[nogabebop23]

>> This was the aircraft the airlines really needed and the aircraft the manufacturers wanted to build.

This is largely revisionist history. The reality was that logistics of flying the Concorde (routing, timing, airport services) combined with the experience (speed over comfort) made it expensive and just not that desirable. The plane was conceived in the era of big government bankrolled air travel and doesn't have a role in the reality of flying buses we see today.

[reaperducer]

I think you've just illustrated revisionist revisionist history.

The original text is true. The Concorde was what the airlines, aircraft makers, and the public wanted. It was fast. It was expensive. It was a trophy project. All things that appeal to one or more of those segments.

What changed was that fuel got too expensive, deregulated airlines started cutting corners everywhere, and people's priorities changed.

The world went from people wearing their Sunday suits to embark on a flight to people piling into Southwest air buses in their pajamas without bathing.

So the history is correct. It's just that the world has changed.

/Flew on the Concorde in the mid-1990's.

[selectodude]

The priority for people was never getting somewhere supersonic. BA needed to fly what amounted to subway service between JFK and LHR in order to make SST worthwhile to the very, very small subset of people who could afford it. However, due to how small that subset was, they were flying a dozen half-full flights per day. If they cut back on the number of flights, they removed the time savings of the Concorde and it was cheaper and far nicer to just fly an overnight flight on a 747. Didn't help that it had the hourly mx requirements of a fighter jet.

[bobthepanda]

Yup.

There is a reason why Boom Supersonic is only targeting a plane that comfortably seats 50.

[Someone]

Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde, it was partly the world changing, but also budget overruns and the sonic booms. Also, part of “the world changing” was that the 747 appeared, a plane that Concorde couldn’t really compete with, economically.

Also, it seems the bill for development of the Concorde was paid for by the governments of Great Britain and France, and wasn’t fully accounted for in the unit price.

If so, that made it a much more attractive proposition. I also would think some airlines placed pre-orders in a defensive move (if it had become wildly successful, airlines flying slow planes could get in trouble)

I doubt any manufacturer would have dared to design and build a supersonic plane if they had to have to pay for all development (Boeing had a competing project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707), but that, too, seems to have been heavily government sponsored)

[ghaff]

In some ways, the 747 was also designed for a different world. The hump housed a first class lounge originally. https://www.pinterest.com/nickverreos/747-upper-deck-flying-...

But when business class came in, it got converted into an upper deck of business class seats in most configurations.

[craz8]

British Airways equipped that section as Economy for many years. It was like flying in a short 737 up there!

[eternalban]

The Shah flew the Concorde and apparently liked it so much, ordered 3 (Condorde 'B') on the spot. Typically ahead of his time, his vision was for making Iran a major hub along the lines of what Dubai and Qatar have done in the interim.

Interesting to note that China apparently also ordered Concordes.

https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/29/archives/shah-of-iran-rep...

[Someone]

I wouldn’t use the Shah of Iran‘s intents as indicator of economical feasibility.

And that’s ignoring the possibility that that order was in return for other transactions (for example, they got enriched uranium from France (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France–Iran_relations#Nuclear_... says they refused to continue to provide Iran with enriched uranium after the 1979 Islamic revolution, so they must have been delivering it before) and the technology to make it (https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/12/29/the-shahs-atomic-dreams...) and hundreds of Chieftain tanks from Britain (https://www.offiziere.ch/?p=33866)

[eternalban]

The Shah of Iran bailed out France's nuclear industry. That is why Islamic Republic has shares in a French nuclear fuel processing concern.

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/26/world/france-and-iran-men...

> I wouldn’t use the Shah of Iran‘s intents as indicator of economical feasibility.

Or people who post from surface knowledge. Sure.

-- ps --

In 1975 Sweden's 10 per cent share in Eurodif went to Iran. The French government subsidiary company Cogéma and the Iranian Government established the Sofidif (Société franco–iranienne pour l'enrichissement de l'uranium par diffusion gazeuse) enterprise with 60 and 40 per cent shares, respectively. In turn, Sofidif acquired a 25 per cent share in Eurodif, which gave Iran its 10 per cent share of Eurodif. Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi lent 1 billion dollars (and another 180 million dollars in 1977) for the construction of the Eurodif factory, to have the right of buying 10 per cent of the production of the site.

