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by BrailleHunting 3375 days ago
Good frickin' luck. If Concorde couldn't survive even without accidents... it might not be a viable business. Aerion has immense resources, talent and connections and is still slowly chugging along on allegedly building the AS2, an expensive, supersonic business jet.

Might want to consider the feasibility of the real economics of jet fuel per passenger/cargo before raising a bunch of money to ignite. And also disappointing investors and losing their confidence when they ask for $5 billion more to continue development and are turned down.

1 comments

Concorde ran into (a) the oil price shock of the 1970s (the price of fuel quadrupled overnight around the time manufacturing commenced), and (b) the airport security theatre of the immediate post-9/11 era (a 3 hour LHR-JFK flight is a whole lot less attractive if you add 2 hours of queuing at security checkpoints and another hour at immigration, when you can rent a seat on a bizjet for the same money and bypass both). But what killed Concorde was (c) the airframe hitting the 30 year point; it has been alleged that Airbus demanded outrageous amounts of money to keep updating its type certification for flight after that time. (Caveat: trying to find a citation for this online is ... vexing.)