Why has the Concorde never returned to service? after all this time there must have been solutions to whatever grounded it
Posted by Hemp_maker@reddit | aviation | View on Reddit | 7 comments
Tiny_Reading_4755@reddit
It was, but service ended in 2003 due to decline in trans Atlantic travel due to 9/11 2001
OkReading9911@reddit
Sent from my iPhone using voice-recognition dictation. Please forgive Siri if not all words are translated perfectly. Thanks. Chris “sealing”
OkReading9911@reddit
Yeah, it was a specific maintenance issue. They had a FOD puncture of the fuel tank, which was beside the hot engine and then led to a fire and the crash. That was the end of Concord, which all could’ve been avoided by putting in a self ceiling fuel cell bladder.
annaoze94@reddit
I would love to see another Concorde I remember when I was a kid in the '90s My dad would point them out to me because I think They flew out of O'Hare a couple of times. We also stayed somewhere in Virginia where they would fly out of Dulles and we would see them from where we were on the beach.
I mean of course Boeing can't even get us from pointed to point me safely sarcasm but for 2024 there's been a lot of very public accidents and I think that the most trusted airplane manufacturer Boeing is still recovering from a PR nightmare so people want to trust what they used to trust and then they might start trusting something like Concord that a lot of people were way too young to remember when it was in service
RationalOptimistOG@reddit
The real reason is REGULATION.
In 1964 the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) conducted 1,253 sonic booms over Oklahoma to test how disruptive they were. Three in four residents said they didn’t mind. But a tiny 3% minority raised hell.
That was enough for the FAA to outlaw supersonic flight in US airspace in 1973. From that point, the Concorde could only unleash its true speed over ocean. This severely limited the routes the Concorde could take, which guaranteed no airline could make money flying supersonic. The last Concorde flight was in 2003.
A few thousand people in Oklahoma City in the 1960s halted all progress in flight speed.
Startups Boom Supersonic and Astro Mechanica aim to transform flying by making it quieter. They're creating engines that are quiet and efficient at slower speeds for flying over land, but can go supersonic over oceans. This is a very hard problem to solve at a reasonable cost, which is why only the military has such planes today.
Boom is also designing the shape of the jet to deafen sonic booms. Think a soft thump instead of an earth-shattering roar that can break windows if it happens at too low an altitude.
I believe supersonic jets will soon be able to fly anywhere as the technology improves.
silverfstop@reddit
Was it ever very (at all?) profitable?
To add what others have said: The optics aren't great either.
Jazzlike_Warning_922@reddit
Apologies for replying but I was doing some reading the whole morning on why it wasn't possible for the Concorde to fly beyond retirement and someone on a forum mentioned that towards the latter stages of the Concorde's life it was making 150k profit per flight for British Airways.
Haven't seen any other information verifying that but will keep looking.