"President Gerald Ford signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete 'nuclear fuel cycle'."[27] The Ford strategy paper said the "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals."

A 1974 CIA proliferation assessment stated "If [the Shah] is alive in the mid-1980s ... and if other countries [particularly India] have proceeded with weapons development we have no doubt Iran will follow suit."[28]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_nuclear

[pinkfoot]

The also made decent long-range, Mach 2 bombers. (For the time)

[lmm]

The FAA's position on booms changed dramatically once Boeing abandoned their project. Many Europeans believe the ban on supersonic flights over the US mainland was more about protecting US manufacturers.

[notahacker]

The Concorde wasn't what the airlines, aircraft makers, and the public wanted by the stage the followup project was cancelled because airlines wouldn't buy it, the aircraft maker hadn't sold any and some of the few routes of the first gen aircraft kept open flew mostly empty.

[lumberingjack]

They used to advertise Concorde in movies with lines like "did you know the Concorde will get you there in half the time?"

[jariel]

"The Concorde was what the airlines, aircraft makers, and the public wanted. It was fast. It was expensive. It was a trophy project. "

There's a difference between aspiration and market reality.

'The Public' never actually wants a 'Trophy Project' to the extent that they are not willing to actually pay for it out of their own pockets. Yes, they might like the idea, but what matters is "are people willing to pay the price"?

I suggest there was probably a lot of hubris in the project, that said, there's probably a lot of demand these days for such a thing.

There are a lot of hyper-rich people and they desperately need status.

Also, in Finance, there are a lot of 'important people' who's time is actually valuable. With long-flight times what they are, doing an Atlantic or Pacific run 'very fast' actually is just 'worth it' even for the company paying for it.

[reaperducer]

There's a difference between aspiration and market reality

It was a market reality for 27 years — longer than most of the companies that employ people who post on HN.

[jandrese]

It was propped up by governments for 27 years as a source of national pride.

One can argue that they got a lot more value out of it than the equivalent amount of money spent on fighter jets and bombers though, and those are just as much prestige projects.

[mpweiher]

> propped up by governments for 27 years

Research revealed that passengers thought that the fare was higher than it actually was, so the airline raised ticket prices to match these perceptions.[70][191] It is reported that British Airways then ran Concorde at a profit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#Operating_economics

[mannykannot]

True, but given the vast write-off of development costs, this falls short of an argument for the economic viability of the B model project, which is the issue here.

[HPsquared]

The R&D probably also was somewhat shared with the supersonic nuclear bombers of the same era. Much like spaceflight and ballistic missiles.

[mannykannot]

By 1960 just about everyone had realized that there was no future in high-altitude supersonic bombers, so I doubt there was any significant military R&D for Concorde to ride the coattails of after that, if there ever was.

[CaptainZapp]

A lot of the innovation, which went into this plane later went into Airbus offerings.

There would arguably be no FBW (fly-by-wire)[1] in commercial aviation without the Concorde.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly-by-wire

[notahacker]

The market reality was that it had only two customers operating only two routes for much of that time whilst most of the aircraft those customers had essentially been given sat on the ground. And it wasn't for lack of unsuccessful experimentation with other routes.

[jariel]

It was government subsidised market reality until it finally failed.

[HPsquared]

In economics this is the difference between 'demand' and mere 'desire'.

[numpad0]

Internet told me that there are a lot of average people who “dream” of existing products; they would “invent” technologies as boring as sliced bread and exhibit cognitive dissonance when shown the specimen of it.

Like if I put a loaf of bread and start eating it before them, they would keep describing the Hypothetical Sliced Bread and that table would look like a live Monty Python filming.

For literature loving people, need-item is subset of want-item chosen by urgency or necessity, but I think maybe logical processes for needs and wants of average people are completely separate that they don’t care how two correlates or overlaps.

[michaelt]

Why did airlines want Concorde to be expensive?

[reaperducer]

The airlines didn't. The aircraft makers did.

[rbanffy]

Nobody wanted. It's just that the technology to make it less expensive didn't exist. Better engines and more range could help a bit, but it'd still be more expensive than cramming a lot ot people inside a 747.

