Bonnie P. in Houston, Texas, writes:
The commercial airline industry has a very safe record, but rarely, bad accidents do occur. And when this happens, thorough investigations are conducted, correctable problems are addressed, and the airline keeps flying the same types of planes. So why did just one accident permanently ground the Concorde? And it was even determined that the cause of the accident was debris on the runway, which was in no way a fault of the airline.
Marilyn responds:
It wasn’t just the accident: It was also the economics of supersonic transport. The planes were expensive, difficult to maintain, and couldn’t fly over land due to noise regulations. So the trans-Atlantic fare was, ahem, sky-high–personally affordable only by people wealthy enough to spend a huge sum to fly from, say, New York to Paris in three hours instead of six hours. (I flew on the Concorde once, but I didn’t pay for it myself. A French television station sprang for the fare. The trip was a thrilling experience I’ll never forget.) This fact, combined with a world-wide downturn in high-priced business travel (most passengers were top executives, not celebrities, etc.) in favor of videoconferencing and high-tech alternatives to globetrotting, led to declining interest in supersonic travel. That terrible accident did indeed stun the world, possibly because it showed that even the Concorde wasn’t immune to disaster, but more mundane considerations were at play in its demise.
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