Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Can X-planes solve the sonic boom problem? - BBC News" video.

You are right about flying to hubs but only 1/2 right about Concorde. Yes its was fuel hungry but then going fast in anything is a fuel consumption issue. If you use basic high school science class then you'd know from kinetic energy that going twice as fast requires 4 times the energy because its a squared law. Drag is also a velocity squared function so going twice as fast means 4 times the drag. It does get more complicated at supersonic speed but going those speeds is very fuel hungry. On the other hand Concorde ran very profitably and for many years was British Airways most profitable division. There's a great documentary made after they retired Concorde that was made with a lot of BA Concorde pilots. Its actually a great case study in effective market analysis. After BA realised Concorde was losing money they told the pilots they were going to shut it down. The pilots said it shouldn't be losing money because the planes were basically full for every flight. The BA board challenged the pilots and said if they could get it to make money they could keep flying. So the pilots checked the ticket records and found that the most frequent users were a bunch of bankers in New York, London and Paris. They found out that these guys were doing work where people still had to meet and sign contract papers. So for them being able to zip across the Atlantic sign some papers and zip back was brilliant. When the pilots asked the bankers what they thought the tickets were worth they got a monster shock - none of the bankers knew because their travel was always done by their secretaries. So they asked these bankers what a ticket was worth to them in terms of their time and got an even bigger shock because it was $1000s more than the actual ticket price. So the pilots upped the ticket price to what the bankers believed they were worth. People kept flying Concorde and they made heaps of money. The pilots kept the board to their word and the pilots ran the Concorde division for years and kept it very profitable. What hurt Concorde in the end was Osama Bin Laden because something like 100 of Concorde's most frequent flyers died in the 9/11 attack because they worked in the World Trade Center.
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It wasn't so much Air France but Airbus who held the rights to the engines and airframe maintenance. They refused to keep the planes serviceable. It was done to help sales of planes like the A380. There was a really good documentary made just after the retirement of Concorde made with the British Pilots who flew it. It went into all sorts of things about the running of the British Airways Concorde division.
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@seanarmstrong8255 Yeah charters of any type are usually profitable because you simply look at the actual costs and then add a percentage and that works for anything - planes, boats, cars,... On fuel Concorde was always thirsty but then so has every other plane in history when it flew supersonic. Its one of the reasons why the generations of jet fighters after the 1970s got slower on their top end speed. I remember an engineer who worked on the F111 who said that with full tanks off an air refueling with no external load to add any extra drag that it had enough fuel for about 4-1/2 minutes at full speed. One day when I was at my glider club in 87 one of the tow pilots mentioned that one of the Concorde pilots had just logged his 10,000th hour as pilot in command at supersonic speed. At that moment he had more time as PIC at supersonic than the entire USAF had logged in all its known history. The SR-71 time was unknown at that stage because it was still pretty secret but it was still estimated at only a few 1000 hours. People don't realise that even though there's F15, F16, F18,.... pilots with 1,000s of hours they have only an hour at most at supersonic with most of them only minutes. Its simply not something they do a lot of. Its a combination of fuel and much it stresses the airframe and engines. I was checking something recently about the MIG 25 Foxbat which was built to counter the potential of the XB-70 and could go faster than Mach 3. Yes it really could go that fast but it did so much damage to the engines they were tossed at the end of the flight and scrapped. Not rebuilt but scrapped. When you know these things it just makes you realise how special planes like the Concorde and SR71 actually are/were.
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@seanarmstrong8255 Even crazier is that the Concordes computers were analog. I don't know if you know what that means but the channel Veritasium did a great video on the subject titled "The Most Powerful Computers You've Never Heard Of" The pilots claimed the engine management, auto pilot and flight trim computers were some of the best that any airplane ever had. The real tragedy of Concorde was that when they were taken out of service they had only done about 25-30% of their design lifetime. They should have flown on for many years. Its why a lot of people were pretty upset.
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