Originally Posted by
IAH-OIL-TRASH
Didn't help the Concorde.
Concorde was actually a profitable aircraft for BA for most of its career. The biggest issues that leading to the retirement of Concorde were passenger downturn in the wake of the AF crash and 9/11 but most of all, the decision of Airbus to stop supporting the model.
Originally Posted by
jsloan
I think the problem with three-class F is that it was cannibalized by the increasing hard-product quality of J.
Boom and UA are betting that supersonic travel is a meaningful-enough differentiator to get people to spend at the F price point again.
Not only this, but to have a successful F product, it needs to be significantly differentiated from J. Having just a larger seat and a soup course added to the J menu isn't anywhere near good enough to attract F customers. Looking at airlines that have been successful with their F products (AF, CX, EK, JL, LH, NH, QF, SQ) there is a significant step up from J to F.
When you look at the airlines that have failed with F, little effort was made to differentiate the F product from the newest J products outside of the seat, which wasn't really enough.
Supersonic on the other hand is a pretty significant difference. Being able to wake up relatively late in London and still arrive in NY at the normal start of a workday is a big deal. While 3.5 hours for a TATL isn't exactly revolutionary, it's still very different from 7-8 hours and one would hope development could get that down to more like 2-2.5 hours.