> it feels like we’ve given up trying to reach for the space age style future envisaged 70 years ago
We forget now that Concorde was a politically-motivated attempt to demonstrate that the UK and France were still relevant in the aerospace industry and the project itself was plagued with costly development inefficiencies due to the desire to split the work between the UK and French participants. E.g. working in both metric and imperial units. Building parts in multiple factories.
The Soviet equivalent (Tu-144) crashed and burned at the Paris air show and never had any economic justification. The Boeing 2707 was cancelled before it even flew because of cost overruns following the failure of an abortive swing-wing design. Concorde itself only became profitable to operate when the govt wrote off the development costs in 1983 in a deal described as "among the most disastrous conducted by a government minister" [0].
Even more than a supersonic jet, Concorde was a successful attempt to create a homegrown European airspace industry. The aircraft itself was a pioneer in fly-by-wire technologies, which Airbus (the current name of the consortium that build Concorde) later commercialized, also at an initial loss. In this way, the entire business was kickstarted by the governments of Britain and France.
The net result was a company that now outsells Boeing, especially in light of the latter's quality issues. Even though Concorde never made money (and never really could make money w/ the supersonic restrictions it had), I think it was still a win for the companies and countries involved.
This kind of ignores the alternative reality. The idea that well if not Concorde then nothing else would have existed and whatever would have existed wouldn't have been 'European'.
This isn't really true. If you look at the British case for example, there were alternative planes in development that asked for British funding. While those projects were British lead, they had specifically designed them to have suppliers all over Europe, including France.
Now that plane could have been a failure or a success, we wont know. Looking at the design, it seems to have some potential.
The French on the other hand might have invested their money in another kind of plane primarily from France but with supply chains outside of France as well.
You could see something like Airbus emerging out of that too. Or maybe something that wasn't Airbus but like Airbus. Or a you could see a British lead company that has success in the narrow body world and later a French plane with success in the Wide-body world. Those could eventually merge.
History could have gone many ways, and could have failed many ways. That we have Airbus now does track back to Concord, but is not true that its clear that without Concord we wouldn't have something Airbus like.
> I think it was still a win for the companies and countries involved
Agree, although I'd love to know how many of Concorde's backers were considering this long-game effect. I suspect that the Airbus of today would be seen as even more fantastic than a supersonic aircraft.
It was pretty fundamental. At the time commercial aviation was a different two horse race between Boeing and McDonnell-Douglass. The aviation industry in Europe was not doing well and those industries and their suppliers represented millions of jobs.
Historically though, Airbus exists despite the Concorde, not because of it. The A300 project ran in parallel and there where fights over funding between Airbus and Concorde. The French government also financed the Dassault Mercure at that time.
The initial success of the A300 was also unrelated to the Concorde, so Europe would probably have gotten their successful aviation industry today either way.
But a lot of big technological developments hve political motivations, because governments are the first and biggest customer. Nuclear energy, internet, space race etc, have all been politically motivated, funded and supported.
True - but the actual development of complex and expensive technologies tends to happen far faster, cheaper, and more reliably when a government feels a burning need for Actual Working Technology ASAP. Vs. when the whole thing is some combination of political showboating and spreading pork to everyone who wants "their share" of government money.
Concorde was ine of the precusers of modern day Airbus so. As an aircraft, despite being gorgeous and an engineering marvel, it was kind of pointless, I agree.
Many politically motivated undertaking leave us better off. Modern day rocket engineers are literally working to get us to click on adverts. No I am not saying let's encourage politically motivated initiatives but not everything that costs a lot of money and doesn't necessarily workout is a bad thing. Look at how much was spent on Covid vaccine mandates. Now that was a waste of money and resources.
Also, it only existed via extreme subsidizes. So working class French and UK people were subsidizing rich people farting in 1st class seats going mach 2.
Its funny how its beloved by the "free market" types when it was just a welfare flight for those who thought themselves too self-important to fly a few more hours between major far-away cities.
113 people died in 2000. It wasn't exactly the safest plane out there either.
With teleconferencing and modern technology, the need for the business class to show up to far-away places should go down. But a lot of it is entitlement, that is to say, show up for a meeting then enjoy a free vacation while "working."
Everything about the Concorde was corrupt if not classist. It was a mistake even if the engineering was impressive. Imagine if that money would instead have gone to public transportation. We'd have the Chunnel in the 70s instead of the 90s.
The money DID go to public transportation. The cost of the Concorde program is peanuts compared to how much value was gained from it. Concorde brought many innovations such as its electric control system, which was developed further for the Airbus A300, and then reached its pinnacle in the Airbus A320. This tech tree is one of the cornerstones of unprecedented safety that modern airliners have brought to air travel, flying hundreds of millions of people every year without causing the loss of a single life, regardless of whether one is a self-important elitist or a regular schmuck on a 20 EUR flight to Ibiza.
