[rollei_list] Re: OT - The Concorde
- From: Jerry Lehrer <jerryleh@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 19:01:15 -0700
Marc,
You are absolutely correct in your assessment of the Concorde! I was
involved in the US and Boeing decision to drop out of competition in
the SST race.
Also, I was happy to see Boeing drop out of the race against the Super
Airbus A-380. That will be a loser for Airbus Industrie!
Wanna bet?
Jerry
Marc James Small wrote:
> 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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