Concorde performance
Agree with the positive comments, am incredulous that BA's share price hasn't taken a battering over this - surely investor confidence should be dented at BA's inability to use this as a neat loss-leader (or even break-even if they managed it better) - must reflect appallingly on the strategists at Watership Down.
I have a couple of performance questions re Concorde's future viability if by some miracle Sir Richard actually would invest in a 15 year programme to keep the things flying. I'm assuming some major technical changes would be made, but can we do the following? I'm not an engineer or pilot so no clue.
1. Make it land on 2500m of runway?
2. Improve range so it can fly to Rio and Buenos Aires, or even Tokyo via the Arctic?
If not, what about starting from scratch to develop a new version supersonic passenger jet, same type of design, maybe slightly larger to allow say 150 passengers, improved noise and fuel consumption to allow more distance and flights over low-density population at least (I'm thinking in particular over north Canada and down to LA or even Mexico and up, or via Siberia to Far East).
Lots of the design is already there from Concorde, other supersonic projects and the laughable and very ugly thing Boeing were toying with. And there was a project to do with flights even higher than Concorde, I think over 90,000ft, to pick up some of the pull of orbit - not saying this is feasible but could tap the design technology.
From a passenger perspective, if you can better than halve flight times to these places, and rig the whole thing entirely business and first class, you could probably make it viable with 150 seats and >80% loads. Concorde's problem has been size and reliability (they have to keep adequate seat cover in Club and 1st 747's in case they cock up, meaning artificially lowering yields and turning it into a big loss-leader), and issues as to limited destinations due to range, noise and runway.
Thoughts please? Am I just a dreamer? Seems a shame to be taking retrogressive steps instead of going forward. Anyone got Clive Sinclair's number?
Cheers
frb98mf