You can't just go out and buy such innovation. It's the natural by-product of relentless pursuit of borderline impossible goals.
Most of Concorde's engineering innovations were tech tree dead ends though.
The Concorde project was certainly good at fostering Anglo French cooperation in aerospace but it's difficult to imagine the counterfactual scenario where the cooperation is doomed to failure because the debut product is a commercially viable subsonic aircraft rather than a technically impressive aircraft that doesn't sell. Similarly, whilst some of the R&D investment in control systems did find it's way into the A300, the A320's digital fly by wire is a completely different system, and it's difficult to imagine the scenario where a nascent Airbus project doesn't consider fly by wire because they hadn't figured out delta wings or droop noses yet
Electric control systems were bound to happen, planes can be safe without them as well. The Concorde cost a huge amount and getting a electric control system out of it isn't actually a good deal.
> It's the natural by-product of relentless pursuit of borderline impossible goals.
No it isn't. Its a direct product of the choice to develop it, and funding it.
Increasing electric support had been going into aircraft for a while and any new development of a major air plane would consider it.
At best it might have slightly push forward adoption of that technology.
> Its funny how its beloved by the "free market" types
Not sure what 'free market' types you are talking about. Most 'free market' types I know were and are not in pro of such projects.
> Imagine if that money would instead have gone to public transportation.
I totally agree with you that money invested in high speed trains all over Europe would have been a far better investment. And you can support just as many jobs and you can do just as much research if you really want to.
Britain at the time actually decided between Concrode and more practical single isle plane more like the 737. A workhorse type plan that you could at least make an argument about beyond creating jobs.
The problem with this line of argument is that most tax receipts come from people who are pretty rich, i.e. they are the ones actually funding the government. E.g. in the UK the top 10% of tax payers contribute roughly 60% of income tax receipts, whereas the bottom 50% contribute less than 10% of income tax receipts (https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...).
Concorde was at least partly a remnant of people flying to London to close a deal over lunch and getting back to New York in time to tuck the kids in. I assume that sort of things is at least less common today.
JFK-LHR is still one billion dollars in revenue for British Airways alone.
The innovation that killed Concorde was the lie flat business seat. You could be cramped in the Concorde’s leather bus seat for three hours, or you could save money and get a sleep in for six hours.
Not really, because Concorde died in the seventies when the lie flat business seat didn't exist.
BA and AF managed to keep the zombie fleet going very profitably all the way until the end in the early 2000s, and that business wasn't killed by the lie flat business class seat either. It was killed by the impossibility of continuing to operate a tiny fleet of '60s planes forever.
Now if you said that the reason we don't have ANY supersonic passenger jets today is because lie flat business seats are good enough, then that's a more defendable position, but I'd still say that the overland flight restrictions limiting any SST to just a couple of routes is a bigger factor.
When I flew on Concorde the one thought I never had was "I wish I had a lie flat seat and half the airspeed".
It is the combination of lie flat seat and the very limited range and the overland restriction.
A six to three hour flight is not really worth the premium. At the same time no supersonic flight has the range to do transpacific where the time difference would be much greater.
It's still a huge route but it's also something you can do on a day flight. Heck, from Boston, I can fly to EWR and still be in London for a late dinner. I don't even need a lie-flat seat.
The extra $4K or so in your pocket pays for a lot of reduced comfort for 10 or so hours.
The anecdotal, apocryphal rumor I heard back in the day when Concorde was still flying was that the big Wall Street investment banks accounted for a third to a half of all Concorde traffic between London and New York. Impossible to verify, and possibly too good to verify... but I would not be surprised if a large chunk of passengers did come from that demographic.
Yeah. You're probably right. The time change sort of kills you. You could fly to London for a dinner and return the following day. (You can sort of do that today but it's going to be a late dinner.)
We forget now that Concorde was a politically-motivated attempt to demonstrate that the UK and France were still relevant in the aerospace industry and the project itself was plagued with costly development inefficiencies due to the desire to split the work between the UK and French participants. E.g. working in both metric and imperial units. Building parts in multiple factories.
The Soviet equivalent (Tu-144) crashed and burned at the Paris air show and never had any economic justification. The Boeing 2707 was cancelled before it even flew because of cost overruns following the failure of an abortive swing-wing design. Concorde itself only became profitable to operate when the govt wrote off the development costs in 1983 in a deal described as "among the most disastrous conducted by a government minister" [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#British_Airways_buys_...