It is five years ago almost to the day that Concorde approached Heathrow airport under much fanfare and nostalgia on its last official flight before heading off into retirement.
In a move which for some people signalled a step backwards for technology, the Anglo-French aviation-engineering masterpiece touched down and with it the chance for people to experience supersonic air travel.
But now, an American firm is on the cusp of re-imagining the supersonic dream and confidently plans
The Aerion Supersonic Jet may not have the same grace and style and the size of the great Concorde, but the Aerion group are so sure that the plane will fly that they have pencilled in test flights for 2012, with transatlantic testing to follow soon after.
Reaching a top speed of mach 1.6 the jet will once again put New York within three hours flight time of London.
The company are so confident in the design that they claim to have 50 interested parties, who have all paid the £150,000 deposit.
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Whatever happened to the word "the"? If they're going to change the rules of English, they should at least be consistent about it:
"New Concorde: Supersonic jet will get you from London to New York in just three hours"
...
"Aerion Supersonic Jet may not have the same grace and style and the size of great Concorde"
Is dropping the article an act of snobbery, or is there some other reason for it?
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Quote:
The new Concorde: Supersonic jet will get you from London to New York in just three hours
The Aerion Supersonic Jet may not have the same grace and style and the size of the great Concorde,
Quote:
Originally Posted by ralfp
Whatever happened to the word "the"? If they're going to change the rules of English, they should at least be consistent about it:
"New Concorde: Supersonic jet will get you from London to New York in just three hours"
"Aerion Supersonic Jet may not have the same grace and style and the size of great Concorde"
Is dropping the article an act of snobbery, or is there some other reason for it?
OK, what am I missing. You took out the word "the" when you quoted the article/OP's initial post - and I don't think you should use quotes when you make changes, that's what ... or (sic) is for - then complain that the word "the" is missing?
On topic - this will never happen. I'll put money on it. And a 40% reduction in US-UK flight time does not result in 3 hours.
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Originally Posted by CPRich
OK, what am I missing. You took out the word "the" when you quoted the article/OP's initial post - and I don't think you should use quotes when you make changes, that's what ... or (sic) is for - then complain that the word "the" is missing?
The quotations were corrected for consistency. If one writes "Concorde" then "the new Concorde" makes little sense, nor does "The Aerion Supersonic Jet" (if "Aerion Supersonic Jet" is "new Concorde").
Now if the word "Concorde" referred to a class of service like "Club World" or a project ("Operation Concorde"), then dropping the article is proper. However, using the class of service to refer to the aircraft makes little sense, especially when comparing the aircraft to another aircraft.
Quote:
Originally Posted by finlandia
Concorde was actually named "Concorde," not "the Concorde." Had nothing to do with mangling English.
So Boeing could call its new aircraft 787. I will fly 787 to London. GM could call its car Astra. I drive Astra. Astra is unreliable. I was not aware that one could extend naming power to the type of noun (countable vs. uncountable, etc.). If the aircraft was named "Concorde", then my corrections are correct.
Note that I'm no grammar expert; I'm sure my posts are chock-full of grammatical errors. Feel free to mock them.
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Originally Posted by CPRich
On topic - this will never happen. I'll put money on it. And a 40% reduction in US-UK flight time does not result in 3 hours.
Mach 1.6 is about 1700 kph. JFK-LHR is about 5500km. With no wind and fast acceleration that yields a flight time of 3.3 hours. Add the effects of the jet stream, which could add 150kph to the ground speed, and your get a 3 hour trip time.
3 hours could certainly happen, though not gate-to-gate.
An example of Concorde (or should that be 5% of Concorde) recorded a ground speed of 1488 mph (about 2400kph). Another example traveled from JFK to LHR in under 3 hours (I assume from takeoff to landing). Cut the climb times and 3 hours for a Mach 1.6 aircraft is certainly plausible.
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For Concorde fans... A series of YouTube clips taking in the cockpit of a Concorde flight. There are multiple camera angles and the Captain narrates the action explaining what's happening all the way through. (They must have different sterile cockpit rules over there then we have here). Really excellent videos.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by LarryJ
For Concorde fans... A series of YouTube clips taking in the cockpit of a Concorde flight. There are multiple camera angles and the Captain narrates the action explaining what's happening all the way through. (They must have different sterile cockpit rules over there then we have here). Really excellent videos.
Cool. It's funny that they use "reheat" in the first video, but use "afterburners" in the second video.
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Maybe instead of this new slower thing, Airbus could have decided to stick to their commitment to Concorde and kept it going. The fact it created a loss, to me, is irrelevant. It was a flagship product and should have stayed in business. Too bad the Concorde lounge got flipped over to be used by EK.
