Turns out a lower volume or air in a gas turbine engine moving at supersonic speed is much less efficient than a large volume of air moving at lower speed.
The 787 boasts around 120 passenger miles per gallon. So the Concorde uses 4x this much at highest efficiency. Not bad for 60's engineering at mach 2! I can see why it was not profitable to operate however, due to the increases in fuel cost since the aircraft was designed.
http://www.darinlee.net/fuel/fuel_widget.html
But even if fuel represented 100% of the ticket price, these supersonic flights could catch all of first- and business-class market. Rich people and businessmen value their time.
Note that the idle fuel consumption (1t/hour; not sure whether that figure was per engine or for the entire plane) was not higher than cruising (4-6t/hour) -- it was just high in absolute terms.
Fuel consumption during takeoff and climb was something like 25 tons an hour. Part of this is because the Concorde's wing has high drag at high angles of attack, most of it was due to the engines needing to be in full afterburner. The plane needed full afterburner to take off even without a full load of fuel on board.
At low speeds, most of the turbofans' power goes to creating a really high-speed stream of exhaust. That's what I mean about the engines being fundamentally more efficient (at converting fuel into forward motion) at higher speeds, where the exhaust speed more closely matches the speed of the plane.
Even so, since drag tends to increase as the square of velocity, and in proportion with density -- you're spending a lot more effort to maintain velocity at higher speeds. The afterburners are mentioned as increasing fuel consumption by 80% and power output by 17%. The high fuel consumption comes down to the plane accelerating, climbing, being in denser and warmer air, and heavier -- all at once. While the engines might be marginally more efficient in some sense at high speed, this would be cancelled out by the vastly higher drag at low altitude/speed.
Back in those days, airline security was a lot more relaxed: despite numerous hijackings nobody had yet figured out that a couple of hundred tons of airliner and jet fuel made a potent self-guided cruise missile, so the usual ending of a hijacking was on the ground with a negotiated hand-over. It was still possible to get from drop-off at the airport to the Concorde departure lounge in under 30 minutes; and for the trip from Arrivals at JFK to Wall Street ... well, that's what helicopters are for. (If you can afford a Concorde ticket you can afford a helicopter limo service!)
The immediate aftermath of 9/11 pushed the suggested minimum check-in time for trans-Atlantic flights up from 30-40 minutes to 3 hours, for everyone, VIP's included. So the folks who could afford a first class ticket -- the only kind of seat available on Concorde -- decamped for NetJets and other bizjet services, because the civil aviation security regulations didn't apply to private jets and you could still do the 30 minute from door-to-plane thing.
(And then Airbus refused to renew Concorde's type certification at the 30 year mark, allegedly just as they were discussing development of a new second-generation SST with a large Japanese corporation ...)
The lightest airport security in my experience was in the mid-to-late 90s following deregulation. I flew from Sydney to Zurich in 1998 without breaking stride at either end (literally waved through every checkpoint).
That was admittedly pretty ridiculous, but they were generally a bit lax back then. I thought it was actually rather odd because there had been a number of incidents, like Lockerbie, and the gulf war was a thing, and people actually were sort of worried about airplane terrorism. Not worried enough I guess...
The immediate impetus for retiring the plane seems to have been the prohibitive cost of rewiring on the whole fleet, to bring it into compliance with stricter modern requirements.
It didn't help matters when one of the Concordes briefly caught fire over the Atlantic due to an electrical short, something that was only discovered after the fact.
It's all in the thread, man!
Technically no, but the 747 is fast, almost too fast in these days of fuel economy.
The 747 was designed by Boeing to do M.87 (Pan Am wanted M.9) , though it now sits around M.855 (913 km/h) [1] due mainly to the requirement of fuel efficiency over raw speed. Almost Mach 1. How did Boeing designers get this speed? Hint: The hump and area rule (min drag > M.8) [2] Now a DC8 was pushed to M1.012 under special conditions. [3] And as a point of interest, Air Force One (VC-25A) is rated at M0.92 (1015 km/h). [4]
[1] http://www.boeing.com/boeing/commercial/747family/pf/pf_400e...?
[2] http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/performance/q0150a.shtm...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_DC-8#Production_and_te...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_VC-25#Specifications_.2...
wing sweep alone doesn't explain why the 747 is the fastest subsonic transport to date. If it did, competitors would have copied the idea. I'm curious why? Boeing describe it as a combination of wing design, engine, electro-mechanical systems. Maybe I should ask Boeing.
[0] http://www.boeingblogs.com/randy/archives/2006/08/father_kno...
My source for the wing sweep thing is also Joe Sutter, in his wonderful book. Also highly recommend Widebody, by Clive Irving, which is sadly out of print.
As for flying over populated parts of the U.S. at supersonic speeds, not even the U.S. Air Force gets to do that. (Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8209976)
I saw the Concorde at OshKosh Air Show. Doubt they had problems flying there, landing, and setting up for viewing plus several demonstration flights. After that, I recall they were set to fly out west coast for another show.
Don't think the USG had any issues with the plane.
Not to mention the flights from JFK to Heathrow and Paris.