Another SST please

Or should we aptly coin it the Flight of the real Intruder - for it intrudes upon wasted leisure time.

Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde is a turbojet-powered supersonic passenger jet airliner that was in service from 1976 to 2003. It is one of only two supersonic transports to have entered commercial service; the other was the Tupolev Tu-144 of the Soviet Union. The US was working on their own version that never went into service. The Boeing 2707 (for short). The US had already spent millions on the project that never saw the light of day.

My brother and sister bragged of making several trips from London and Paris to the US in half the current ETA. I cannot get over my jealousy. I want to make that wormhole trip as well! I had a flight booked in the 80's but missed it hanging out with a girl in Paris. (I didn't mind it at the time.)

I cannot believe there hasn't been another joint SST project. Technology is even more advanced now and the niche market will always be there. I travel quite a bit more than the norm. I have friends in Romania, France, Lithuania, England and family spread about the globe. With a flat in the UK, a beach house on the East Coast, a joint family home in Nantucket, I can enjoy these assets more if I could zip about in a few hours! I could be much more, spontaneous - a quality my soon to be wife adores. As it is, one has to plan too much, taking 13+ hours to accomplish some flights. I don't know, I just like the idea of some transatlantic flights being too short for certain movies.

Come on. Isn't it high time to relaunch the SST wonder years with a much more expanded service route?

It reminds me of the Malign's streak drive and its advantages.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ ... 7-hist.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144

Fully agree. There must be more than enough people who could afford such a service, when you look at the sales of very expensive houses and cars.
As an aside, consider the Space Shuttle, how many people were still driving the same vintage car as it when it went out of service?

Probably not going to happen.

Consider the following:
1. Concorde was always hamstrung by the requirement to remain subsonic while over land. This is not a big deal if you're going across the Atlantic, but it does rule out routes from Europe to Asia, Europe to Africa and intracontinental US routes.
2. The dynamics of supersonic flight (fuel consumption, necessary hull shapes etc) make it impractical to build a plane that can carry enough passengers to make a profit on each flight given current fuel prices.
3. There is no business need to ship executives around the globe at a moments notice when a video call through skype will do.
4. While there are enough people who could afford an SST ticket once a year or whatever, there aren't enough of those people around to fill enough planes for a daily or even weekly schedule.

Concorde was always a prestige project. It was never a necessary development, it was never a big profit engine for the airlines that operated it, and as we got better and better telecom tech, it degraded further and further into a luxury thing.

The E wrote:Probably not going to happen.

Probably true, mostly because of point one.

The E wrote:Consider the following:
1. Concorde was always hamstrung by the requirement to remain subsonic while over land.

There was also the claim the Concorde's exhaust was damaging the ozone layer and other eco-nazi objections in addition to the political "noise pollution" restrictions.

The E wrote:2. The dynamics of supersonic flight (fuel consumption, necessary hull shapes etc) make it impractical to build a plane that can carry enough passengers to make a profit on each flight given current fuel prices....

I think that improvements in engines and computers make much of the aerodynamics more practical. Many modern military aircraft are now capable of "super-cruise" at the same Mach numbers flown by Concorde (and higher) which would bring fuel consumption down to something a bit closer to affordable for a new SST design.

Weird Harold wrote:I think that improvements in engines and computers make much of the aerodynamics more practical. Many modern military aircraft are now capable of "super-cruise" at the same Mach numbers flown by Concorde (and higher) which would bring fuel consumption down to something a bit closer to affordable for a new SST design.

Well. Small issue. Concorde was supercruise-capable. It only used afterburners to power through the transonic interface (which it could have done on supercruise, but doing so would have used too much fuel).

Thing is, you could probably build a new SST that is a bit more fuel-efficient than Concorde was, that can carry a few more passengers, that is overall more economical than Concorde could ever hope to be. But even so, we're talking about an investment of hundreds of millions, probably billions in research and development, followed by an impressive price tag for each plane. Each Concorde cost something short of 200 million USD (in today's currency); For that price, you can get a Boeing 787 or an Airbus A330, both planes with a proven track record and known profitability ranges.

cthia wrote:Come on. Isn't it high time to relaunch the SST wonder years with a much more expanded service route?

It's a research project with so far limited funding but Reaction Engines Ltd. is working on the LAPCAT A2, a Mach 5 SST. The pre-cooler, a rather essential part of the engine, seems to work in demonstrations already.

The next 'SST' is most likely to be a business-type aircraft with max capacity of around 20 passengers. Even with the above mentioned abilities for video-presence conferences, there is a growing 'need' for long-distance travel that minimizes executive down-time AND enhances ego & prestige!

