Concorde

[powell11]

Does anyone know when the concorde will be able to fly again with passengers or wont it?, if so when would it fly again ?

[kira000]

Concorde is gone forever. It was officially retired for good in 2003. It no longer has an airworthiness certificate (a bit like an MOT), and is therefore not allowed to fly, with or without passengers.

[eltelioni]

Does that put it beyond someone doing a restoration? People do restore and fly old aircraft but I guess there is a possibility that Concorde has been deemed unsafe.

[kira000]

Yes, without an airworthiness cert, the CAA wont let it fly at all, even as a restoration. The reason being, there are no parts being made for it now, so all the parts are cannibalised from other concordes and are therefore old and worn from the stresses of the spped and altitude it flew at.

[alavahalf]

Next time you see Concorde it will have it's wings removed, and be on a cargo ship going to Dubai.....I believe it is going to be made into a restaurant...!

...and I expect we will let it go...!

[kira000]

Nope. Not true. The dubai rumour is just a rumour. They are trying to find a place for it somewhere at heathrow, but BAA want obscene amounts of money to sit it anywhere apart from on the very busy aircraft parking areas.

[powell11]

But if people coped well enough on flights of the concorde then why did they get rid of it, sure the money and fuel, costs and so on... but they were able to make quite a few, why did they get rid of it, it was such a beautifal aircraft that the concorde got the passengers to there desired destiniation in no time compare to modern day airfcraft, if we were able to make such wow! aircraft that went well, why did they get rid of it, i jus dont understand, get all the things you need and bring it back to life e.g airworthiness certificate

[sandmaster]

Why did they get rid of Concorde? One word - America

[kira000]

No, i disagree. The reasons Concorde got retired are several.
It was old, noone does or did make parts for it anymore, so all parts were recovered from scrapped concordes, making time and resource hungry to maintain. It was pretty environmentally unfriendly, with the noise and the amounts of fuel it burned/leaked. It was HUGELY fuel hungry which meant that ticket prices had to be very high, and these days with video conferencing, email etc, there were very few people willing to pay full whack for the speed of a concorde trip. I mean, a concorde ticket to NY could be �7K. Which is about the same as a FIRST class ticket to Singapore. Now imagine needing to sell about 80 seats like that on EVERY flight, as compared to 14 FIRST class seats like on a 747.
Impossible in these days.

Yes, you could have filled the plane with day trippers and interested people if you could have sold it at �500. But at that price it would cost the airline millions of pounds to operate, so no business would do that.