ago
As a french, the Concord was a great thing and I am truly sad that it had to go (especially the way the existing plane were dealt with, what with the airlines refusing to sell them to another operator and destroying them instead).
I don't know much about the economics of it, and I know it wasn't very good money wise to keep the line open for the airlines which made them pretty much relieved to have an excuse to close it, but still this article throw around "facts" and "numbers" to give an highly exaggerated and misguided view of it.
And even if, it was important because it was something great we could do. Supersonic passenger plane ? Yes, we can do that. In fact, we did it, and not just a prototype, a real regular line.
I didn't think much about it at the time it closed (I was too busy enjoying high school), but nowadays all I can hear our politics and many countrymen say of my country is "no we can't do that", "that's not possible", "be realistic", ...
If you have that attitude, you fail before you even start, and Concord was in the exact opposite direction, it was doing something not because it made economic sense or because you needed it, but to prove a point: yes, we can do that, and we're going to prove it to you.
Frankly we need a lot more of that today. I'm tired of all the negativity.
I think that's also a huge part of why, despite being a joint FR/UK project, both side kind of think of it as "their" plane.
- ragesh 13y agoI can't upvote this enough. As someone who was lucky enough to have flown on Concorde 20 years ago (almost to the date), I'm extremely sad that it isn't even an option anymore. The thrill of hitting mach 2 and being able to see the curvature of the earth is something I'm going to carry to the grave. That's just sad. It simply feels wrong that we were able to make it happen and couldn't figure out a way to make it sustainable in all this time.
- switch007 13y agoRich people got to fly quicker than they needed to and it was created with public tax money, to the tune of over a billion pounds. If Concorde wasn't the poster child of excess, I don't know what was. Thank heavens we soon discovered we were destroying the planet and environmentalism became a thing.
- gambiting 13y agoAre you saying that it was a bad thing they tried to make it a reality?
- switch007 13y agoNo. I think it was an outstanding achievement. I'm proud it was (partly) a British creation. It was an engineering marvel. But was my summary inaccurate? I find endless applauding of its greatness tough to stomach when it was just a mode of transport for the mega rich and given how much it cost.
- ragesh 13y agoTo some extent I think we're both saying the same thing. We figured out how to make it happen, but in all this time we couldn't be bothered to make it sustainable. And then it looks like everyone just gave up and said, "Meh, it's too hard"