Mkuu najua wewe ni mtaalamu kwenye haya mambo but reason yako for discontinuation of concord na TU-400 is the least kabisa why zilistopiwa! Mpaka leo bado watu wanajaribu kurudi to supersonic commercial flight but issue bado iko kwenye fuel consumption and sonic boom (noise)!
Concorde problems which resulted in its discontinuity ;
· It could not do super long haul. It had the range to do transatlantic but not transpacific flights. That was already a large number of possible - and indeed lucrative - routes closed off to it. Concorde therefore only flew from LHR and CDG to JFK, IAD and BGI. The only non Atlantic route was a Bahrain-Singapore route flown very briefly in the 70s by Singapore Airlines.
· Oh, and the ticket price was very high. First class ticket pricing. A return ticket from London to New York would set you back $8000. That was on a good day. you could face up to $11000
· Concorde used roughly 25,629 litres per hour. The average length of a flight was 3 1/2 hours.
So in total a Concorde flight with maximum 100 people used 89,708 litres of jet fuel. Let’s compare Concorde to its long time Transatlantic rival - the iconic Boeing 747.
A non-Concorde flight with a minimum of 400 passengers consumed 59,500 litres of fuel. So Concorde flew far fewer people and consumed far more fuel.
· It was not allowed to fly transcontinental in the USA. The official reason was the sonic boom could disrupt people down below. Although this is certainly true, it is also not unlikely that the Americans didn’t feel particularly hospitable to a foreign supersonic jet flying over their skies when Boeing and Lockheed between them had failed miserably to come up with a viable alternative despite generous funding from the federal government. It took multiple supreme court battles before Concorde could even fly to JFK or IAD - before that it could not even fly to the USA, only to Rio and Bahrain.
· Although it is true that other european countries (W Germany, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland) and Canada did also ban supersonic flights over their territory, this was very unlikely to have much of an effect. This was in the days before much middle eastern airline traffic, it wasn’t worth flying Concorde on a route shorter than 3 hours, and Concorde did not, as already stated, have ultra long distance range, so no airline would have bothered operating Concorde on such flights. These bans were symbolic, the USA ban was a serious blow.
· As already stated, this was before the golden age of middle eastern airlines. Although nowadays Etihad, Qatar and Emirates happily throw money at a fancy plane that has multiple problems because it’s cool, up to the 2000s this was simply not the case.
Footnotes
[1] Concorde: 40 fascinating facts-Telegraph
[2] Flightdeckfriend.com | Becoming an Airline Pilot | Latest Pilot Jobs |
[3] Heritage Concorde
[4] 2 AIRLINES CANCEL CONCORDE ORDERS
