Originally Posted by
brunos
From 1976, AF and BA tried many different routes plus charter flights. Most were commercially unsuccessful and by the nineties they only flew to NYC.
I believe that those flights had a decent load of high-paying customers. That did not mean that AF made profit as the plane was expensive to operate and required a backup plane ready in case of mechanical problems.
Indeed, from the linked article:
According to figures from the British government, during the first five years of Concorde operations, British Airways recorded a loss of £10.4 million and Air France a loss of £36.7 million. However, the airlines claimed that in some years the SST operations were profitable. This occasional profitability was based on the fact that Concorde’s development and capital costs were absorbed by the British and the French governments. In essence, the Concorde was too expensive for the airlines to operate and maintain with consistent profitability, even though they bore none of the cost of designing and building it.
And:
Although there has not been an accurate accounting of the costs, it was argued in 1976 that the official figure of £1.46 billion had been a drastic underestimate, and that the program cost of Concorde was nearly £4.26 billion. This was approximately £29.15 billion in 2017 pounds, equivalent to about $37.52 billion in U.S. dollars.