With Concorde Pointing to Extinction, What’s Next?

Whatever happened to the future of commercial air transportation? Once, that future was going to be filled with long, sleek SSTs, smashing sound barriers, crisscrossing oceans in less than four hours, and immeasurably easing the lives of long-distance travelers. But the way things are shaping up, the adventurous air traveler in 2018 may have more chance of entering outer space than boarding a supersonic jet.

The Concorde: Yes, those needle-nosed wonders still cross the Atlantic daily, carrying and coddling the impatient rich. But airline officials and aviation authorities agree that after the expiration of the small fleet of Concorde jets now operated by British Airways and Air France, the Concorde has no future.

The aircraft cost too much, come with too many environmental side effects (they’re loud and they guzzle gas) and (thanks to their poor fuel economy) can’t cross the Pacific without a substantial redesign. Maybe they were doomed from the start. As one Wall Street aerospace analyst noted last month in Conde Nast Traveler magazine: “The Concorde was designed at a time when oil was $1.70 a barrel, and by the time it went into service, oil was over $11 a barrel.” By 1997, the price was about $19 a barrel.

Subsidized by the French and British governments, the Concorde made its first commercial flight in January 1976. The last new one entered service in 1979. The jet can fly from London to New York in about three hours and 45 minutes, peaking at twice the speed of sound and landing more than three hours ahead of a 747.

British Airways has seven Concordes and rotates them in and out of service, offering two daily flights between New York and London and a Saturday flight between London and Barbados. British Airways spokeswoman Fran Ostroff says the company expects to fly them “for another 15 to 20 years.”

There’s only one class of service, and it includes caviar and champagne in crystal flutes. At this writing, the fare was $10,037 for most round trips, $5,780 one way--a bit rich for the blood of most coach passengers. But if you compare it to the price of a first-class seat in a British Airways 747 between New York and London--$4,301 each way--it may not look as bad.

Air France has six Concordes, five of which are in operation, offering daily service between JFK and Charles de Gaulle outside Paris. The French ask $9,346 for a round-trip ticket. (If you buy your Concorde ticket as part of a tour package from either Air France or British Airways, however, you often can knock more than $3,000 off the carriers’ air fare-only rates. You also can buy discounted Concorde tickets in conjunction with a one-way transatlantic cruise on the Queen Elizabeth 2.)

The youngest of Air France’s Concordes arrived in 1978. Though many observers have forecast a suspension of supersonic service within the next 20 years, “we’ve left it fairly vague,” says a spokeswoman. But she also acknowledges that, like British Airways, Air France has been ordering a lot of Boeing 777s lately. (The 777 typically holds about 270 passengers, more than twice the number held by Concorde.)

Boeing’s main competitor, the European consortium Airbus Industrie, is at work on the A3XX, a “super jumbo” jet that would hold 550 passengers on two levels. At soonest, introduction of the A3XX is about six years off, industry watchers say.

And in the longer term? Boeing and other manufacturers have said they’re looking at the possibilities of a new sort of supersonic travel, something they call high-speed civil transport (HSCT). But no airlines have announced any concrete HSCT plans.

About space: Outer space hasn’t seen its first fare-paying tourist yet. But since 1989, the commercial space transportation industry has been growing fast. Federal officials have approved 93 launches, many of them designed to place satellites aloft. And since 1996, the St. Louis-based X PRIZE Foundation has been trying to “jump-start the space tourism business” by offering a $10-million prize (as of mid-April, the group said it had more than $5 million in hand) to the first nongovernment venture to develop and demonstrate a reusable space-launch vehicle. Foundation spokesman Steve Werner says 14 companies have met preliminary qualifications in the competition. Werner says his group expects a winner in two to three years and an established space tourism industry in 10 to 15 years.

Meanwhile, at least two companies not on the X PRIZE competition list (Zegrahm Space Voyages in Seattle and Space Adventures in Virginia) already have taken a few dozen deposits from would-be space travelers--a bold move, given that no vessel to carry these travelers yet exists. Details of the companies’ offerings vary, but both are planning top-of-the-line trips that are designed to climax with a few minutes spent at zero gravity in a craft about 60 miles above the Earth’s surface, with the sky dark and the planet’s curvature visible. The price tag for that: $90,000 at Space Adventures, $98,000 at Zegrahm.

Target departure dates for these voyages are three or four years off, and the commercial aircraft to fly those trips are still in the design stages. And, perhaps most crucial, no U.S. commercial venture will be able to take passengers into space until it gets a license from the U.S. Transportation Department’s Office of the Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation. Licenses issued so far: none.

Reynolds travels anonymously at the newspaper’s expense, accepting no special discounts or subsidized trips. He welcomes comments and suggestions, but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053 or e-mail chris.reynolds@latimes.com.