The Student Room Group

How cool was Concorde?

Scroll to see replies

Original post by jneill
Indeed. And beautifully dangerous windows...


Yeahh thankfully he wasn't anything to do with the windows, but then the other side of my family did make the chain for the anchor of the titanic so... basically never get on anything that anyone in my family has had any part in making.
Reply 21
Original post by Jonsmith98
Yeahh thankfully he wasn't anything to do with the windows, but then the other side of my family did make the chain for the anchor of the titanic so... basically never get on anything that anyone in my family has had any part in making.


LOL.

Although the anchor was the least of Titanic's worries... :smile:

And as the good folks in Belfast say: she was alright when she left here.
Reply 22
Original post by Pickles
Just look at this legend



These ones look better. :u:

(edited 7 years ago)
Original post by ETbuymilkandeggs
Anyone know why it was put out of service? I know there was a crash involved, but surely they would've simply re-designed the plane or introduced more rigorous maintenance protocols instead of scrapping the multi-$billion project entirely?


The Comet crashes were in 1953/4 but the last Comet variant, the RAF Nimrod R1 was only withdrawn from service on 28th June 2011 and had been flown on ops as recently as March that year in the overthrow of Libya's Colonel Qaddafi. Not bad for a plane that had been ordered before the Allied Armies had crossed the Rhine
Reply 24
Original post by nulli tertius
The Comet crashes were in 1953/4 but the last Comet variant, the RAF Nimrod R1 was only withdrawn from service on 28th June 2011 and had been flown on ops as recently as March that year in the overthrow of Libya's Colonel Qaddafi. Not bad for a plane that had been ordered before the Allied Armies had crossed the Rhine


That poster was (I presumed) referring to Concorde.

Posted from TSR Mobile
Original post by ETbuymilkandeggs
Anyone know why it was put out of service? I know there was a crash involved, but surely they would've simply re-designed the plane or introduced more rigorous maintenance protocols instead of scrapping the multi-$billion project entirely?

The Concorde project had already been scrapped decades before the last Concorde left service, basically on economic grounds.

The economic case for a supersonic plane is that a faster plane can make more trips in a given time, so you don't need to buy as many planes to cover all the necessary routes. It is also reasonable that people would pay a bit more for a flight that is quicker. The downside is that the planes are more expensive to build and consume a lot more fuel.

Concorde failed for two reasons: first, the oil crisis hit in 1973 which led to a long term increase in the price of oil, and that made running supersonic planes much more expensive than had been predicted. Second, supersonic aircraft proved to be intolerably noisy for people living below regular routes, which led to them being banned from flying faster than the speed of sound over most land. This essentially limited Concorde to the New York - London/Paris route which was mostly over water (in principle a supersonic plane could also have been appropriate for Tokyo-LA but Concorde was too short ranged; a new plane would have to have been designed and it wasn't worth it).

So supersonic planes were much more expensive to run than expected because oil is more expensive now and they were much more expensive to buy than expected because there are hardly any routes they can operate on and thus there is no mass production. It quickly became very clear that there would not be enough orders for Concorde for the manufacturers to cover their sunk costs and start making a profit. At this point BAe and Aerospatiale considered the project dead and focussed on other things, although the few Concordes that had been built remained in service.

British Airways was operating a fleet of Concordes it had bought for 1 GBP, which was a reasonable assessment of their value. You could make some money out of them as a luxury option for that one high traffic route if you didn't have to pay any of the production costs. That 1 GBP also included all the spares used to maintain the planes, which had been produced as part of the initial production run. There was no factory producing spare parts for Concorde and hadn't been for decades. Now in principle new replacement parts could have been produced with bespoke design and manufacturing but go back to how BA acquired them: they're worth running if the capital cost is zero and the capital cost of designing and manufacturing new parts could have been comparable to designing a new plane. Not worth it.

Concorde was kept going a lot longer than it had a right to expect and we should be thankful to BA (and Air France) for that.
(edited 7 years ago)

Quick Reply

Latest