Concorde

2 Pages 558 Words

The news was disheartening for people around the world when they came to know about the decision regarding the last scheduled flight of Concorde. For some, the decision was too early and surprisingly, for the others it was a bit late. But, on the whole many people were affected by the decision. Many people kept wondering about the reasons behind such a decision of bidding farewell to all the supersonic passenger jets. In recent years, the overall image of the Concorde has been dramatically changed. As Knight explains, “Hardly any major industrial or technological project in the modern age has had to suffer the barrage of criticism that has assailed Concorde throughout its life.”1 After looking at the fate of the Concorde, little hope is left for making these supersonic jets available again for the people in near future.

There had been a number of reasons for the commercial failure of the Concorde. In the era when there is a struggle for the survival and to minimise the cost of production, the Concorde’s unique travelling experience was an expensive one. Its fuel inefficiency was also of major concern. As Knight argues, “It must be the only airplane project ever launched without some preliminary understanding with the airlines of what their requirements were and what the market for it might be.”2 The terrorism around the world and the Iraq war were the other major consequences that contributed to the commercial failure of the Concorde. Above all the other things the changing nature of economic climate around the world cannot be ignored. The other factors which affected the Concorde commercially were the noise level, tax, purchase prices and depreciation.

If we analyze the reasons behind the commercial failure of the Concorde we can divide the reasons into the direct factors and the indirect factors. One of the significant direct factors has been the crash of an Air France Concorde in Paris in July 2000 which killed mor...