In the US it's close. The inflation since '69 is 5.79X. I remember paying about $.30/gallon during a price war and about $.36 normally. So that's $1.74 to $2.08 today. Gasoline is $2.41/gallon here, so yes a little more.
OTOH, I'm making well over 25x what I was making in 1970 (I made nothing in '69).
The difference is easily explained by tax.
Plus the externalities, such as having your windows rattle twice a day (waking the baby, of course) just because some rich nitwit couldn't wait another couple of hours to get to LA. Anyway, rich nitwits save more time than that by buying or renting their own subsonic jet, which goes wherever they want, whenever they want. It's a far more rational solution (if you can call it that).
There was also a big outcry at the time about the pollution--apparently folks were worried about damage to the ozone layer or something, due to inefficient engines spewing crap in the stratosphere. I'm not sure whether there was anything to that (there so often isn't, in the environmentalist cosmos), but that and the sonic booms were what got supersonic flight banned.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
MRD.
Fast it was, but poor design NO.
As is any super fast jet. I should know, I spent many years working in that environment.
Lots of passengers enjoyed the fact they could spend the day shopping in another continent and be home for tea.
Dave
Yes I read fine I interpret differently from you!...
The 747 has nothing to do with supersonic air travel its a completely different class of aircraft.
We \were\ talking about Supersonic airliners....
It was .. for what it did...
I dunno. Spot welds?
Just more symptoms on Not Invented Here syndrome.
Or Envy...!
My understanding (possibly wrong) was the itty-bitty 777 is significantly cheaper to run. ISTM that it wasn't so long ago that twin jets weren't allowed to do transatlantic flights, but on the more recent UK-USA flights I've done it's nearly always been a 767 or 777
Well under a fraction of one percent isn't sucessful. It's nothing but ego bloat.
Yawn. US SS military jets were banned from populated areas long before the first Concord was pieced together from British and french landfills.
That's your opinion. They were so worried about building the FIRST commercial SS plane that they cut corners to save time. the result was an overpriced, underperfoming product that required longer runways and altered flight paths at existing airports.
And how many flights were justifed? It wasn't that long ago that it took months on a ship to ross the Atlantic or Pacific.
And people in hell would enjoy icewater. They might even be the same people.
Uh, that was only partially to avoid the bad PR (and damage claims) from sonic booms. It was mainly to avoid conflict with civil air traffic, and collateral damage on the ground when one occasionally falls out of the sky, sometimes at full power.
The 747 (on a bad day) moves more passenger-miles per hour on less than 1/4 the lbs of fuel per passenger mile than the concorde could dream of on it's best day
Continental do 757s on some transAtlantic routes.
They would have had a lot of damage claims. I have an aunt that lived near Wright-Patterson AFB, and the early flights broke windows and cracked concrete block walls. I was there a couple times when the SS Air Force jets went over. Her house and her neighbors always had something happen. Broken dishes, windows, things knocked off shelves and out of cabinets.
And could land at older, landlocked airports. What good does it do to shave a couple hours off a flight, then spend it in heavy traffic to reach their destination?
Oh, come on. Anything designed in England in the 1960s has to leak oil.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs (Former Triumph owner)
Sorry? Where was supersonic flight first achieved, again/
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
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