Nice to hear. Concorde was a beautiful airplane, but limited to '60s technology (it even had vacuum tubes in the flight deck computers). But it did pave the way for a lot of technological advances at that time, such as carbon brakes etc.
Be good to see what engineers can come up with using current technology to make things stronger, faster and lighter.
Always intrigued by the fluctuations in the airline industry. I remember a time when it was said 'smaller aircraft were dead, and it is the time of the super jumbos', and now the reverse is true with airlines shunning huge aircraft for smaller aircraft that can do regional hops.
Given that the R&D and deployment process for a new aircraft type is measured over decades, it would be incredibly difficult to build a plane today that will fit the market in 10 years time. Hats off to Boeing, Airbus, Embraer et al for their efforts.
What about climate change [1], and using less fossil fuels? We need the opposite - less first class, less business class seats, less private jets, to maximise the people who can travel per the same quantity of fuel. A typical passengers aircraft burns ~ 48 tons (!) of fuel to cross the Atlantic [2]. Part of the refugees issue happens exactly because of the warming and drought [3]
This is not a piece of software app that you can just launch whenever you feel ready full of bugs. You can't pull an Uber and say, hey fuck regulations, we will just do it (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/19/uber-self...). Yeah, sure, if you want to fly between Inner and Outer Camelstan then you might get away with the very fashionable "disrupt" shit but if you want to fly airspaces controlled by the FAA, EASA, CASA -- and let's face it, the money is in New York, London and Sydney -- then you need to do better.
This is going to cost 5-10 billion dollars at least just based on the very fact that the C Series costed 5B and I can't see what here would make it cheaper. And it's not easy to see how are you going to recuperate that much money, this is not a big market and while obviously time is money, it's a very big question of just how much money. Gulfstream delivers 140 planes a year https://www.wsj.com/articles/general-dynamics-profit-rises-9... with about 2-2.5b profit a year. I absolutely can not see how these numbers will stack up. Is this another venture capitalist fueled hype? VC invests, hypes it up, gets rid of the stock, small investors at the end get to hold the bag.
We've been here before. There was Aereon[1] They announced they were building a $120 million supersonic bizjet back in 2015. It was going to cost $80 million in 2007. Their web site hasn't been updated in more than a year.
It's not impossible, but the market is small. The total number of known private jets in the world above $100m is about 10. There's one guy with a private Airbus 380, and a few Boeing Business Jets, including Trump's. Boeing has about 12 more Business Jets on order, but most of those are 737-based.
I'm pretty sure that there are more large private aircraft in the Middle East alone. They might be reported as government property to avoid scrutiny though.
While no new press releases or anything similar might not mean much, even the job postings are from November 2015, so yeah, Aerion seems quite dead.
I thought they might not just dwindle away because they announced a cooperation with Airbus, but alas, getting enough funding probably is impossible if it's not pushed by a big corp like Airbus/Boeing and governments.
The Concorde was an incredible achievement considering the time it was built and a very beautiful airplane. It was very fuel inefficient, both because at the time of construction the oil crisis had not happened yet, and the limitations of jet engines back then. However, modern cheap air travel is mostly possible because modern jet engines are so much more efficient than their ancestors from the Concorde times. So it is very unfortunate, that the Concorde was built but that it did not trigger any iterations of the concept, just picking up all the advances in jet engine and body material construction.
my understanding is that Concorde engines are among the most efficient built to date - they had something like 70:1 compress ratio. It is juts the nature of high speed flying that you have to burn much more fuel.
>modern jet engines are so much more efficient
because of high-by-pass. Wouldn't work for supersonic.
"For example, Concorde cruised at Mach 2.05 with its engines giving an SFC of 1.195 lb/(lbf·h) (see below); this is equivalent to an SFC of 0.51 lb/(lbf·h) for an aircraft flying at Mach 0.85, which would be better than even modern engines; the Olympus 593 was the world's most efficient jet engine.[2][3] However, Concorde ultimately has a heavier airframe and, due to being supersonic, is less aerodynamically efficient, i.e., the lift to drag ratio is far lower. In general the total fuel burn of a complete aircraft is of far more importance to the customer."
