Later today the last scheduled Concorde flight is due to take off from London-Heathrow to New York-JFK, returning tomorrow. There's a good article about it in last week's Economist titled "the less beautiful future of international business travel" and I agree. Too expensive? Sure, completely out of my bugdet (and most of the planet's too :)). But so what? Concorde is a fascinating piece of engineering and its beautifully designed. Sometimes I find it good to know that certain things exist. They provide a yardstick: "Here's what we're doing now, you go further". We seem to be losing a lot of those these days. (I'm repeating myself, I know).

Example: it's sad to see that the future of supersonic travel seems to be completely on hold. Boeing is developing a new jet, but not much of a departure from, say, the 737 (7E7 is its name, the E supposedly stands for "efficient") and Airbus is going forward with the (to me) horribly stupid idea of creating a 555-seat airplane, the A380 (check out their A380 site. If how bad that site is any indication of how crappy travel will be in that airplane, we'll be better off with the cattle on a barge). I mean, come on. 555 seats? Can you imagine how long it will take to load and unload that plane? Air travel is bad enough already. At least Boeing is coming out with a smaller (250-seats), more efficient plane with the 7E7.

Oh, well. Farewell, Concorde.

Categories: technology
Posted by diego on October 23 2003 at 12:22 PM