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Comment by makerofspoons | Hacker News Reader

Would range have mattered as much to make the Concorde more palatable for airlines and travelers? I have always been under the impression the main reason the Concorde didn't see more commercial success was because the cabin was small. It seems like what was really needed was a design that could hold more passengers.

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I don't think that the cabin size per se really made that much difference. Supersonic flight is always going to cost a lot more than subsonic, so you're targeting the segment that wants the speed/prestige of going Mach 2 and is willing to pay. There aren't that many of these people, and they tend to be sensitive to schedule, so you have to run the service fairly often. That means that you either run a small airplane or give away a lot of seats (even with 100 seats, at least towards the end, British Airways was giving free upgrades to Concorde for a large fraction of the seats).

I think that today the supersonic airliner market is still quite tough, because first class has gotten so good. For transatlantic, you only save four hours, and you can spend that sleeping fairly comfortably or using your computer with provided power and pretty good Wi-Fi.

Where there is more legitimate value is transpacific, where supersonic might shave 10 hours. However, due to the higher fuel burn, there's almost no way to avoid stopping for gas, which erodes the advantage both in time and comfort.

Exactly. Even with modern first/business seating, subsonic trans-Pacific is still a long flight even from the West Coast even if the seating is comfortable and the food is good. But as I recall you need something like 2x the range of the Concorde even to fly a route like SFO-NRT. And, as you say, if you need to fuel up in Anchorage say, you lose a lot of the time advantage.

Wouldn't a SFO-NRT flight do the layover in Hawaii? That seems much more direct, and in either case you're going to have to build the facilities to support the SST.

Look at the great circle route. Hawaii is way to the south. (Although Anchorage isn't quite on the way either.) As I recall when my dad was flying to Japan a lot--sometimes on the company plane--there would sometimes be refueling stops in Anchorage though that may have been leaving from Michigan.

Yeah, and the problem is that there is a range death spiral, so you can't just scale up the plane. More range needs more fuel, which is more weight, so the efficiency goes down, so you need more fuel... I don't think that supersonic transpacific is really solvable with current technology. You either have to refuel mid-air or go suborbital or use a different fuel.

And at some point, if you can make 20 or 24 hours of flying comfortable enough and maybe have good enough communication systems, who cares? (OK, there are a few people who want to go back and forth to Japan in the least time possible. But, let's get real. Air Force One isn't a supersonic jet.)

It's mostly a case of dialing in the space and price per passenger for the market. Given enough space and entertainment options--hey, live performances in the lounge!, celebrity chefs--very few of us really care that much about getting to a destination 12 hours faster.

Just build something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk , only three times longer, put it where it is needed. done. Optionally combine with exquisite duty-free shop for the passengers stretching their legs while it is refueled. How hard can it be?

Supercruise is actually more fuel efficient than subsonic flight. You're going faster but also through less dense air and the engine works more efficiently. The major impetus for the concorde was actually to save on fuel costs. The reason the concorde lost out was that it was using inefficient turbojets at the same time that subsonic airliners were adopting the much more efficient turbofans. Turbofans for supersonic flight wouldn't be developed until the 80s.

This is wildly incorrect. Supersonic is much higher drag. A Concorde got 17 mpg/passenger in supercruise. A 737 gets 80-90.

What you are probably thinking of is that drag peaks in the transonic region (Mach 0.95-.99, say) but the Mach 0.85-.9 mostbairliners cruise at is much lower drag than either.

Drag is higher, but jet engines are more efficient at higher speeds which compensates for the increased drag. Overall propulsive efficiency is at a minimum at mach 1, above that it starts increasing again. Beyond a certain point (supercruise) you get higher overall propulsive efficiency than at any subsonic point.

Again incorrect! Look at the data. In what universe is having 12x the fuel burn (per unit of time) or 5x (by mile) “more efficient”.

A Supercuruising Concorde has higher fuel flow than a (much much larger) 747.

Your whole “engines more efficient at higher speed” argument is totally unsupported by facts. Supersonic flow is a major problem is jet engines. They have to use special very-high drag inlets to slow it down to subsonic velocity to actually combust.

The air being thinner doesn’t help, either. It’s basic chemistry... every unit of fuel you burn requires X units of oxygen. The density doesn’t really matter - except that denser air moving slower decelerates less and thus causes less drag.

You're comparing apples and oranges. The concorde used turbojet engines with afterburners. That's 10 to 50x the fuel consumption of a comparable turbofan like the one a modern airliner uses. If you are using 5x the fuel with an engine that should be burning 10x the fuel, you must be using it in a way that is twice as efficient.

No, that’s just dumb. BURNING MORE = LESS EFFICIENT

Vehicle A takes 10 gallons of fuel to move 4 passengers 500 miles.

Vehicle B takes 40 gallons of fuel to move 4 passengers 500 miles.

In what possible universe is vehicle B more fuel efficient than Vehicle A?

Again, I'm not saying the concorde is a more efficient vehicle, I'm saying flying supersonically is more efficient than flying subsonically. The concorde was an extremely inneficient plane because it used inneficient engines. Were it to use engines with the same efficiency as modern turbofans, it would be more efficient overall.

I'm saying put vehicle A's engine in vehicle B to make some far more efficient vehicle C and it'll only take 5 gallons of fuel to move 4 passengers 500 miles.

And I say that " I'm saying flying supersonically is more efficient than flying subsonically." is a complete load of rubbish unsupported by science or data.

