We have written a couple articles recently about the passing of Concorde, but I have just seen yet another twist which, as I am also someone who lives directly under what was that magnificent bird’s flight path, brings an incredulous smirk to my lips.
Anti-noise activists in Queens, New York, are claiming that it was their protests against the aircraft that lead to its withdrawal from service. Ok, so let me get this straight… this supersonic aircraft has been flying in and out of the USA for 25 years following the utter defeat of attempts to prevent that in 1977, and against a backdrop of the well known fact that civil aviation has suffered a general reversal in fortune in the aftermath of September 11 , and yet we are to believe1…
“We lost a few battles, but after 25 years, we finally won the war,” said Frans C. Verhagen, the president of a coalition of civic groups in Queens, Sane Aviation for Everyone. “It took 25 years, but a bunch of citizens in Queens stopped the SST from proliferating into the rest of the United States and the world.”
I wonder if this is all a result of the irrationalist cult of self-esteem. It reminds me of the comical Greenham Common Women jubilantly dancing and banging drums claiming they had seen off the USA when the missiles were removed from the UK between 1989 and 1991… as if the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987 with the rapidly collapsing Soviet Union did not have just a little something to do with it. Doh!
It is widespread delusional mindsets like, these with an inability to grasp anything beyond the most rudimentary causal links that sometimes get me muttering things like “the more people I meet, the more I like my cat”.
1 = NY Times link requires free registration.
I rode along the sea front at about 11 this morning and the tide was in a really long way, possibly a bit too far in even. I was down there again this evening at it had gone right out. Now I’m not one to brag, but I think I just may have helped see it off…
Oh boy do I hear you, this sort of crap drives me crazy! The SST did not proliferate because it made no economic sense, end of story.
They do have a point, you know. Had it not been for protest fantasies about “supersonic booms” damaging buildings and what have you, the aircraft might have been allowed to overfly land and do many more routes, with the result there might have been a market for lots more aircraft and a profit in a replacement.
The longer the routes, the more attractive Concorde would have been. LA-London, LA-Paris in 4 hours and a bit? Just think of all the film-folk on shopping trips!
Oh my! Whatever’s going on here is probably nothing so complicated as a “delusional mindset”. Anyway, solipcism wasn’t invented in Queens, NY.
In the US, many airports are blessed with some little anti-noise group whose work continues, rain or shine, from one decade to the next. Often, such groups involve homeowners who bought something cheap near the end of a runway, then discover they are shocked, shocked! by the audible sound of aircraft.
Guy Herbert is correct.
I believe that one of the reasons the super made no economic sense is that it could not fly at top speed within some distance of populated areas (e.g had to slow down out at sea before it reached NYC) and could not fly over the continental USA at all. Those limitations made indeed have had some impact on its economics.
Moreover, as I remember, Boeing’s SST was killed (thankfully for both the company and anyone in its flight path) by politics before it ever flew.
So while gloating is never pretty, these folks have some reason to be pleased.
I really think that is quite incorrect. The reheat/afterburn technology used by Concorde, Concordski and the abortive Boeing SST is just not suitable for civil transport and thus no supersonic airliner made real economic sense regardless of where you can fly it. Conventional afterburning for supersonic performance may be fine for a combat jet but is just too expensive to ever be more than a rich man’s toy when it comes to civil airliners. Extending the routes to California would not change that one iota… they are just hellaciously expensive to run. Supercruise technology may change that but for now, that is just the sad truth. The protesters were irrelevent.
While I never flew on a Concorde myself, the one person I knew who did regularly wished dearly that it went from LA to Paris directly, as he flew that route quite often, with only the last leg on the Concorde.
I don’t know what their utilization numbers were (% seats full), but I know that in spite of it’s already high cost, he’d said he would have paid even more per mile to not have to take a Red Eye to the East Coast and then transfer to a Concorde (can you tell he’s a movie producer? Ah, to have that kind of cash…oh that my Aunt would have married him!)
But I presume the airlines were already using their nifty differential pricing algorithms on the Concorde, and there just was no way to make it turn a profit.
But this does make me think that perhaps their IS a latent, very high end, market for sub-orbital transport. The super-rich will often pay whatever it takes to get somewhere they must be in person on time. Paging Burt Rutan…
Or as Frederick the Great once said: “Now that I know men, I prefer dogs.”
Except, Perry, that your remarks on afterburn expense imply that BA was actually flying Concorde at a loss, which I can’t see even that benighted organisation doing for more than a decade after privatization. A proper burden of development costs might have done for it, but was borne by the taxpayer. The coup de grace seems to have been maintenance of an old aircraft.
That it could never have been more than a rich man’s toy is not in itself a problem. There’s no shortage of rich men in the world. Many of them have obtained their wealth fairly in commerce or throught talent, and reasonably want to get places quickly.
Because your cat is sabre-toothed?
David Mercer:
The load factor on Concorde was pretty poor at the best of times (certainly below BA’s average of around 75% utilisation). So there is little evidence that they were underpricing the product! The rocket didn’t have the range to reach the West Coast and even if it had the noise lobby did not allow supersonic flight over the Continental USA (which was one of the reasons for the demise of the old Concorde route to Dallas as I recall). Nice idea though!
Perry de Havilland (a great name indeed) should know that Concorde doesn’t use its afterburners for cruising.
Yes, I do know that… afterburn is disengaged shortly after take off. However it does use a tremendous amount of fuel in that short time and compared to a conventional aircraft, Concorde is very cost inefficient simply due to its use of technology more suitable for a military aircraft.