Most commercial aircraft receive upgrades as more are produced, usually efficiency gains which improve range, reduce costs or take out weight. There was a proposed Concorde upgrade that would have occurred had more orders been received.
This is the final article in Concorde week. Others in the series include a list of all Concorde’s in museums, the time Braniff operated Concorde in the USA, a couple of cool videos, and one about the best Concorde books and web sites.
The Concorde Upgrade That Never Was
The proposed Concorde upgrade was referred to as the Concorde ‘B’. This included reducing the aircraft’s noise, improving the operating range, reducing fuel consumption, plus aerodynamic improvements.
What Happened?
The short answer is that nobody wanted Concorde, so there was no justification to continue to build the aircraft. Had airlines been placing orders, the improvements would have come into play from production aircraft number 17.
Overall Thoughts
You always see aircraft being upgraded. For example, the venerable Boeing 737 has seen the original -100 and -200 models, the upgraded -300, -400, -500, -600, then the next generation -700, -800, -900 followed by today’s MAX series. It’s a shame Concorde was so unsuccessful from a sales standpoint that upgrades were never put into place.
For the full story about the Concorde ‘B’ you can visit this page here. Did you know there was supposed to be a Concorde upgrade? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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All other images via Concorde SST.
That does make me wonder what any supersonic aircraft would be like today. Maybe if it would have remained in service there would have been incentive to develop on- and on- and on. Who knows where we could have been in terms of reducing noise and improving fuel efficiency today! Thanks for these articles, I definitely enjoyed reading them :)!
I imagine fuel efficiency would be much much better – plus we’d be getting places a hell of a lot faster, which would be nice for huge trips like Europe to Australia! Glad you enjoyed the articles 🙂
Thanks for this series on what is still one of the most beautiful aircraft to ever take to the skies. When you realise that this was effectively designed with slide rules, it makes the technological achievement all the more fantabulous.
I agree with you completely! Glad you enjoyed the series – it was fun putting it together, so thanks for taking the time to comment!