On Wed Jan 29 11:39 -0600, Lonnie Borntreger wrote: > On Wed, 2003-01-29 at 11:31, Levi Ramsey wrote: > > On Wed Jan 29 12:22 -0500, HoytDuff wrote: > > > On Wednesday 29 January 2003 12:12 pm, Jason Komar: > > > > I'd love to go, but Calgary is a long way from Paris. > > > > > > The French have that ultra-cool, fast airliner . . . > > > > Not sure I'd call the Concorde ultra-cool... after all, even with the > > thin air at its cruising altitude (55000 ft/17000 m), it generates > > enough friction to boil water on its surface. > > I'm quite sure the Concorde is British, not French.
Anglo-French combine, actually. Both nations invested way too much money into the project, and when they learned that nobody else was willing to buy them, forced British Airways and Air France to buy the 14 that were built (7 apiece). For both airlines, IIRC, only 4 or 5 of their 7 were ever flown commercially. The Concorde was a disaster. If it had better range, as in range sufficient to do a nonstop trans-Pacific flight, it could have been profitable (Sydney - LA in 8 hours would attract a lot of interest from businessmen and such, and NYC - Tokyo in 7 even moreso). The fact that most nations on earth banned supersonic flight within their airspace, most notably the USA (and Canada, IIRC) didn't help matters, either. The way I see it, Air Canada could have pulled off a coup had they bought a couple of Concordes and ran a sort of shuttle service between Winnipeg, Saskatoon, or Edmonton and Paris/London with connecting flights from whichever Canadian end to various cities in Western North America (slicing a couple of hours off the LA-Paris flight, for instance). I doubt sonic booms over Hudson Bay would do much damage. -- Levi Ramsey [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG Fingerprint: 354C 7A02 77C5 9EE7 8538 4E8D DCD9 B4B0 DC35 67CD Currently playing: Monster Magnet - Atomic Clock Linux 2.4.21pre3-2mdk 12:40:00 up 54 min, 6 users, load average: 0.01, 0.06, 0.15
