Originally Posted by Globaliser
I'm not sure if this has ever been positively confirmed or refuted, but I believe that CDG-JFK was always economically marginal at best, and a real dog at worst.
If the winds over the Atlantic were bad, Concorde could not make JFK from CDG, and would have to stop and refuel or restrict it's payload.
The statistic that floored me, when I worked it out, was that when BA was still operating a double-daily Concorde to JFK, it was flying 200 Concorde seats each way every day, but only about 100 subsonic first class seats. Even at Concorde's relatively low breakeven load factor, you're still needing a very high yield market to make that work.
The CDG crash aside, 9/11 is what really killed Concorde. Forty of BA's top revenue customers were killed in the Towers, evidently, and not only did they spend a ton of cash on Concorde, they controlled the travel budget of a lot of other Concorde passengers, and they're replacement managers stopped flying their employees on Concorde. The loss of those passengers made BA's service unsustainable. I imagine AF was looking for an excuse to end their CDG service for years, and followed BA's lead.
Back to the main point of the thread...the A350 will have one big advantage over the 7E7, namely CCQ. I think that beancounters at the more financially sophisticated airlines would want to see a financial incentive from the 7E7 to overcome this handicap.
I am not familiar with the term CCQ. Can you clarify?
The 7E7 will be more efficient then the A350. It will also probably cost less (based on the 7E7's list price being tens of millions lower then the A330, and one can expect the A350 will at least be as expensive as an A330, if not more). Both should be music to a beancounter's ear.