If you study aerospace engineering you derive this in undergrad. Again, the whole reason supersonic transports were pursued in the 60s was to reduce fuel costs, and the attempts were abandoned when turbofans proved a better method of achieving that goal.

Then why did the Valkyrie B-70 have a longer range flying supersonic than subsonic?

As wind resistance increases with the square of the speed and is the major resistive force when traveling by air it's really hard to become more efficient by going faster.

It's probably true that Concorde, with its supersonic optimized design would have been less efficient traveling at Mach 0.95, even when traveling at its optimum speed a subsonic optimized airliner is going to require significantly less fuel per passenger mile. I mean this is one reason Concorde failed: the oil crisis turned its high fuel consumption into a serious liability.

Drag increases proportional to the square of velocity times the density. At higher speeds, you can fly at higher altitudes for a given lift to drag ratio. Higher altitudes -> lower air densities. Drag overall does increase, but at a slower rate than just looking at the velocity alone would suggest. The efficiency of jet engines increases with both altitude and airspeed (which is why subsonic airliners fly as close to the speed of sound as they can get btw). At and slightly above the speed of sound drag dominates, but engine efficiency eventually becomes more important again past Mack 1.6.

The important thing to remember here is that at the same time as the concorde was being developed, another technbology, the high bypass turbofan, was also developed. This looks like and is commonly referred to by the layperson as a jet engine, but the two are very different. A Turbofan is 10 to 50 times more efficient than an afterburning turbojet, regardless of speed. The concorde didn't have turbofans, the planes it was competing with did. You slap the concorde's engines onto any other airframe and fly at any other speed, it's still going to burn an order of magnitude more fuel than a turbofan aircraft.

Compare the concorde to turbojet powered aircraft it is competitive. The turbojet powered boeing 720 got 16 passenger miles per gallon and the 727 got 10. In that context the concorde's 17 at over twice the speed looks pretty good.

So your argument continues to be that the aircraft that is provable, and AS YOU ADMIT, is less efficient, is somehow "more efficient" because "reasons".

Again, that's not my argument. I will continue to assume good faith one last time.

Drag is proportional to density times velocity squared

flying through air with 30% the density at 2.5 times the speed thus produces (.3)x(2.5^2) = 1.875 times the drag.

Using 1.875 times the power for 1/2.5 = 0.4 times as long requires (0.4)x(1.875) = 0.75 times as much energy.

This is before you consider that jet engines moving at higher speeds and higher altitudes are more fuel efficient.

The 737 uses turbofans which are much more efficient than the concorde's turbojets. Trying to compare their fuel consumption is meaningless unless you account for this. If you compare the concorde to a subsonic turbojet of its era, like the 727, the concorde burns significantly less fuel per passenger mile.

Air pressure difference between FL350 (traditional airliners) and FL600 (Concorde) is about 1/2. But the speed difference was about 2.5x, so overall you would expect Concorde to need to expend about 3.125 times as much energy per flight hour. Even with the flight time divided by 2.5 you're burning more fuel for the trip.

Interesting to consider a Concorde like design today using a slightly scaled up version of the P&W F135 supercruise capable turbofans.

But you'd still be competing with highly efficient turbofans like the GEnx series in a cost dominated aviation market. Also you still have issues like not being able to fly over land in the US that seriously limit the potential market.

> Air pressure difference between FL350 (traditional airliners) and FL600 (Concorde) is about 1/2. But the speed difference was about 2.5x, so overall you would expect Concorde to need to expend about 3.125 times as much energy per flight hour.

This is false. First, drag is proportional to air density, not pressure, with density at FL600 being 30% of FL350. Drag is increased by 1.728 times[1], which means thrust required is increased by 1.728 times, but energy required is not linearly proportional to thrust required. As a jet engine moves at higher speeds and through less dense air, it's efficiency increases and therefore the power required to produce a unit of thrust decreases. So even though you need 1.728 times the thrust, you need less that 1.728 times the power. Even if it were the same amount of power, at 2.44 times the speed you are only expending that power for 41% of the time, and thus the energy consumption would be 73%.

There are plenty of very valid concerns with regards to the concorde and supersonic transport in general. For starters, you can't simply slap a modern turbofan on there and call it a day, you'd have to sacrifice decades of lessons learned to make high bypass turbofans of the necessary size, so they're still going to be inferior to more refined engines on subsonic aircraft. But the belief that the laws of physics force SSTs to be ridiculous gas guzzlers and no amount of technological refinement can overcome it is misguided at best.

[1] This is actually an oversimplification. Drag does not scale perfectly with qV^2 through the transonic and low supersonic regimes. Wave drag dramatically increases drag close to Mach 1 (which as an aside is the source of the term sound barrier). Wave drag becomes less significant past Mach 1.4 though and by the time you get to supercruise qV^2 is once again a good approximation.

It was very successful (if not wildly profitable) for most of it's life. It was a great example of a halo project.

Then the Air France crash happened in 2000. That hurt. Then They were brought back into service a bit over a year later, on September 11th, 2001. Talk about bad timing.

Even after BA retired them Richard Branson wanted to buy (and operate) the entire fleet.

It was never profitable on an accounting basis. Only if you ignore cost of construction.

There's a lovely LRB piece by Francis Spufford that covers (amongst other things) the accounting and procurement shenanigans required to avoid Concorde getting prematurely scrapped in the 80s, after it was clear it was a dead-end: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n11/francis-spufford/lov... [paywall]

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