French to Get Concorde Back to the Skies

Unlike military aircraft commercial ones are supposed to pay for themselves and the Concorde never did. With airlines hurting financially all over why put a proven loser into your hardware line up? It doesn't matter if the Concorde's flight performance was achieved. The REAL performance is ultimately in the accounting office. If they can't afford to give you free peanuts anymore how the hell can they make that turkey profitable in a free competition astmosphere?

Concorde's Successor needs to do three things:

1. Have TOL and pattern behaviors significantly under 200 knots. Paris happened because the jet is a veritable beer can on a rocket sled in it's skin thickness' versus rotation requirements (and it's just as bad coming in as going out as numerous tail scrapes and 'hard over' rudder fatigue/gear problems under crosswinds have shown).

2. Be able to double the distance at the same costs. Since the Atlantic is a broken sewer between two ghettos compared to where the money is 'really flowing' over the twice-a$-broad Pacific.

3. Be able to carry a minimum of 250 passengers at Mach 3/3.5. This last is the obvious leg breaker on the engineering side since you are almost certainly talking about an exotic fuel (methane or hydrogen, I doubt if even a boron additive would do) to get the energy levels and that will mean an entirely new ramp cryo support system, even if an Asian megaconglomerate decided to put the money in to doing it right.

Would it work? IMO, yes. Because 6-8 hours over the Atlantic is nothing compared to 12-15+ over the Pac in terms of being disgusted with high altitude body reactions and cramped conditions. And because there will always be a snob-cum-glitz factor inherent to saying "Once a day, bring all your hub liners to our port of convenience and we will fly at a profit."

Particularly if 'luxury is our business' comes as a part of a classless high-comfort flying environment (i.e. a _very_ big airframe volume).

Unfortunately, there are political and environmental conditions as well as commercial ones at work which, IMO, will stand on the necks of any Kuala Lumpurian type mega financial (consortium) effort to pull the trigger out of Asia.

Sure be a good lesson to both Airbust and Boing though.


KPl.

Originally posted by ch1466
Be able to carry a minimum of 250 passengers at Mach 3/3.5.

One of the reasons the American SST failed was it tried to go too fast, and needed fancy materials [aka not aluminium] to withstand the heat.

I'm not sure how much more successful different practical composites are - but if we take the F-22 as an example, heating has been posed as a limiter on the airframe's speed.

The SR-71 had the capability to withstand Mach 3 heat since the 1960's, is incorporating titanium into the skin still that difficult?


[edit on 23-10-2006 by WestPoint23]

As much as i think its beautiful to look at, and certainly draws oooh's and ahh's from onlookers, i never want to hear the big white pointy thing in the sky again.

When your a kid and its flying overhead its great, but when you live in a town where it does most of its circuit bashing when crew training, those four Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus engines get a little wearing 30 times a day.

Originally posted by WestPoint23
The SR-71 had the capability to withstand Mach 3 heat since the 1960's, is incorporating titanium into the skin still that difficult?

Its not difficult - its expensive!


I'd love to see a viable business model for an aircraft built from titanium