[gsnedders]

In 1972, at list prices, 24M for a 747-100 and 34M for a Concorde, which is a fair bit more expensive… and then that's _vastly_ more expensive per seat.

[rbanffy]

If the plane can fly twice as often, it has, effectively, double the capacity.

Still, supersonics will need some major breakthrough in operational cost.

[WWLink]

Were you a business executive flying on a corporate flight? I was under the impression that the vast majority of concorde passengers were flying on behalf of their employer and had a very high position at their company. Eg the kind with escorts and possibly white powder being served up at their business meetings. o_O

Didn't know average people flew it.

[lb1lf]

-'Average' people got to fill the seats not taken by the rich and famous on occasion. (I flew it once - BA 747 LHR-JFK, Concorde JFK-LHR, mid-nineties. The round trip was organized by an aviation magazine, once the ‘wow, I’m on the Concorde’ novelty wore off (a couple of minutes after going supersonic), the experience was rather underwhelming.

Glad to have experienced it, though.

[kortilla]

The “public” isn’t people willing to put on business suits to travel. The “public” wanted to be able to afford to travel and that’s not what the Concorde brought.

The “public” you’re referring to is the small 0.1% of the population that gets annoyed when Delta One is sold out.

[HPsquared]

Those people are a section of the public.

[kortilla]

Every person is a section of the public. It becomes pointless to talk about what “the public” wants if what you really mean is a tiny slice of the market.

[mopsi]

> The plane was conceived in the era of big government bankrolled air travel and doesn't have a role in the reality of flying buses we see today.

This is a little bit unfair. Among other innovations, Concorde was the first production airliner with fly-by-wire controls (first flown March 1969!). The people who worked on it carried their experience to later highly successful designs such as the Airbus 300 and Airbus 320 series, which is a backbone of modern air travel.

The 737 MAX fiasco shows that Boeing still hasn't caught up with what Airbus was doing in the 1980s.

[edmundhuber]

> The 737 MAX fiasco shows that Boeing still hasn't caught up with what Airbus was doing in the 1980s.

The Air France 447 accident demonstrated to me that Airbus hadn't really thought things through either. Pilots entered conflicting inputs and the plane averaged them out instead of giving (good, actionable) feedback.

Side question: is fly-by-wire an obviously good idea for passenger airplanes? It's ubiquitous in e.g. fighter jets because of the inherent aerodynamic instability of those platforms, making them hard or impossible ("Hopeless diamond") to fly without computer assistance. Passenger jets have different goals and are built to have stable flight -- the plane wants to fly level. My takeaway from Air France 447 was that I want more Boeing-style (linked, mechanical) controls in passenger airplanes than I want fly-by-wire. Am I off base?

[ricardobeat]

My understanding is that there is no 'best option'. Dual input is a situation that shouldn't ever happen while a crew is flying according to protocol.

In AF447 it has been established that the crew failed to follow multiple protocols, ignored warnings (including the audible "dual input") and while design / instrument improvements have been put forward, it's not clear they would have avoided that tragedy. The conflicting inputs only happened during the final seconds of descent.

Here's a good discussion on the why: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/23577/why-do-ai...

The latest Boeing 787 has switched to fly-by-wire.

EDIT: an eerily straight-forward report of how the AF447 flight came down: https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a3115/what-really-ha...

[gsnedders]

> The latest Boeing 787 has switched to fly-by-wire.

The Boeing 777, much earlier, was the first Boeing aircraft with fly-by-wire.

[jfb]

That is a wonderfully written report, that gave me the screaming meemies towards the end.

[mopsi]

> Side question: is fly-by-wire an obviously good idea for passenger airplanes?

Once you have electric control, you can start putting logic between pilot inputs and actual control surface movements. You can create dynamic, real-time-conditions-based safety stops that prevent pilots from doing common mistakes like pitching up too much and falling from the sky.

With direct control, it's up to pilots to figure out where the limits are and ensure that they are not crossed. With advanced fly-by-wire, pilots can resort to setting goals and it's up to the control system to figure out how far the aircraft can go (within safety limits) to meet them.

This is really difficult to get right, but saves lives when it finally works.

