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They do mention that regular engines are also billion USD territory in the next sentence after the one you quoted: “Just to do a run-of-the-mill, state-of-the-a
by morsch 13y ago
They do mention that regular engines are also billion USD territory in the next sentence after the one you quoted: “Just to do a run-of-the-mill, state-of-the-art subsonic aircraft engine, you’re talking a $1 billion bill,” says Stephen Trimble, an editor at the industry publishing site Flightglobal.
Most kinds of mass transport are going to be more fuel efficient than an SUV (and many regular cars). Airplanes are however unique in that they enable people to travel thousands of miles in a few hours. The alternative to flying Paris - London for a week long trip or a weekend is not going there by SUV (or boat), it's not travelling Paris - London for a week long trip.
- notahacker 13y agoThe alternative to flying Paris/London - New York on Concorde would be flying the same route on a regular widebody, potentially for less than $1000 return, whereas some crude maths suggests the cost of the written-off development subsidy for Concorde worked out at around $2k per passenger per flight in 2013 dollars. It's not that developing Concorde was unusually expensive, at around $10bn in 2013 dollars. It's that because they were so hideously expensive to fly the entire programme resulted in less than 90,000 flights, including test flights (Delta has individual DC-9s approaching 70k flight cycles). That doesn't compare favourably with a $1bn engine programme that sells hundreds at $15million+ a pop and millions of dollars worth of replacement parts. ($10bn of taxpayer money across 90k flights works out at over $100k per flight. According to their stats BA carried around 50 passengers per flight - around 50% full - so assuming Air France had similar load factors that's a $2k subsidy per passenger.)