Originally Posted by
tdracer
The Concorde and Boeing SST business cases were built on a couple flawed assumptions.
First, jet fuel would remain dirt cheap and the higher fuel burn of supersonic travel not contribute significantly to cost of operation - which was blown out of the water by the first Arab oil embargo.
Well, the 2707 project never advanced to the point where such practicalities were considered - but it's certainly the case that part of the Concorde "B" spec was intended to do away with reheat (afterburner) entirely, and be much more fuel-efficient as a result.
Second, that the majority of demand for air travel would remain for the 'premium' product - basically that the majority of people would happily pay a premium to get there faster. This assumption applied to most people who flew on jets in the 1960's - either business travelers or well to do people that weren't that worried about what it cost.
Not necessarily - supersonic travel as a "premium" product was always intended to co-exist with subsonic offerings, much as it ended up doing. There's a revisionist narrative that has the USA betting on mass transit with the 747 versus Europe betting on supersonic transit with Concorde - but all the contemporary material I've read indicates no such thing. Even setting aside the protests within the US against the Concorde, the simple fact is that SST was never going to be a viable domestic solution, so that limited the market for the 2707. Whereas a transatlantic SST was very much a viable proposition due to the transoceanic nature of the journey. It could be argued that even with the oil crisis and the subsequent drop in orders, the UK and French governments gave up on the Concorde project too soon.
Reality was it went the opposite direction - a shift that started with the 747 and other widebodies. The economies of the wide body aircraft lowered the cost of air travel to the 'everybody' level. Suddenly there was a whole new class of air traveler - people for whom an extra $100 airfare meant they just wouldn't go, never mind that they'd get there in half the time. In short, they didn't foresee air travel becoming just another commodity - the low cost trend that continues today.
If that were genuinely the case, then there would have been no Airbus project or consortium. As Clive correctly points out, the A300 project started taking shape while Concorde was undergoing her proving flights. While there's no doubt that the Concorde project was completed for political reasons most of all, the idea that she was a forlorn hope before she went into service is grossly unfair.
The reality was, both the Concorde and the SST needed to sell hundreds of copies to even begin to justify the development costs. The evolution of air travel into a low cost commodity, combined with the rising costs of jet fuel, insured that would never happen.
Yet, as alluded to before, the R&D gains and technological knowledge coming from the project helped to lay the foundations of a pan-European aircraft maker which would eventually go toe-to-toe with the best the USA had to offer. The sidestick technology which led to an unprecedented level of commonality between short-haul and long-haul types was first tested on a Concorde airframe (Google "concorde minimanche"). Added to which is the fact that in Concorde, for all the project's problems, an airliner was produced which - on a technological level at least - left every competitor in the world in the dust. That is something that can never be taken away.