Why did Concorde fail? It was supposed to be the next step in passenger aircraft evolution

Design flaws causing the fuel in the wings to explode.

ozone depletion, longer runways, sonic booms, airport noise, fuel consumption, potential profitability

Yeah, t's not like 9/11 impacted air travel or anything.

Redpill me on 9/11 was it really just a bunch of pissed off Muslims that got lucky?

Yes.
I mean, if there was any non-shit proof otherwise then Dubya's head would be on a stick already.

I wouldn't say it failed, given it was one of three attempted super sonic passenger planes to actually have a career.

It was always going to be somewhat of a prestige project though, hence the lack of financial viability.

But as a piece of technology, it was peerless.

Because it was incredibly expensive to procure and fly and really limited in its operations.

The Concorde was (obviously) optimized for Mach 2 supercruise, but this came at the cost of horrendous low speed efficiency. Its takeoff and landing performance sucked - you had a very high rotation angle requiring the droop nose and a very high takeoff speed - and the sonic boom problem meant that all overland flight was limited to subsonic flight, really hurting the economics of the design. A lot of people don't seem to understand how bad sonic booms can be - the acceptable threshold I've seen for overland sonic booms is ~

The real reason this shit failed is the cost reward wasn't worth it. The real target market for people who needed to be able to go from New York to London and back in a single day was face to face international business meetings. People on vacations don't really give a fuck if the flight is 3 times as long. With the advent of the internet and web based telecommunications the that face to face meeting could easily take place over the web competed for the same customers. Why spend that much money if you don't have to.

The Tu-144, and Boeing 2707 failed, Concorde literally soared by comparison.

good god the original 2707 proposal was retarded.

>Fortunately, supersonic flight does seem to be making a comeback through some NASA programs and commercial proposals for supersonic business jets, but it's still a long way off.
And what about the sonic boom issue? If I understand correctly these things can't fly at supersonic speed over the land.

>And what about the sonic boom issue?
They're loud as shit and can physically damage things. IIRC overpressures of 2psi can break glass, and even the (unattainable under the scope of the study) 1 psi goal set by NASA and Boeing during the HSCT program was considered unrealistic.

Effectively, the accelerating climb to cruise had the potential to by physically dangerous over populated areas once an SST broke the sound barrier, and the swath of noise produced - around 30 miles wide by the estimates I've seen - wasn't considered acceptable based on existing noise regulations. IIRC the Concorde already had issues meeting noise regulations at subsonic speeds because of its engines.

Theoretically, it is possible to reduce to sonic boom to an "acceptable" level by the time it reaches the ground, and NASA and a couple other major contractors are working on that. But it's a really tough problem. You effectively design the aircraft for a specific
>cruise mach
>cruise altitude
>cruise lift coefficient
Which involves factors that you can't realistically keep constant, like weight, or ones completely out of your control, like ambient air conditions.

That depends entirely on the engine used.
It was too small both in fuel and passenger capacity to operate economically, and the tech just wasn't there yet to make it bigger or more fuel efficient. Appropriately for its gotta go fast concept, the concorde was ahead of its time. Even today an economically viable supersonic airliner would be a challenge.

Even if you can get the booms to the point where they aren't breaking peoples' windows, it'd take a hell of a lot more to reduce it to a level where anyone living within 100km of the airport won't be complaining 24/7

They didn't get lucky, they were trailblazer in crashing a plane with no survivors instead of landing it on tarmac and negotiation for release of prisoners which was the norm since forever

bad tyres

good goy

That's what NASA, Gulfstream, and Lockheed are all working on right now. We're well past the point where we aren't breaking windows, but they're working on a true "quiet" demonstrator right now.

Something like the SR-71 with a turbo/stato engine should do the job. Nothing really new, I know...

>Something like the SR-71
Nope. the problem comes from the shock strength and the interactions between the shocks produced by the aircraft. What makes the design so complicated is that you effectively have to manage these interactions all over the underside of the aircraft in every direction all the way from the cruise altitude to sea level.

However, there are some simple principles that can be applied. If you spread a large shock out over several smaller ones, it significantly reduces the noise (see NASA's Quiet Spike). An extending probe like Quiet Spike is one way to do that, but just generally using a very long, narrow design also helps. There's also lots of complicated shaping (demonstrated during the Shaped Sonic Boom Program) that can be done to reduce sonic booms, but those usually end up producing very unusual almost organic designs like pic related.

>but those usually end up producing very unusual almost organic designs like pic related.
>"but"
How is that a flaw? Nature produces organic designs for a reason: they're efficient.

Fucking Muslims ruining it for everyone, even other terrorists

>they're efficient.
Not necessarily, and not always for reasons that would be useful to people. Birds evolved the way they did partly due to limitations of their organic structures, and they operate in significantly different flight envelopes from modern aircraft.