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Anyone interested in the supersonic passenger jet biz should read (or re-read) the story in Vanity Fair from a few years ago.
I've posted about it before and can get it out if anyone needs the specific reference.
Without major subsidies, a la French & UK 1970s subsidies of nationalised companies, I'm 100% skeptical of any commercial flight of this aircraft, too.
COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Concorde devotees loved its glamour, its look, and its celebrity cargo. Above all, they loved its speed. And if there were gripes about noise or wasting fuel ... well, for most of the world that $12,000 round-trip was a champagne-and-caviar-filled fantasy. With Air France and British Airways closing the hangar doors on the only supersonic passenger jet, David Kamp considers the 27-year reign of "the white bird," the misfortunes (the 2000 crash, post-9/11 travel cutbacks, rising maintenance costs) that grounded it, and the slender hope that its needle nose will rise again
A quick excerpt (there is much more at the link)
Quote:
But while much is made of the Concorde's glamour-the Connolly leather seats, the generous allotments of champagne and caviar on board, the opportunities one is afforded to see Sir Elton and David Furnish in slumberous repose-what its wealthy passengers are paying for, first and foremost, is speed. The Concorde cruises above the ocean at Mach Two, or twice the speed of sound, which translates to roughly 1,350 miles per hour. (The actual speed of sound varies according to altitude and air pressure, among other conditions.) A 747, by contrast, maxes out at Mach 0.83, or about 550 miles per hour. What this means in practical terms is that the Concorde halves transatlantic travel times: the New York-to-London flight takes only three hours and 20 minutes; New York-to-Paris, three hours and 40 minutes. Flying westward, from Europe to New York, you literally arrive, in terms of local time, before you left-a feature that has proved invaluable to such time-stressed commuters as Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, who says, "What's great about it is I'm able to take my children to school at 8:30 in the morning, drop them off, then take B.A. Flight 001 at 10:30 to New York, and get to New York at 9:30 a.m., in time for my Weight Watchers meetings and speeches."
In flusher times, when British Airways offered twice-daily Concorde service in each direction, an English businessman was able to fly to New York for a morning meeting and return to his London home the same day, without ever bothering with overnight accommodations in Manhattan. "Essentially, what Concorde is is a time machine, a wonderful time machine," says the chairman of British Airways, Lord Marshall of Knightsbridge, who, back in the early 1980s, when he was simply Colin Marshall, the New York-based president and C.E.O. of Avis, was a regular Concorde customer, precisely the kind of hard-charging senior executive for whom the plane was a godsend. Nowadays, though, Lord Marshall is decried by Concorde enthusiasts as one of the heartless suits who have rung down the curtain on the era of supersonic travel. On April 10 he and Rod Eddington, the airline's C.E.O., along with their counterparts at Air France and Airbus, the European aerospace company responsible for manufacturing parts for the planes, announced that the Concorde program was coming to an end, a victim of tough economic times. Maintenance costs were rising as passenger loads were falling, and it seemed wise for all the parties involved to pull the plug as soon as possible, even though the nine Concordes the two airlines kept in active duty were fit to fly until at least 2007-and even though, just 16 months earlier, the airlines, with much fanfare and at considerable expense, had triumphantly returned the Concordes to service after a 17-month pause that began with the July 2000 crash of a Concorde outside Paris. British Airways will cease its Concorde operations at the end of this month. Air France already did so on May 31, a day of rude awakening for the designer Marc Jacobs, who, in his dual capacity as the Paris-based director of Louis Vuitton and the New York-bred head of his own label, flew the plane one to three times a month. "I don't like it," he says, freshly arrived in New York after a seven-and-a-half-hour flight. "I used to get here by eight o'clock in the morning ready to go. But I got in at noon and felt funky."
The news of the Concorde's imminent demise has evoked surprisingly vehement outpourings of grief and sentiment, akin to those elicited by Cal Ripken Jr.'s 2001 farewell tour of major-league ballparks and Ronald Reagan's 1994 "sunset of my life" letter to the American public about his Alzheimer's disease. The French call the Concorde l'oiseau blanc, the white bird, and for many it really is as if a living, breathing species were being clubbed into extinction. "This day is to be marked of a black stone," wrote "Laurent," the florid co-administrator of the French Web site concorde-jet.com, on "Black Thursday," as that April day has come to be known; Laurent further lamented the fate of those mechanics and engineers who "work ardently so that the white bird takes its take-off, those which 'walk' in [its] entrails." The poor guy has plenty of company; it's extraordinary how much the Concorde has captivated even those who have only ever dreamed of flying it.
