[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.

[jacobreg]

I think its reasonable to write off development costs, given that it was the first of its kind. This is why we have government funded research: to create technologies that would be too risky for any private company to pursue. The question shouldn't be "is it profitable to create the first one?", its "once we've solved the hard problems, can the industry be profitable?".

[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.

[gsnedders]

The engines were derived from the BAC TSR-2, and at least on the British side there was a some shared from other interceptor projects.

[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.