Oh, Your Private Jet Is Just Subsonic?

zerogeewhiz writes "Found this article here at The Sydney Morning Herald . It seems that Bill and his mates need to move a bit quicker these days and for a cool US$80 million, you too can overtake the Concorde on a dash to Harrods for dinner. As described in the article, the main complaint about Concorde is that it can only fly supersonic over water and creates those nasty sonic booms that punch holes in buildings and shatter windows. They reckon they can get rid of these waves by making the plane longer. These are gonna be fast but hideous. 737-700s are suddenly passe as a corporate jet..."

"Bill and his mates"?

[barzok]

There's no mention of any customer at all. Are we taking potshots at MS for absolutely no reason now? There's no connection here at all.

Re:Concorde Avionics (or lack thereof)

[SirWhoopass]

Aviation is one of those areas where, if it ain't broke, don't fix it [insert Concorde crash joke here]. People's lives are at stake with the equipment in an aircraft, so you don't want to upgrade simply to make everything look cool.

missed the point

[joss]

Concorde can fly perfectly well across land, but Boeing successfully lobied US government to ban it from being used across continental USA.

This came as a rude shock and completely fucked the economics of concorde which was explicitly designed for long-haul, eg LA-London flights. It's the main reason so few were built.

Morons - what did they expect ? The US will always protect it's own corporations from competition if it can get away with it. This occurs at the expense of it's citizens, but nobody cares about that. Just like any other nation of course, but it's a lot harder to bully the US into accepting competition than smaller countries.

Re:Eye Candy

[David Ishee]

This isn't necessarily a picture of a sonic boom. If the aircraft is traveling close to the speed of sound, the acceleration of the air over the wing and around the fuselage will start forming a shock wave (but you won't hear a sonic boom yet). If the atmospheric conditions are right, the rapid decrease in pressure behind the shock wave which causes the air temperature to drop will cause the moisture in the air to condense into fog.

I've seen this happen to an F-18 at an air show on a high speed pass by the crowd and it was pretty cool. You saw the cloud of fog flash like a strobe light a couple of times, but it wasn't stable.

Re:About private jet economics and lifestyle

[Chris Y Taylor]

There is more economic benifit to corprate jets than just getting your employees from point A to point B faster. A number of companies use them as sales tools. I once had a supplier fly me and 4 other engineers and technicians from the local airport near our plant to their production facility in a very nice corprate jet so that we could do a supplier audit* on them. They were trying to get a very valuable supplier contract with us, but it hinged on whether we thought they could consistently provide us the quality we required. We approved the company's product and process, and so they got the contract.

In this case it had very little** to do with the aircraft; we were impressed with their Quality Assurance system at the plant. BUT, if the team sent to audit the plant had consisted of a bunch of muddle-headed artsie craftsies with MBAs then I could easily see them being swayed by the possibility of more such rides, and the free steak dinners, and the liquor, and... I have got to schedule more supplier reviews.

Anyway, properly used a corprate jet can be a great tool for the sales staff in addition to transporting a companies own people. Winning one big sales account for this company could easily pay the annual maintenance and salaries to support that plane (yes, I know how expensive that is).

* A little word of advice to younger engineers; never trust a supplier's ISO, QS, or other certification. Remember how much stuff the auditor missed on your audit? They did the same thing for your suppliers. If quality is important then check them yourself.

** It did let us take the trip sooner than if we had driven or scheduled commerical flights; so they wound up getting the contract sooner than they otherwise would have been able to. But that comes back to just getting from Point A to B. Plus we were in a better mood at their plant than if we had taken conventional travel and could spend more time there. That allowed us to do a more thorough audit than we probably otherwise would have, but since these guys had a 1st rate facility that helped them more than it hurt them.