Here's a weird example. Pic related is predicted to be incredibly efficient at supersonic speeds. Does this look like a bird to you?

Da fuck? lol no airport will accept that shit ffs.
Actually it looks like half a bird, and that's exactly what they do with their wings, they adapt the angle of attack depending on their speed.

>they adapt the angle of attack depending on their speed.
Congratulations, you understand a basic principle of lift. But that plane's significance isn't that it changes its angle of attack. It changes the effective sweep of the wing by rotating the entire aircraft (and keeping the engines facing the freestream) from 37 degrees at takeoff to 70 degrees at cruise. It'd be practically flying sideways at Mach 2.

>But that plane's significance isn't that it changes its angle of attack. It changes the effective sweep
Yeah that's what I meant sorry, Im not familiar with aeronautic vocabulary.

stupid nigger

Laptop computers and email happened.

When you can still get work done and communicate with people around the world while you're travelling, people stopped being willing to pay twice as much (or more) just to cut a few hours off the length of a flight.

it was a gas guzzler, basically the SUV of aviation, and vastly more expensive just to save a few hours on travel times

Think about this, it takes 7 days to travel from NYC to London by ship. 3 days to travel from NYC to LA by train. Yet it only takes 7 hours to get to London by a conventional plane, and 5 hours to LA.

Supersonic travel is nowhere near that drastic of a cut in travel time to be worth the expense for the vast majority of people.

it is interesting how so much predicted future tech from the past revolved around making it easier to get to places, like flying cars, but the route of technological advancement has been the opposite. The entire world has come to you.

It's funny you say that, because that's the actual reason asymmetric aircraft are uncommon. People look at them and say "I'm not fucking getting in that" even if they are demonstrably superior.

>Supersonic travel is nowhere near that drastic of a cut in travel time to be worth the expense for the vast majority of people.
That's another thing. The faster you go, the higher the costs for smaller gains. The HSCT study, which looked at proposals ranging from Mach 2 to Mach 10, found that for even the longest feasible flights (London to Sydney, IIRC), the projected takeoff weight balloons almost exponentially with increasing Mach number while the average flight speed plateaus. So while the average flight speed for a Mach 2 transpacific airliner may be Mach 1.5 or so, the average for speed for a Mach 6 design would "only" be about Mach 3, and only barely over Mach 4 for a Mach 10 cruise design.

>Supersonic travel is nowhere near that drastic of a cut in travel time to be worth the expense for the vast majority of people.
Practically yes, but there's still the few percent rich people who want to travel faster than the rest simply because they can. It's a niche but there's still a market for that.

not if you have enough money to fly Concorde

it's not a large enough market to justify designing and building a plane for them, let alone airlines adding them to their fleets and making regular flights with them

That's part of why NASA's planning on starting with a supersonic business jet with its new projects and why there's two companies right now working on flying Supersonic Business Jets.

Luxury is a special market. The Bugatti Veyron costs millions and is still not profitable, yet they build it...

Just building a certain shape of car with a certain logo and people conspicuously consuming it at huge mark up is absolutely nothing like setting up and maintaining the engineering and maintenance pipeline to keep supersonic planes flying chartered routes on a schedule every day.

But it's what Concorde was. It was well known to be a money pit, like the Veyron. I'm not a specialist, but I guess having a flagship like that is profitable for a large group.

It wasn't profitable. That's why it was shut down

It actually looks like there is. There's two companies - Aerion and Spike - that are looking to make Supersonic Business Jets, and they have quite a bit of commercial backing. These are far from a Concorde - they're carrying 6-20 passengers anywhere from Mach 1.2 to 1.8 - but they do fill a niche. Although speedy travel isn't as necessary as it once was, some companies are always going to have problems that require someone to be there in person.

I worked on something similar as part of a senior design project for my undergrad, and as part of the analysis we found that, with a cruise L/D of around 8 - something that at least Aerion looks like they might reach - they end up actually saving money on fuel compared to a conventional business jet in the same class. It's a weird reason - although a supersonic plane would burn fuel faster, it's also traveling for less time, so for a given L/D, cruise speed, and specific fuel consumption, there's a point where a supersonic business jet would theoretically be more economical.

No, without the accident it would probably still be in the air. It wasn't profitable since the beginning.

F-14's distant cousin.

This plane could cross the Atlantic in 3.5 hours. Why did it fail? youtu.be/a_wuykzfFzE
・accident in 2000
・noise
・environmental damage
・fuel inefficiency
・price
・being obsolete

The plane itself wasn't profitable, but it was prestigious and that's a big plus for a company. Otherwise they wouldn't have operate it to begin with.

the Americans.

The yanks kept refusing the planes to land claiming it was too noisy. Filthy fucking pigs deserved it in a building.

>vox

>Why did Concorde fail?

Concorde first flight March 1969

Oil Crisis October 1973

Concorde commercial introduction January 1976

...

Why are SST proposals always so sexy?