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Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

"The Concorde was what the airlines, aircraft makers, and the public wanted. It was fast. It was expensive. It was a trophy project. "

There's a difference between aspiration and market reality.

'The Public' never actually wants a 'Trophy Project' to the extent that they are not willing to actually pay for it out of their own pockets. Yes, they might like the idea, but what matters is "are people willing to pay the price"?

I suggest there was probably a lot of hubris in the project, that said, there's probably a lot of demand these days for such a thing.

There are a lot of hyper-rich people and they desperately need status.

Also, in Finance, there are a lot of 'important people' who's time is actually valuable. With long-flight times what they are, doing an Atlantic or Pacific run 'very fast' actually is just 'worth it' even for the company paying for it.

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There's a difference between aspiration and market reality

It was a market reality for 27 years — longer than most of the companies that employ people who post on HN.

It was propped up by governments for 27 years as a source of national pride.

One can argue that they got a lot more value out of it than the equivalent amount of money spent on fighter jets and bombers though, and those are just as much prestige projects.

> propped up by governments for 27 years

Research revealed that passengers thought that the fare was higher than it actually was, so the airline raised ticket prices to match these perceptions.[70][191] It is reported that British Airways then ran Concorde at a profit

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

True, but given the vast write-off of development costs, this falls short of an argument for the economic viability of the B model project, which is the issue here.

I think its reasonable to write off development costs, given that it was the first of its kind. This is why we have government funded research: to create technologies that would be too risky for any private company to pursue. The question shouldn't be "is it profitable to create the first one?", its "once we've solved the hard problems, can the industry be profitable?".

> The question shouldn't be "is it profitable to create the first one?", its "once we've solved the hard problems, can the industry be profitable?".

Given that the original project ran into delays and overages throughout, it strains credibility to propose that, starting with the 'B', all the hard problems would be in the past, and that performance would henceforward live up to the promises.

The R&D probably also was somewhat shared with the supersonic nuclear bombers of the same era. Much like spaceflight and ballistic missiles.

By 1960 just about everyone had realized that there was no future in high-altitude supersonic bombers, so I doubt there was any significant military R&D for Concorde to ride the coattails of after that, if there ever was.

The engines were derived from the BAC TSR-2, and at least on the British side there was a some shared from other interceptor projects.

Every jet engine, barring the first few independently-developed ones, was derived from predecessors, so this may mean something significant, or it may not.

The TSR-2 never went into production, which raises the question of which (if any) of these projects was riding the coattails of the other. I accept that the total bill written-off could have been reduced if there was some R&D cost-sharing, but, as the TSR-2 was a ground-hugging strike aircraft intended for relatively short European-theater missions as opposed to intercontinental flight, I suspect the issues that needed R&D were quite different for the two aircraft.

As for supersonic interceptors, the missiles that rendered the high-altitude supersonic bomber irrelevant did the same for the interceptor. The only supersonic interceptor both developed and deployed by the UK was the EE/BAC Lightning, the predecessor of the TSR-2. At least, unlike the TSR-2, this airplane was put into production and into service.

The two engines were designed and built at the same plant (Filton: I lived a few 100 yards from the fence in the 80s -- noisy at times). So there was significant benefit from the previous military projects even if only that they didn't need to build a new plant, test stands, and staff up a new design team.

A lot of the innovation, which went into this plane later went into Airbus offerings.

There would arguably be no FBW (fly-by-wire)[1] in commercial aviation without the Concorde.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly-by-wire

The market reality was that it had only two customers operating only two routes for much of that time whilst most of the aircraft those customers had essentially been given sat on the ground. And it wasn't for lack of unsuccessful experimentation with other routes.

It was government subsidised market reality until it finally failed.

In economics this is the difference between 'demand' and mere 'desire'.

Internet told me that there are a lot of average people who “dream” of existing products; they would “invent” technologies as boring as sliced bread and exhibit cognitive dissonance when shown the specimen of it.

Like if I put a loaf of bread and start eating it before them, they would keep describing the Hypothetical Sliced Bread and that table would look like a live Monty Python filming.

For literature loving people, need-item is subset of want-item chosen by urgency or necessity, but I think maybe logical processes for needs and wants of average people are completely separate that they don’t care how two correlates or overlaps.

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