Originally Posted by
tdracer
BA was able to make money on Concorde as in positive cash flow. But they were basically given the airplanes. The commercial failure aspect comes from the simple fact that no one wanted them to build any more (what I've heard is that at least one production Concorde was built but never put into service - basically becoming a donor for spares - not sure if that's true).
Not as far as I know - the first UK "production" Concorde intended for testing rather than line flying (G-BBDG) did end up as a donor for spares, but it wasn't a case of an aircraft without a home - it was just the way things turned out - they never intended to sell it to an airline. In fact that very airframe is the one now living at Brooklands. Several things kiboshed Concorde as a going concern in the '70s - not least of which was the protest movement in the US making US airlines shy away. Above all it was not an issue with the project itself, but the early '70s oil crisis which had the most drastic effect. In fact, while the UK government effectively wrote off the cost in the '70s, the profits BA ended up making could have made a sizeable dent in the development costs.
I also suspect it was too much of a point design - it didn't have the range to be useful in the Pacific.
There was a B model on the drawing board which could very well have been capable in that arena.
CONCORDE SST : CONCORDE B
If BA (and Air France) honestly thought Concorde was a profit center (rather than brand prestige), they would have wanted more
.
In fact, BA significantly underestimated what customers would be willing to pay for Concorde service at first - it was this realisation that enabled them to turn a profit!
The same thing would have applied to the Boeing SST if it hadn't been cancelled (I knew a guy that worked on the Boeing SST inlet control system - talk about complex
). Cancelling the SST is probably the best thing that ever happened to Boeing - it likely would have bankrupted the company.
Well, that was kind of the crux of the issue. Boeing had already effectively bet the company on the 747 project, and the 2707 still had technical issues on paper that the Concorde project had already solved. As far as my reading suggests, the runaway success of the 747 in fact owed a lot to the issues that ended up swamping the DC-10 and L-1011 - essentially gifting Boeing a market leading position and rescuing the company from the abyss - the 2707 was cancelled long before that became a reality though. In effect, before the success of the 747 was a done deal, Boeing couldn't stretch to doing both.