Have you ever flown Concorde?

seamus wrote: »

BA and AF flew the thing primarily at a huge loss for the last years of its existence,

IIRC S and I think I do, it was actually covering its costs in the last years. It was a loss leader for much of its life in fairness. The story goes that in the 80's an exec at BA looked at the price of tickets and then asked his secretary I believe, to ring various frequent flying types how much they thought the price of a ticket was(they never actually paid directly themselves) and that back of the fag packet research showed that their market actually thought it was far more expensive and exclusive, so BA(and AF) raised the prices in line with that perception.

I suspect supersonic passenger flight will come back eventually. Modern widebodies are practically engineered to handle that stress already

I'll bet the farm they are not S. Not even close. The heat stresses alone would bugger them at Mach 2. Carbon fibre et al ain't worth jack when the temps go up. And that's before we come to the engines that might drive one, never mind the wing form. A widebody in pretty much every metric is as far away from Mach 2 as a Landrover is from a Formula 1 car. The engineering requirements scale up in a near exponential rate. Don't let the 1960's timeframe throw us, the tech and engineering involved in Concorde was one helluva leap. Indeed it has been noted that when some of the Concorde engineers met with the Apollo engineers, the latter expressed the opinion that Concorde was in many ways the equal of Apollo on the pure engineering front. And they daily and commercially operated a jet where the passengers could chug champers and eat lobster, while flying at such a speed that no ground based interceptor fighter could catch it if it passed overhead. Put it another way, the Russians attempted their own Concordski, the Tupolev T something or other and it was a dismal failure and a hairy old bastard with it, even though it was a near copy of the Concorde. In short; to make a "new" Concorde, they'd pretty much have to rebuild the old one in modern terms.

starvin wrote: »

They have the Concord, the SR-71 and now there's the Space Shuttle.

Talk about a step backwards when such things are museum pieces. Though you can be sure our Yankee cousins have an SR71 replacement. Project "Aurora" the likely one. When you consider the first flight of the Blackbird was in 196 fecking 3(IIRC), A) that's bloody amazeballs and you can be sure the Lockheed skunkworks or similar have improved upon it since then. The first "stealth" plane flew in the mid 1970's. Then again... There's an awful lot of 60's tech we haven't improved upon much, or have merely polished further. How do we get into space these days, if manned missions are the order of the day? The Russian Soyuz capsule, another 1960's design*, though folks like Space X are looking good on that score. Not so much the Chinese, they're just ripping off the old Russian stuff. Though that IMH makes them clevererererer. They have the cop on to see what actually works and run with it.










*and waaaay safer than the Shuttle was. I recall watching an episode of that shíte BIg Bang theory and one of the cliched nerds was going into space and his girlfriend was freaking out cos he'd be going on a Russian spacecraft and not the Shuttle and they kept on this slant. I wanted to kick the fcuking telly in at that point, or hunt down the "writers"... Far safer in Russian hands than in that overweight, over engineered, underfunded and over compromised housebrick with wings that was the space Shuttle.

What I liked most about her, even beyond the speed specs was that she was beautiful, both in aesthetics and engineering. The best stuff usually is IMH. She just looked "right". For me I generally dislike the mundane stuff, even if it just about gets the job done. Exceptions to that rule would be stuff that is so damn ugly, but solid, it becomes "right" again by virtue of its efficiency. The aforementioned Soyuz and the Apollo LEM as examples that spring readily.