The Concorde will fly again! (maybe)

boing
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Ha! Very nice!

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Precisely. It was, in fact, designed and built too soon, before the technology was really available. Visit a Concord(e), e.g. at Duxford, and you will find it is cramped and the avionics and cockpit look really primitive. It was only really acceptable in a day when a much higher airline death rate was tolerated than ambulance chasing lawyers people would tolerate nowadays. Flying Concord was mainly about bragging rights; it was dead commercially when email and mobile phones meant that businessmen didnā€™t need to cross the Atlantic in a few hours, they preferred to be out of contact of the office for a working day so they could actually think and get stuff done.
It was an interesting technology demonstrator, but I really wouldnā€™t want to fly in one even if the fares were comparable to those for a subsonic plane.

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Random contribution: I had a girlfriend a number of years ago, whose high school nickname apparently (according to her) was Concorde. Something to do with her nose. I thought she was quite pretty.

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I would hate to be the parts procurement officer for this project.

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Oh. I think it would be fun

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That is a Tu-144, the SST race opposite to the Concorde. Concorde was luxury and speed, Tu-144 was a scary, loud, slapped together but for the records supersonic POS which only ever flew as a fleet enough to be recorded as the first SST, beating the Concorde by a few months and showing the triumph of narrowly focused Soviet Socialism which it turns out was already only a decade from going bankrupt from these stunts.

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Iā€™ll take 5 and a half hours Seattle to Sydney in the Concorde over 22 hours in even the most comfortable 747. I donā€™t hate flying. But I absolutely hate breathing everyone elseā€™s recycled air and listening to screaming babies all day.

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Concorde will need three hops for that trip, so it will be rather more than 5h30. Given its unreliability, there will be significant ground time for checks. And it will be phenomenally expensive. A conventional aircraft will be around 16h in the air, and you would be able to go first class for less than the price of the Concorde trip. Despite its expense, the standard of travel in Concorde is basically cramped economy. I know which I would prefer.

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Hell, Iā€™d prefer a month on a schooner. Australiaā€™s not going anywhere, whatā€™s the rush?

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Well, depends on the boat and the skipper but in principle,yes.
Some nomads believe that if you travel too fast you leave your soul behind and have to wait for it to catch up. I think this explains the shiny, glazed look of so many businessmen.

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Because things start to happen very fast but are all over very quickly?

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The existence of the Tu-144 makes me wonder if it and Concorde were meant to be supersonic nuclear bombers.

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Much of the design of the concorde was based on data gathered with an xb70

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You beat me to it; I figured the SSTs were follow-on developments.

IIRC the Concorde project was subject to industrial espionage by the Tupolev project, so @jerwinā€™s idea might indeed be workable, assuming some degree of commonality (and using duct tape where there isnā€™t any).

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Maybe thatā€™s part of the fun he was thinking of?

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Strapping a bunch of rich people on a huge, thin-walled tank of jet fuel and hurtling them towards Monaco at supersonic speed? I like it!

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If you travel from A to B and then back to A, does the soul have to follow the whole route, or will it make a U-turn once you pass it on the return leg?

And/or they are pretty costly.

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I suggest you apply for funding to find out. Documenting the experimental methodology should be interesting.

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Braniff! Now thereā€™s a blast from the past! I lived in Dallas the first time they went bankrupt. It looked like someone had spilled a basket of Easter eggs all over DFW!

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