[rollei_list] OT - The Concorde
- From: Marc James Small <msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 19:25:51 -0400
At 03:37 PM 4/21/05 -0400, Ardeshir Mehta wrote:
That went right though the roof, admittedly.
All the same there's something fishy about the Concorde cancellation. I=3D20=
=3D
wrote a post about it on another mailing group as follows:
Ard
You miss the point. The Concorde was effectively a loss-leader from the
get-go. The British and French built it in anticipation that the US would
follow suit and that they would enjoy national prestige by beating the US
into the market by four or five years. There were huge government
subsidies to the development of this aircraft which were never charged
against either British Airways or Air France. So, in the end, the Concorde
was simply a black hole into which huge sums of money disappeared; there
are many parallels in transport history -- among them, the Zeppelin
airships, which never recovered their cost of production, and many ocean
liners which were grossly subsidised by the government for matters of
national prestige.
In the case of the SST, the US put a quit to this in the last years of the
Johnson Administration and the early years of the Nixon Administration by
simply stating that there would be no Federal subsidy to produce a US SST,
so Boeing rapidply lost all interest in its Concorde-bashing project. The
US attitude was in part based on sour grapes: the refusal to allow the SST
to fly into DFW was a prime example of that. But it was also based on a
recognition that the transport industry had to pay its own way and that the
US had achieved such a super-power status as not to need to fund such craft
for purposes of national prestige.
To be fair, the first commercial aircraft only entered production due to
government subsidies, and the transition from gasoline to jet engines was
similarly a result of taxpayer contributions. But, though it took some
government money to make the Ford Tri-Motor and the Boeing 247 realities,
the DC-3 was a money-maker, while the government subsidies necessary to
produce the Boeing 707 and the Sud-Ouest Caravelle were not needed for more
recent aircraft. (Government subsidies, however, have re-entered the
picture in the recent competition between Boeing and Airbus, but that is a
slightly different issue.)
And now the Japanese are planning on building an HST and the Chinese are
mooting about the same. Our children may well be travelling on a Japanese
aircraft from London to Melbourne in six hours or the like. Sub-orbital is
next. But that government subsidy may well be an essential element. (To
be fair, the early voyages from Europe to the New World were all
underwritten by the governments of the nations involved.)
To get back to Concorde: it was a magnificent aircraft which apparently
was a delight to fly. It also was quite old and maintenance concerns were
a major problem: this is an aircraft produced thirty years back, and a lot
of the OEM companies are no longer in business, so merely keeping these
guys flying was an increasing concern. Grounding them was a recognition
that the great vision shown by the British and French in producing the
craft was simply premature.
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx=20
Cha robh b=E0s fir gun ghr=E0s fir!
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