What an astonishing post from mike-wsm! And what a reasonable reply from M2Dude!
mike-wsm is judging an aircraft designed and built in the 1960's by the standards of a 2010 airline accountant. And thereby wins the booby prize for inappropriate insight.
He suggests the engineers knew they were working on a sham. He may be generalising from someone he knew. (My advice: pick better company.)
The engineers I know who worked on Concorde considered it the pinnacle of their careers. And went on to work on the A320, A330 and A340, all of which benefitted technically from the experience of designing and maintaining Concorde.
Let's look back at the 1960's, when Concorde was designed and flew.
In 1961, a largish Mach 2+ airplane, the B-58 Hustler, flew from Texas via Washington DC and New York to Paris Le Bourget for the air show, mostly at Mach 2 (with aerial refuelling of course). The crew won the Mackay Trophy and the Harmon Trophy for their feat. All that way! That fast!
A week later, the airplane crashed during a flight display at the show. It wasn't exactly easy to handle. When you lost an engine at Mach 2, the airplane broke apart. The USAF purchased 128. By November 1963 there were 95 remaining. They had lost over a quarter of the fleet to accidents. And that was the state of the art in 1961.
Less than eight years later, an aircraft flew that was to perform this feat routinely, many times a day, without aerial refuelling, and with some hundred people on board sipping champagne, rather than three people, two of whom could barely see outside.
The Concorde was the most high-performance aircraft of its day, and of any day since. The aeronautical understanding derived during its development is likely unmatched by any other project in aeronautics.
And that aircraft flew after 64 years of powered flight, and continued flying, doing its thing very well, for twenty-four years of service until the Paris crash (after 95 years of powered flight), and only stopped because EADS decided to discontinue support. We are now at 105 years. With one airplane, one airplane only, lost. Everyone else in those twenty-four years had a good flight.
mike-wsm strikes me as the kind of contributor who would say on an arts-appreciation site that Picasso was just another scribbler, and that his plumber knew it.
PBL