Virgin…2 concordes!?!

yep concorde wud have to be mainly white – if you compare the old BA c/s the Concordes were White in the main, whereas the rest of the fleet was “Pearl Grey”

Barnes Wallis was always a practical man and one thing that Concorde has never been is practical. I can see his point.

Andrew, Sadly the model isnt mine, it belongs to a friend. It is made by the company A.M.I Phelps and I am told there are only two in existance, Mr Branson has the other one! It is made of fibreglass and is in 1/100 scale. I have an A3XX in the same colours and scale made by the same artist, again it was one of two and I’m told that Mr.B. has the other one. A.M.I Phelps is the preferred model supplier to Airbus Industrie. When I visited their premises about 18 months ago they were putting the finishing touches to a 1/25 A380-massive!

I remember reading an article some years ago by Sir Barnes Wallis giving his views on Concorde, he wasnt very impressed.
Has he been proved right or were his negative views just sour grapes beause he didnt design it? Judging by some of your posts he couldve been right .

Dave

The Virgin model does look great but wouldn’t it still have to be painted largely white for thermal reasons ?

Cool Model. Mate where did you get it… of did you paint it yourself?

will look great!

I know its only a model, but it gives an idea how great a Virgin Concorde would look!

Coanda,

Ok for a kidney , but how many organs cross the ocean every year.

I agree that if I was involved I would appreciate , but that’s a tiny “market”.
I don’t think it would motivate anybody to make the investment to convert Concorde into a freighter.

Concorde really isn’t all that economically viable as an airliner either. This is most likely just a publicity move on the part of FedEx I’d guess, albeit an expensive one, but one which they could probably afford for a few years at any rate. Besides, a US-owned Concorde would mean we could get it into a US museum, right? 😀

Yeah, if you want a Kidney from the States… but if concorde was based this side of the pond, it would take about 4 hours there, 4 hours back, plus time to refuel that side, by which time it could have been transported subsonically, anyway…

And consider also that you wouldn’t just effectively be buying one ticket, you’d be buying the equivalent of the whole plane, for a return flight… what’s a concorde ticket for a roundtrip to New York? £3300 or something?

So, for this one kidney, which could potentially arrive sooner if it went subsonically, you’d pay the best part of 3 and a half million?

I Can’t see many health insurance firms shelling that kind of money out, so you’d have to finance the trip yourself…

Believe me, Concorde isn’t economically viable as a freighter.

when you want an american kidney you’ll see the need!

Information/drawings/special products are all contenders for high speed freight.

coanda

What the hell would be the interest to have a supersonic freighter?

Regardless very specific goods such as flowers I don’t really see the need to gain a couple of hours.

On the top of this Concorde has a very short range.

Yes…the normal size containers would not fit in the concorde….. only about 4 come in the A300 i think.

whats the most precious cargo that concorde carries?

Transplant organs and Diamonds

Gold is too dense! It would load out the airframe before it reached anywhere near an economical financial solution.

when all trimmings are removed, freighter conversions are lighter when empty than the passenger equivalents(pop along to the airbus website and look for the A300 family, characteristics on the A300 and then the A300F).

Also, given the actual space inside the concorde, there is certainly no room for average sized pallets or containers. This aircraft, as a freighter would carry small, or one off items of mail/freight over long distances at high speed, there is a limited market for this. And would certainly grow if advertised and carried out in this way. There are plenty of trans atlantic firms out there willing to pay for this service.

As for virgin getting a couple, I wouldnt know. I do know that it would be a loss to the aerospace manufacturing and design industry, as it has its own airworthiness requirements and certification documents, quite apart from the ‘average’ airliner. I would suggest that you might well be seeing more aircraft cruise climbing across the atlantic in the next 20-30 years.

I have a design project funded by airbus, for a ‘new’ transport aircraft, and its completely open to what you want to do. This is led by the capability sustainment manager for airbus UK, here in Filton. Whilst Airbus is quite anally retentive when it comes to technology inclusion (you may not think it but it is) in its products (you’d be amazed at what we could put into an airplane!). There are two ways of thinking, slower, and marginally faster. Cruise Mach numbers have come down over the past 20 years, and it could be said that they would fall and stabilise at about 0.65-0.7 and stay that way. Or….with greater design and research we can come up with an aircraft cruising at about 0.9-0.95. There are ways and means to achieve this, but it all depends on whether people like airbus are gonna shell out for the research.

coanda

PS Airbus HATES BWB designs

There are 2 things that limit carrying capacity, actual weight limitations and internal volume/layout. The volume/layout case is best shown by the excellent Shorts 330/360 as the square fuselage section is ideal for putting in large number of square boxes which do not fit well in a round section fuselage. Opening up the galley areas on Concorde would help in the volume/layout case but this is the smaller part of the problem. The major consideration is the max payload which is much more restrictive and pretty well set in stone. If the aircraft is currently running at the max design payload, raising that figure with the licensing authorities would require massive structural reworking of the aircraft plus a complete reworking of all the performance side of the operations. Again for such a small number of airframes I cannot see this being viable.

As somebody recently said this is purely a prestige exercise and one that I don’t think even Virgin can be affording to do with another Gulf War imminent.

Thanx for that SOC.

Wys even if Concorde is converted into a F they will have to increase the playload…probably open all galley area and connec baggage area with main area….so i guess it MTOW will be higher than present. If they keep everything same…then anyway too…useless.

The Tu-144S was used to carry freight and mail initially. It actually entered revenue-earning service before Concorde, although Concorde entered pasenger-carrying service first. The Tu-144D was never used as a freighter as it was intended to be the definitive passenger model, as the new RD-36-51A engines were much more fuel-efficient.

I’m not convinced on the freighter idea.

And frankly there is not a great deal of money in it for Virgin. But the whole point of Concorde is not to make money (though it’s a nice bonus) but to top of the range.

A bit like the airline equivalent of a 7-series BMW.

This has become a really interesting thread. Well done for suggesting it A330C.

Assuming 100 passengers, all males (worst case scenario) with slightly heavier than standard baggage the payload with no additional freight would be about 9.5 tonnes leaving a further 3.2 tonne payload capability (assuming no other performance restrictions due to runway length, pressure, temperature, etc).