It's like memory safety in computer programming. If you're really good at programming and you never make mistakes, then you don't need it, but most people make mistakes from time to time and are better off when something checks that their buffers don't overflow and variables don't go uninitialized.

[lmm]

> Once you have electric control, you can start putting logic between pilot inputs and actual control surface movements. You can create dynamic, real-time-conditions-based safety stops that prevent pilots from doing common mistakes like pitching up too much and falling from the sky.

Which may end up doing more harm than good, as seen in Air France 447.

[mopsi]

Quite the opposite! Protections are built for situations just like the AF447, where pilots have a perfectly flyable aicraft, but crash because they are disoriented, don't understand what's going on, and accidentally push the aircraft out of safe flying margins.

The AF447 didn't have automatic protections available due to sensor failure. Flight computers detected the failure and degraded flight controls into direct mode with less protections than under normal operating conditions. While flying on their own, pilots performed below their expected standard and there was not enough information available from sensors for automatic systems to save them.

[lmm]

> The AF447 didn't have automatic protections available due to sensor failure. Flight computers detected the failure and degraded flight controls into direct mode with less protections than under normal operating conditions.

Notably the net result was that when the pilots did the right thing (pitching down) and the sensors recovered, a stall warning sounded.

> While flying on their own, pilots performed below their expected standard

You're talking as though pilot performance is a constant. Notably these pilots had little experience flying "on their own", precisely because of these automated systems, and were thrown in at the deep end, having to take over flying under bad conditions.

[skoskie]

I would argue that removing humans from all but oversight is a good goal, even though there may be growing pains along the way.

What we don’t have data for is how many accidents would have happened if not for the systems that prevented them. But we should be able to compare incidents of aircraft with and without such systems and get an idea of the (no pun) impact fly-by-wire has had on safety.

In other words, the answer is, show me the data.

[goodcanadian]

Side question: is fly-by-wire an obviously good idea for passenger airplanes?

Fly by wire is about removing the weight and complexity of mechanical control systems. A pilot wouldn't likely have the strength to move the controls without fly by wire. However, I don't think that's what you are asking. Fly by wire does not inherently have to be computer assisted; it could simply translate your input to a control surface movement without interpretation. Of course, to get any kind of feedback, it is going to have to be computer generated. The question is where to draw the line.

Finally, you compared Airbus to Boeing. Both are fly by wire. The difference is, I guess, that the control yokes on Boeing are mechanically linked to each other but not on Airbus. However, from the yokes to the control surfaces is fly by wire either way. My understanding is that the difference is in philosophy of how much the computer does for you.

I hope I got all this right.

[bencpeters]

Mostly right! Fly by wire doesn't inherently have to do with whether a pilot has the strength to move the controls or not - airliners in the pre fly-by-wire era still had hydraulic actuation of control surfaces, which allow pilots to multiply the force of their inputs. The main question/difference here is how much physical feedback the control system gives to the pilot - basically how much harder to move the stick it gets as the actual pressures on the control surface increase. Whether it's an electronic system or a hydraulic one in between the cockpit controls and the surfaces doesn't HAVE to mean that the physical feedback is all that different. It does make it easier to do non-linear ramping of the feedback though.

You also can do more complicated mappings of control inputs to control surface movements more easily with FBW (you can think of automatic traction control in a car as a somewhat analogous system - it uses differential braking per wheel, which the driver has no direct control over, to attempt to straighten out the path of the car and follow the driver's inputs from the steering wheel). As another comment mentioned, this has been happening in fighter jets for a long time, mostly due to how inherently aerodynamically unstable they are.

[baybal2]

I wonder, how in the world non-hydraulic assisted airliners flew?

[teruakohatu]

They would have used pulleys and I think they still do:

https://www.ralmark.com/aircraft-pulley/overview/

[Animats]

The control cable system of a B-52 looks like something that belongs on a bicycle. Steel cables on big open pulleys.

[HPsquared]

The two things (fly-by-wire control system, and linked controls) are not mutually exclusive.

[jagger27]

> Passenger jets have different goals and are built to have stable flight -- the plane wants to fly level

I can think of a particular passenger jet that doesn't.

[chipsa]

Boeing would have preferred to have introduced a new narrow body aircraft, on their own schedule. But the new version of the 737 was announced before they got there, by American Airlines.

