What Happened to the Concordes?
airandspace.si.edu
These days, it takes seven hours to fly from New York to London, compared to under three hours flying at twice the speed of sound on the Concorde. When I started my internship at the National Air and Space Museum, I was determined to learn why.

Why didn’t it succeed?

Concorde flights came to a screeching halt after only 27 years of operation on October 24, 2003. The reason? Excessive cost, high fares, and loud noise. On a regular flight, Concordes consumed 6,771 gallons of fuel, which quickly exceeded the profit made from the flight. In addition to that, only a total of 20 Concordes were built and no airline ordered them except for Air France and British Airways, who had to as they were state-run airlines at the time.

Oh, and a 2000 crash that killed everyone on board (109 people) and four people on the ground.

  • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    10 hours ago

    Boom Supersonic is a private company working on it, with an eye towards better fuel efficiency than the Concorde. They’re still in the early stages, though, so who knows if they’ll actually be able to finish a design, much less manufacture a working model.

    And NASA has been doing some research on sonic boom characteristics, to see if a plane can be designed to fly faster than the speed of sound without causing a sonic boom.