There a british company that changed engines design to decouple front and back blades; 15% fuel savings, 70% noise reduction. Apparently the design is so appealing they expect them to be used next year.
At the expense of 'Everybody dies if the slightest thing goes wrong.' And 'Everybody better be wearing space suits... Unless you want to get Souz-11'ed.
There is more then an order of magnitude of complexity between designing a vehicle that can travel at Mach 2, and one that can travel at Mach 22. Personally, I'd pass on the risks of hypersonic re-entry for my SEA->NYC flight... And on having to pee into an astronaut diaper.
Space travel (And a ballistic suborbital hop is 90% of the way there) is, as a mode of transportation, incredibly dangerous.
It also overstates its effect on total travel time-- which includes all the other nonsense (like the TSA) and planned buffering against uncertain delays that makes it frustrating. You'll burn a day crossing the Pacific either way.
All you have to do to beat JAL first class is to set the cabin temperature to something less than 82 degrees. You basically make the mistake of flying JAL transpacific exactly once, cursing yourself for ignoring all the Flyertalk posts regarding their odd cabin temperature policy.
I hate to say it, but American is way better in this regard.
For me personally the issue is not with a flight the time but with comfort. The other day I flu JetBlue mint from LA to New York and I never felt better after the flight. The problem with my flights to Europe are incredibly narrow and uncomfortable seats and limited leg space. I just can't physically sit in those economy seats even for 2 hours...I'm 6'3" btw
Fortunately I have the status to always fly my default airline with extra legroom seats.
But to your broader point. Modern lie-flat business class is far more comfortable with personalized entertainment options (and plugged in via WiFi if you want) than first class on PanAm ever was. Long flights are still kinda boring but I'm not sure they're painful enough that any but a vanishingly small sliver of people who aren't already flying in private jets would pay a huge premium for them.
The biggest reason Concord wasn't successful was the sonic boom.
This is why it only ever flew transatlantic. It was originally envisioned to also fly across the US, e.g. NYC to LA, but this was banned due to noise concerns.
Had the Concord been permitted to fly over the continental US, it could have been much more successful than it was.
Maybe I'm a bit pessimistic, but these 'might' headlines are never followed up by the real thing. It helps me to read these headlines a bit different: might = won't. In casu: Supersonic passenger jets won't make a comeback
Is individual travel time so important that we should spend our limited environmental capital and build supersonic passenger jets? The Concorde was cool and sexy and destructive. Today's passenger jets, much improved over past aircraft, are still destructive and damaging.
Wikipedia got nice list of those projects, as usual most of projects never realize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_transport
List of potential problems with supersonic jets is also quite long. I guess we've all would love to see progress being made.
I was just watching a documentary on the 2000 Concorde crash in France the other day. It had some really good history and technical breakdown of how it worked.
Apparently it was an unusually safe aircraft with no accidents for 30yrs until this incident. I won't ruin it but what caused it is also interesting from an engineering perspective.
The thing is that First/Business class has also been upgraded considerably as well. As has in-flight options like WiFi. And there are, for example, Business-class only BA flights between City airport in London and New York.
Even among executives/investment bankers/international lawyers, there really isn't that much demand to go back and forth from the US East Coast to Western Europe in a day which was a big pitch from the Concorde. A faster plane starts to look more interesting Trans-Pacific but that's a whole other set of tech challenges. (It's greater than the Concorde's range.)
I was thinking along the same lines - what changes in society have occurred since then that would make any one person need to expend this much fuel to get from point a to point b marginally quicker?
You'd think with advancements in telecommunications - the internet, etc - there'd be even less reason to need to be physically present in a place.
Is NASA co-operating with JAXA on this project? They've been working on a similar project for over a decade and last I heard were doing small scale tests.
