Question: Will there ever be a replacement for Concorde?

Eleanor Sherwen answered on 8 Nov 2017:

I think there won’t be a Concorde replacement, but not for engineering reasons.

A key challenge of Concorde was that the sonic boom and high speeds literally flexed the whole frame during flights, and so the engineers had to keep in mind that it would have a service life as a result, and that stress fractures might be hidden. Since Concorde aircraft were retired the methods of detecting internal fractures have remained similar, you can use ultrasound or X ray, but they have become more common and cheaper. Formula 1 teams strip down their cars between races and X ray all the carbon fibre bits and remake any parts showing tiny fractures. So that would be easier to manage on a supersonic aircraft now.

We have new materials widely available now – carbon fibre may offer a lot of gains in a new design – and we have much cheaper computation and more accessible fluid dynamics software, so it’d be easier to model the effects of airflow and sonic boom.

All of that means we could probably build a much better replacement for Concorde, but I don’t think one will get built because there doesn’t seem to be enough urgency of need to reduce flight times. It cut the time from London to New York in half, but no-one is exactly having trouble selling 8hr flights now it’s gone. Flight operating companies know supersonic means extra maintenance and lots of commissioning time, they also know their industry has gone heavily toward cheap bulk flights, and I don’t think it makes business sense for them to invest in it. Which is a shame because it would be a really cool engineering challenge to revisit.