Originally Posted by
jodeliste
If your talking about real profit, does anyone know what the true development costs were and how many airframes they would have had to sell to break even.
With the governments (or you and I really) paying all the up front costs the suggestion that concorde was ever profitable is a bit of a myth . Technical tour de force that it was.
rod
Have a quick look here:
Concorde FAQ
(Scroll down to "How much does a Concorde cost?" and "Did Concorde make a profit for the airlines?".)
IIRC, break-even was slightly over 100 airframes.
You are making the usual mistake of confusing
development costs and
operating costs.
The development costs were covered by the governments, so it that respect, yes, Concorde was a commercial disaster. Even so, the Concorde project paid for much of the groundwork of what was later to become the European Airbus consortium, so it certainly wasn't all wasted money.
BA and AF
bought their first aircraft, much like all those other airlines that chickened out would have done.
Maybe they got a bit of a discount as launch customers, but they certainly
paid for them!
BA and AF were never expected to pay for the development costs... you could say that was not their problem!
BA's operations were in the beginning subsidised, until they "bought out" the government, and revised their cost and pricing structure.
After that, overall, the BA Concorde operation was profitable until the end. Maybe the bottom line of the operation wasn't huge, but it was certainly positive and no myth.
AF's operations, for various reasons, were less of a success story....
CJ