Concorde made money for British Airways in every year it flew.
Originally, however, they had to return 80% of any operating profit to the UK Government in exchange for a 'Condorde Subsidy'
After BA had been privatised they bought themselves out of that agreement, ending the subsidy but pocketing the profit directly. They then proceeded to operate the fleet for another 20 years.
So, in a British context, on an operating basis Concorde absolutely was economically viable. On a program basis, considering all the development costs, it was not; but then again the Boeing 787 program is > $30 billion in deficit right now and is unlikely to ever clear that.
I think this lesson has been learned. After making losses for a while, British Airways did the research and found that people who were willing to pay for the Concorde's pricier tickets were actually willing to pay substantially more.
After BA upped the ticket prices and the wealthy customers just kept paying, the service quickly became profitable for them, and remained so until the crash.
For any new entrant to this market, it will need to remain an expensive niche.
[+] [-] cyberferret|9 years ago|reply
Be good to see what engineers can come up with using current technology to make things stronger, faster and lighter.
Always intrigued by the fluctuations in the airline industry. I remember a time when it was said 'smaller aircraft were dead, and it is the time of the super jumbos', and now the reverse is true with airlines shunning huge aircraft for smaller aircraft that can do regional hops.
Given that the R&D and deployment process for a new aircraft type is measured over decades, it would be incredibly difficult to build a plane today that will fit the market in 10 years time. Hats off to Boeing, Airbus, Embraer et al for their efforts.
[+] [-] Accacin|9 years ago|reply
It's incredible interesting and various pilots and engineers turn up to share their stories.
[+] [-] agumonkey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DodgyEggplant|9 years ago|reply
[1]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/climate-change-gam... [2]https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-do-airplanes-flying-acro... [3]http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/is-a-lack-of-water-...
[+] [-] chx|9 years ago|reply
This is not a piece of software app that you can just launch whenever you feel ready full of bugs. You can't pull an Uber and say, hey fuck regulations, we will just do it (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/19/uber-self...). Yeah, sure, if you want to fly between Inner and Outer Camelstan then you might get away with the very fashionable "disrupt" shit but if you want to fly airspaces controlled by the FAA, EASA, CASA -- and let's face it, the money is in New York, London and Sydney -- then you need to do better.
This is going to cost 5-10 billion dollars at least just based on the very fact that the C Series costed 5B and I can't see what here would make it cheaper. And it's not easy to see how are you going to recuperate that much money, this is not a big market and while obviously time is money, it's a very big question of just how much money. Gulfstream delivers 140 planes a year https://www.wsj.com/articles/general-dynamics-profit-rises-9... with about 2-2.5b profit a year. I absolutely can not see how these numbers will stack up. Is this another venture capitalist fueled hype? VC invests, hypes it up, gets rid of the stock, small investors at the end get to hold the bag.
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
It's not impossible, but the market is small. The total number of known private jets in the world above $100m is about 10. There's one guy with a private Airbus 380, and a few Boeing Business Jets, including Trump's. Boeing has about 12 more Business Jets on order, but most of those are 737-based.
[1] http://www.aerionsupersonic.com
[+] [-] Cyph0n|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_duke|9 years ago|reply
I thought they might not just dwindle away because they announced a cooperation with Airbus, but alas, getting enough funding probably is impossible if it's not pushed by a big corp like Airbus/Boeing and governments.
[+] [-] _ph_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trhway|9 years ago|reply
my understanding is that Concorde engines are among the most efficient built to date - they had something like 70:1 compress ratio. It is juts the nature of high speed flying that you have to burn much more fuel.
