Why was concorde airline phased out of flight completely?

Answer 1

Multiple reasons exist as to why Concorde was phased out.

One...just the design...it's a very small airplane so it could only carry a few passengers. This meant that the cost per seat went way way up per passenger, and the prices were exorbitant (In the thousands.) From there...you can see that it was very costly to operate the Concorde and in the case of Air France...it never turned a profit for them (However, British Airways did turn a good amount of profit).

Plus with the fuel tank issue shown by the crash in France...retrofit would have been very expensive on such a unique airplane. In addition to normal maintenance costs...the paint must be special to handle high temperature friction heat...and so on.

Three: the fleet was aging already, the Concordes were made back in the 1970s so they were on the verge of hitting 3 decades of use...they had to be retired sooner or later.

Four: Lack of places to go. Concorde was banned from flying supersonically in the USA, and the Concorde was forbidden to land in some places so with fewer destinations to fly into...less opportunities...less allure...and less profit chances for the airlines.

It was simply a multitude of reasons to why Concorde was phased out...but I think the pilots of those planes say it best..."it's rare that mankind should ever take a step backwards, before you could say you could travel from New York to London in 2 and some hours, now you have to travel for 8 hours." We will have supersonic passenger aircraft in the skies someday...it's just a matter of when and what technology.

Answer 2

The cost of upgrading the aircraft after the Charles D'Gaulle tragedy was very expensive. Then 9/11 hit, the cost of oil rose, Gulf war 2. British Airways was not making a profit. Air France was in talks to merge with KLM and KLM didn't want the cost of running Concorde.
A huge shame, but it was all about Money.... I flew on concorde a few times and though quite uncomfortable it was an amazing experience that we will never have the chance to repeat in our lifetime...

Answer 3

So what good is parachuting without proper training beforehand? Also, how long does it take to exit the plane? Do you think everyone's going to have enough time to jump out of the plane? It's just not feasible. Also, if you're over the ocean, where do you propose landing? You now have jumped out of a plane without a life preserver... Do you plan on treading water for hours or days until someone finds you? You could be MILES from where your plane was last detected on radar. There are plenty of plane crash survivors. It happens. But, if you slam into the side of a mountain (as the Russian flight did), you're not going to survive. And no one knows if the pilot detected any trouble. People at the control tower only knew that it disappeared on the radar. The pilot likely didn't see anything when they slammed into the mountain. How would parachutes have helped? There's a risk of taking any kind of travel. Air Travel is still one of the safest possible forms of travel.

Answer 4

Because by now it would cost $10,000 to fly on it and even then it is to expensive for airlines to fly (with the cost of jet fuel) and people can't afford to pay that much.

If you had the chance to ever ride on it you are really lucky.

Answer 5

They were old and to expensive to maintain and their were not very many of them. Probably had a very hard time getting replacement parts.

Answer 6

Because the thing was unsafe.

It had a fatal design flaw that was too expensive to fix that late in it's life span. During a major tire failure, the fuel tanks were exposed to the risk of catastrophic failure which would lead to the plane exploding.

Answer 7

Simply, Cost and Safety...

Answer 8

rising fuel cost. it used to cost around 3,000 u.s. dollars
for a one way tix. now it would cost about double.

Answer 9

Cost.

Answer 10

one reason i think was expense. another was it could only be used for transoceanic flight due to the noise when breaking sound barrier.