While there is a dog pile-deep of hype, there are significant pros to this operation. Smaller aircraft equals smaller sonic booms and some of the experimental work appears indicates that even that can be minimized. Also smaller planes need smaller engines and current designs appear to be 'easily' ramped-up but would still have reasonable fuel costs (for values of multi-national corps).

Barring a major tech break-through, I'm not going to be able to do the trans-sonic dance in my lifetime. If you want to read a supersonic dream, look at James Hogan's 1978 Inherit the Stars / 2006 The Two Moons (Baen). He has his protagonist board a Boeing 1017 that does a VTOL from London with a 2 hour flight to San Francisco at 54 miles altitude and speed of 3,160 knots (Mach 10!) Oh, and he also had flying cars in the book!

The E wrote:1. Concorde was always hamstrung by the requirement to remain subsonic while over land. This is not a big deal if you're going across the Atlantic, but it does rule out routes from Europe to Asia, Europe to Africa and intracontinental US routes.

I know they have experimented with some airplane designs (scale models) that drastically lessen the sonic booms which would mean it may possible for transsonic flight over land.

But in the end it all comes down to economics, can an SST be economically feasible compared to the latest generation of people moving jets?

I always knew what I was up against from reading all about the various programs and problems. As far as profit, the industry underestimated what they could actually charge. I remember my ticket (one way) was around $5,000 US dollars. I would have paid ten thousand or more easily. And would now. Many businesses would as well for critical dealings.

There are times when a video call or skype just won't do. Times when you need to look a perspective client in the fleshandblood eye. Such as when dealing with Japanese businessmen. Mutual respect cannot be properly shown on video. Many subtleties are lost.

The US version was going to hold more seats to assist in being profitable. I certainly see the concern regarding being able to fill the seats as often as a regular commercial flight to be practical from passenger to airline, but I believe that if you build it they will come. I'd fly every month and rack up frequent flyer miles like peanuts. It isn't the monetary cost of the flight that would concern me, but the cost of the time of a regular flight.

Market the thing right. Valentines Day, Lovers Day any day of the week with a quick trip to France and back in an eight hour period with a romantic 7-course meal at a lovely quaint Chateau.

Athletes would be a major target market. What super athlete wouldn't want to save several hours travel time - that could better be used resting and/or preparing - enroute to a single event and hundreds of hours travel time each year? And spectators could catch events that they normally couldn't. I caught a few Wimbledon matches several weeks ago, but would have caught plenty more if there was an SST. My fiancee' jumps at any chance to travel home to England.

I was thinking more on the lines of advanced aircraft design shared by two countries. A smaller, more efficient, acceptable emissions plane would be phenomenal. I still think the market was greatly underestimated. People will pay exhorbitant fees for convenience and practicality. And oftentimes it is a necessity. A successful SST that could also operate over land (akin to dropping out of Warp lol) would be the kicker. Just look at it as an SST convenience store. Convenience costs and we pay a third of a billion dollars annually on convenient stores because no one wants to wait in line. We value our time.

But people do pay outrageous prices for convenience, exclusivity, bragging rights, practicality and necessity. People with means are willing to pay for the best. Everyone scoffed when a famous personality sent an employee on a two hour roundtrip plane flight to buy a $50 NY burger. Not me. I said, "you go girl!"

And what about this. I won't say whether I've indulged...

The Fleurburger
As is everything in Vegas, the FleurBurger 5000 is over the top with a hefty price tag of $5,000.00. Created by Chef Hubert Keller, the FleurBurger 5000 is served at Fleur de Lys in Mandalay Bay. It is a Kobe burger containing foie gras, a special truffle sauce, and is served on a brioche truffle bun with black truffles on the side. The burger is served with a bottle of Chateau Petrus 1990 poured in Ichendorf Brunello stemware (you get to keep the stemware)imported from Italy, and a certificate of authenticity will be mailed to your home so you can brag to your friends about how you spent $5000 in Vegas...on a burger.

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, except the bill.

Point is, that's the cost of an SST flight.

cthia wrote:The US version was going to hold more seats to assist in being profitable. I certainly see the concern regarding being able to fill the seats as often as a regular commercial flight to be practical from passenger to airline, but I believe that if you build it they will come.

They did build it. They didn't come. That was kind of the problem.

And I assure you if they could have charged more they would have. Sure if they increased the prices *some* people would have paid, but not enough to make up the revenue loss from all the people who would tell them to go screw themselves and taken a regular flight instead.