What is Digg?43 Comments
- Zm3r3, on 10/12/2007, -1/+69The day the Concorde was grounded was a day when aviation took a step backwards
- biohzrd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+27When your time is worth thousands an hour, saving 6 or more per flight adds up quickly.
- baxtermaddux, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24"Sonic booms are NOT cool"
this reminds me of what is even less cool. those jackasses that guy to auto pimp-out shops and buy those noisy rice burner tailpipes for their ***** cars. those people should all be shipped off to gitmo - nunbot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18@z
totally; we don't need to go slower. and until we perfect teleportation I wont be happy - johnnybluejeans, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17Did the submitter even read the article? This has nothing to do with ressurecting the Concorde, that statement is completely false. A new supersonic private jet is being developed for commercial travel.
RTFA next time *****. - gwolf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12No, fighters and missiles will always be much faster.
- baxtermaddux, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8yeah, well since the concorde was around for 3 decades, and they never hijacked one, i suppose that says something about their safety. plus, its not like you can go to a flight school in miami to learn how to fly a Concorde.
- illt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8this is not a concorde....it's a ***** 12 seater for the super rich.
concorde was feasible at $5k a ticket. (about british airways first class price with similar or better than first class cuisine)
you got me all excited. - Adgeman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7@ Misesean - I was lucky enough to fly on Concorde a few times. The food was nice, certainly better than all other aircraft but I'm vegetarian so didn't really experience anything outstanding. The wines and brandies were amazing though. I was given a generous glass of Cognac when I boarded for the first time - talk about making a good flight great. Twenty year old champagnes, Johnny Walker Blue etc.
Supersonic was fun but you never 'felt' it. People always asked 'Did you hear the Sonic boom?" Nope; I was about 10 miles ahead of it at the time. :) Looking out of the window and seeing the darkness of the upper atmosphere and the curvature of the earth was very cool indeed.
I got to take the spare seat in the cockpit for landing at LHR the last time I was on it. Fantastic stuff indeed. - FattyCorpuscle, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Woo Woooooooo!
- Adgeman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I don't know of any first class that allows you to see the curvature of the Earth out of the window. Concorde was a little cramped but the ride was amazingly smooth since the atmosphere is a little thinner at 65,000 feet. Concorde is full of a huge variety of sensations - the speeds of take-off, the feeling of the thrusts being turned on or the reverse thrusters being applied on landing. A truly amazing aircraft.
- HiddenForce, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4> Sonic booms are NOT cool
That's why the Lockheed-designed SAI QSST ("Quiet Supersonic Transport") uses sonic boom reduction methods to reduce the downward sonic boom to barely-noticeable levels (they claim 65 dBA) that would allow them to fly over land (assuming the FAA approves it).
For information, look at their website: http://www.saiqsst.com
For some semi-technical information, check out patent numbers 5740984, 6651928 B1 and 6729577 B2. - gwolf, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Current technologies like the F22's ability to super cruise without afterburners suggest that perhaps the industry tried to go supersonic too soon. If no one tries to improve on the limitations of subsonic commuter planes they will never improve performance, fuel economy or safety. Unfortunately, necessity is the mother of invention and there really isn't a compelling economic driving force for improvement right now. Still, even research that isn't fully successful or practical on a grand scale can yield improvements to the aging commuter fleets of the worlds airlines.
- bierce, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6The food on Concorde was nothing special. Going Mach 2+ was awesome.
- marinist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'll guess that flying a Concord is quite unlike your average passenger jet.
- bcorder, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4umm, its fast, but not that fast. most fighters are much faster than it, and i'm not so sure it can pull a 180... something about interia. besides radar works at the speed of light...
- Muncher, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@Axim
Are you trying to say that RADAR works at the speed of "radio" rather than the speed of light? If so, you should know that they travel at the same speed (they're both electromagnetic waves). - NicePaul, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"Entrepreneurs Resurrect Concorde" - no they don't, they plan to build other supersonic jets, as the article says. Thats not as exciting as a story about resurrecting Concorde, which is what I clicked the link for. INACCURATE.
- myfanwy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2err, bollocks. no-one's resurrecting concorde. branson wanted to do it, the uk gov said no, so the planes sit as museum pieces round the country. there's one in Manchester airport the public can visit.
marked as inaccurate - MrDiggle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Agreed. But it is still a good article about free enterprise and how the rich are the beta testers of new technology.
- polyGone, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2For ***** sake, give up the terrorist *****!