At that point it's either repudiate AA's announcement, harming relations with a customer worth at least 100 aircraft, or go build the thing. And if they build it, they're stuck with a bunch of the problems with the 737, like being unable to change how the controls work.

If they could sub out the control system from mechanical cables to fly by wire, they wouldn't have had any visible issues with the Max.

[selectodude]

The 777 is the safest ever plane with 5 hull losses, two of which were due to Malaysia Airlines "issues". And it is a fly by wire aircraft.

[LawnGnome]

That characterisation feels a bit unfair on MH, who certainly weren't at fault for the plane shot down over Ukraine, and may not have been responsible for the disappearance MH370 either, depending on which theory you think is most likely.

[selectodude]

I'm not blaming MH "issues" on the airline, I'm just also not blaming them on Boeing.

[yread]

Indeed and both asiana and emirates were blamed on the controls design - auto throttle behavior

[selectodude]

In that it was disabled by the pilots.

[D_Alex]

A380 has zero hull losses and zero fatalities.

[notahacker]

Yep. The routes look like flights of fantasy rather than reality. A stopover in the Soviet Union? Flights crossing large parts of a US that had banned supersonic flight? Regular all business class flights between Lisbon and Caracas? [the actually-built generation of Concordes can and did fly Paris/Caracas with a stopover in Lisbon... just not very frequently]

The improvements to fuel economy, range and sound would have made little difference to the commercial viability of a niche of aircraft that already spent most of the time on the tarmac because the tiny handful built and basically given away weren't allowed to fly most routes or remotely approach economic viability for most others.

The governments threw their money at a project later called the Airbus A320 instead. Difficult to say they were wrong...

[nimbius]

This, exactly.

i know its a controversial post but its right for more reasons as well. Concorde was economically advantageous as long as fuel represented a small percentage of operational costs it launched in 1973 during the oil crisis and all the way through the OPEC embargo, and almost immediately became the most expensive plane any airline could choose to operate.

Airlines also had to contend with when and where to execute supersonic flight, as a boom over a populated city would immediately draw negative publicity. pushback in some cities in europe reduced the Concordes routes and speeds significantly in 1976

Concorde produced nitrogen oxides in its exhaust, which, despite complicated interactions with other ozone-depleting chemicals, are understood to result in degradation to the ozone layer at the stratospheric altitudes it cruised. while concord was a small fleet, 500 of them could become an ecological disaster.

Concorde's high cruising altitude meant passengers received almost twice the flux of extraterrestrial ionising radiation as those travelling on a conventional long-haul flight. the flight deck had a radiometer and an instrument to measure the rate of decrease of radiation. If the radiation level became too high, Concorde would descend below 47,000 feet. to my knowledge we still havent produced a SST that solves the radiation concern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde

[bjarneh]

> The plane was conceived in the era of big government bankrolled air travel and doesn't have a role in the reality of flying buses we see today.

Doesn't government still bankroll the whole airline industry? I read about some massive handouts to both Lufthansa and The Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) due to the coronavirus; perhaps it was even more extreme 50 years ago.

[the_watcher]

The government doesn't bankroll air travel, at least not in the same way. I believe the quoted statement is referring to propping up the prices of flights via the pre-deregulation era. The government no doubt supports airlines in plenty of other ways, but the mechanism has changed, as have the behaviors it incentivizes.

[mpweiher]

> revisionist history.

Not revisionist, speculative, as the B never came into being.

> logistics of flying the Concorde .. expensive and just not that desirable

Research revealed that passengers thought that the fare was higher than it actually was, so the airline raised ticket prices to match these perceptions. (Wikipedia)

> routing

Hmm...vastly improved routing was one of the main benefits touted for Concorde B discussed in the fine article.

> plane was conceived in the era of big government bankrolled air travel

It is reported that British Airways then ran Concorde at a profit. (Wikipedia)

Furthermore, it was actually (American) government that had a significant hand in killing the Concorde, by imposing overflight restrictions that made it far less useful. Of course this had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the US competition to Concorde never took off.

> doesn't have a role in the reality of flying buses we see today.

Concorde was operating profitably at time of its retirement, which came after an accident and issues with keeping the fleet in the air.