>modern jet engines are so much more efficient
because of high-by-pass. Wouldn't work for supersonic.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrust_specific_fuel_consumpti... :
"For example, Concorde cruised at Mach 2.05 with its engines giving an SFC of 1.195 lb/(lbf·h) (see below); this is equivalent to an SFC of 0.51 lb/(lbf·h) for an aircraft flying at Mach 0.85, which would be better than even modern engines; the Olympus 593 was the world's most efficient jet engine.[2][3] However, Concorde ultimately has a heavier airframe and, due to being supersonic, is less aerodynamically efficient, i.e., the lift to drag ratio is far lower. In general the total fuel burn of a complete aircraft is of far more importance to the customer."
[+] [-] agumonkey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vkou|9 years ago|reply
There is more then an order of magnitude of complexity between designing a vehicle that can travel at Mach 2, and one that can travel at Mach 22. Personally, I'd pass on the risks of hypersonic re-entry for my SEA->NYC flight... And on having to pee into an astronaut diaper.
Space travel (And a ballistic suborbital hop is 90% of the way there) is, as a mode of transportation, incredibly dangerous.
[+] [-] wolf550e|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jws|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbervogel
[+] [-] nine_k|9 years ago|reply
A rocket could be fuel-efficient only if it accelerates very quickly, passengers won't survive.
[+] [-] CaliforniaKarl|9 years ago|reply
• Comfort • Speed • Price
I wonder how post-Concorde passenger jets would fit in, assuming they ever made it down to our level.
[+] [-] djsumdog|9 years ago|reply
http://archive.is/U2cOP
[+] [-] valugi|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] peteretep|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scaevolus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|9 years ago|reply
I hate to say it, but American is way better in this regard.
[+] [-] usaphp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hh2222|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|9 years ago|reply
But to your broader point. Modern lie-flat business class is far more comfortable with personalized entertainment options (and plugged in via WiFi if you want) than first class on PanAm ever was. Long flights are still kinda boring but I'm not sure they're painful enough that any but a vanishingly small sliver of people who aren't already flying in private jets would pay a huge premium for them.
[+] [-] djsumdog|9 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_wuykzfFzE
[+] [-] kogepathic|9 years ago|reply
This is why it only ever flew transatlantic. It was originally envisioned to also fly across the US, e.g. NYC to LA, but this was banned due to noise concerns.
Had the Concord been permitted to fly over the continental US, it could have been much more successful than it was.
[+] [-] hh2222|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] janwillemb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bamurphymac1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drallison|9 years ago|reply
* http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/11/average-us-family-des...
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...
[+] [-] Sami_Lehtinen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|9 years ago|reply
Apparently it was an unusually safe aircraft with no accidents for 30yrs until this incident. I won't ruin it but what caused it is also interesting from an engineering perspective.
https://youtu.be/nKu_IoJ65gw
[+] [-] Ericson2314|9 years ago|reply
Once the powerful are hooked there will be no going back.
[+] [-] ghaff|9 years ago|reply
Even among executives/investment bankers/international lawyers, there really isn't that much demand to go back and forth from the US East Coast to Western Europe in a day which was a big pitch from the Concorde. A faster plane starts to look more interesting Trans-Pacific but that's a whole other set of tech challenges. (It's greater than the Concorde's range.)
[+] [-] omegaworks|9 years ago|reply
You'd think with advancements in telecommunications - the internet, etc - there'd be even less reason to need to be physically present in a place.
[+] [-] api_or_ipa|9 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
[+] [-] nether|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0max|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astdb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dingaling|9 years ago|reply
After BA had been privatised they bought themselves out of that agreement, ending the subsidy but pocketing the profit directly. They then proceeded to operate the fleet for another 20 years.
So, in a British context, on an operating basis Concorde absolutely was economically viable. On a program basis, considering all the development costs, it was not; but then again the Boeing 787 program is > $30 billion in deficit right now and is unlikely to ever clear that.
[+] [-] cknight|9 years ago|reply
After BA upped the ticket prices and the wealthy customers just kept paying, the service quickly became profitable for them, and remained so until the crash.
For any new entrant to this market, it will need to remain an expensive niche.
[+] [-] Pxtl|9 years ago|reply