If terrorists stole ten million lollypops, who knows what they can do?!?!?! AHAHHHHHHHHHHH - wolfkeeper, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Huh? Concorde had supercruise almost 30 years ago.
- Misesean, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I gather you're not speaking from experience? I've only been on (a) Concorde on the ground, but everyone I've ever heard of who's actually flown Concorde says the opposite: the food was terrific, and supersonic flight was a complete non-event - you wouldn't even know about it except for the machmeter on the forward bulkhead.
- Markpdotcom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Why do you call it THE Concorde? Its just Concorde! As in: "I've just booked my tickets on Concorde" adding 'THE' makes you sound like Cletus from the Simpsons.
- Adgeman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The food was okay but the wine cellar - oh boy that was fantastic.
- JasonPrini, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1When I tried to book once on the Concorde the ticket price was $24,000. I'm pretty sure that was return, and that was still a loss for them.
- tmach, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2You're right, they're not resurrecting the Concorde. But they SHOULD be. Taken out of service because one crashed. ONE!!! How many 727s, 737s or 747s have gone down over the years, and THEY'RE still flying. Sure, it was super-expensive to fly and maintain, but when you have the super-rich willing to pay for the tickets, who cares? Grounding that beautiful aircraft set aviation back a couple of steps. After all, how many of the things we now take for granted were once reserved for the super-rich? Hopefully this new project will pick up where the Concorde left off.
- egrumling, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It's really too bad that transportation hit a brick wall in the 1970s... Price of fuel and general inflation, along with a public (at least in the US) that was skeptical of anything mechanical that was in the hands of "da man." No more moon shots, SST shot down on the drawing board. At least computers got better.
- zombiedog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1While this article is correct, it is incomplete. Gulfstream has been quietly conducting supersonic research for a while and last fall went supersonic with their spike boom attenuation experiments. They are non committal about this leading to production of a SST business jet, but they are spending boatloads of cash on this and are known as the leader of high tech biz jets. From personal experience I can say their EVS systems and flight deck toys are fun to play with.
link: http://www.gulfstream.com/news/releases/2006/061023.htm - Livewired, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It wasn't taken out of service because of the crash. It was the huge lack of air travel after 9/11 that doomed the aircraft.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2They're working on a new type of Super Sonic Passenger Plane that will not have the huge sound or boom, mainly because of its shape. It sounds like it will be pretty awesome.
- Shookit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Because a fleet of 14 Concordes is a significant contributor to the world's pollution problems. Honestly.
- andrebsd, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Brainwave:
You people and your terrorist bull... I have a better chance of winning the lottery than dieing from a terrorist, and quite frankly if someone hijacks a plane I'm on then I'm going to die trying to save everyones butt... I'd die anyway if I don't do anything, might as well try it.
Now of course someones going to say "well if you do something they would kill everyone on the plane"... There aren't enough bullets to do that so they would kill me with a bullet and then everyone else will die with their origional plan.
... And honestly as a side note: The people who keep saying "terrorist this, terrorist that" you might as well call yourself a terrorist. Why? Because the definition of a terrorist is to cause fear. Going around saying "your going to die because of a terrorist" is doing exactly that. - x00x, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Why should they care about the increased pollution and the extraordinarily profligate waste of fuel?? They're the super-rich and can damn afford to pollute, waste the Earth's resources.
- Misesean, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Almost? 2007-1969 = 38 years, less a few months - try "almost 40 years ago"
(And the Lightning did this in 1954, according to Wikipedia) - JimmyDushku, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1This is a dream come true. I love this plane.
- Axim, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3bcorder: RADAR:
RADIO Detection and Ranging - ykcor, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1read plaintext: http://S.DR.AG/www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/start.html
- JackyTreehorn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0The Concorde crashed *before* 9/11. That was the last Concorde "flight" to my knowledge. I suspect Air France and British Airways were looking for a reason, any reason, to ground the Concorde, and one literally fell on their runway. The planes were just too expensive to operate.
- baxtermaddux, on 10/12/2007, -7/+3i wouldnt mind if it had a Sonic the Hedgehog
- NervousSystem, on 10/12/2007, -11/+0I don't see the big deal, why not just fly first class? People just seem to like spending triple-fold the money so they could get there a few hours early..
- Brainwave, on 10/12/2007, -17/+1If terrorists hijacked a supersonic plane, they would have more of a difficult time tracking it down and taking it out.
- elnerdo, on 10/12/2007, -26/+3Supersonic planes are just not suited for use all the time. Sonic booms are NOT cool, and the extra speed isn't exactly necessary for commercial travel.
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