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Photos via avishaiweiss's flickr and NYC Aviation.
The supersonic Concorde jet that spent 30 years flying fiercely through the skies went unharmed until retiring in Brooklyn, where the president of the foundation that operates the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, Bill White, was charged with overseeing its care. After just two years in the borough, The NY Times reports it got it's signature needle-shaped nose taken off by a truck.
A Concorde that is owned by a British airline, was hit by a truck that was hauling equipment from a Jamaican music and soccer festival. The truck clipped the distinctive nose cone off the parked Anglo-French jet about 3 a.m. last Monday, prompting an impassioned uproar among the jet’s band of enthusiasts.The nose, of course, is the most physically dominant part of the jet, and is what makes it distinctive from others; The Times notes that it can be lowered to 12.5 degrees to help with takeoffs and landings. Concorde fans have united and blamed New York for the carelessness; when the jet had to leave the Intrepid, White housed it at Aviator Sports at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn for $15K/month.
Whether it was carelessness or accidental, the big question now is: who will pay for the pricey nose job? The replacement part will have to come from a collector, and White says the Aviator Sports insurance policy will have to cover it (the complex doesn't seem to be certain about that). One thing is for certain, British Airways has laid down the law and wants the jet be fixed and returned to the pier by year's end -- a trip that will cost around $250K. Is the Intrepid, and everything it touches, cursed? More info on the busted nose can be found here.
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It's sad that one concorde crashes (because of a piece from ANOTHER plane) and they take them all down... If a 737 crashes, do they take them all down?
Well, not that I was going to fly on one anyway...
The missing nose cone is only part of the problem. There are pigeons living in the tail and day campers are allowed to use the plane as a wall to peg with tennis balls.
The disturbing photos and details mentioned in the Times article can be found over at NYCAviation.
Mocanlagunas: If not for a design flaw on the Concorde, the debris from the other aircraft would not have caused a crash. There were a number of other reasons for Concorde's retirement...it wasn't profitable anymore, for one, and airport-area NIMBYs who always hated it because it was noisy, had new "IT'S DANGEROUS" ammo thanks to the firey crash in Paris. If it would have been profitable to fix Concorde's flaws, somebody would have. With only 14 in service, compared to the thousands of 737s in service, there's a giant practical difference in grounding each type of aircraft.
I was always surprised that some richer-than-god types didn't just buy up the concordes for their own personal use (which would require hiring concorde mechanics, concorde pilots, custom milled spare parts, etc.) Talk about your bragging rights!
Right now, somewhere, there's a guy - who's wife, it seems to him anyway, gripes to him at least twice a day about the concorde nose taking up space in the garage and why the hell he spent all that money on a useless hunk of aluminum in the first place - with the hugest s*** eating grin on his face.
[3] Couldn't have said it better myself. (Actually, mine probably would have been a bit worse.)
Richard Branson wanted to take them for Virgin, but the other airlines (and the governments?) wouldn't let him...
longacre, I know it was also an economic issue (mainly). but when it crashed, before anybody knew why it had happened, they were all immediately grounded... this after so many years of safe flights. Anyway my point is that it's sad they're not up there anymore...
As far as I can figure it, there are a couple of factors that motivate against a more-money-than-they-know-what-to-do-with type of a person buying a Concorde as a private jet. First, the Concorde required so much runway space (about 11,800 feet), the number of places you could take it is fairly limited. You could fly to Denver or Lyon but then you'd need to get the rest of the way to Aspen or Cannes another way.
Additionally, if airlines stopped using it and the manufacturer stopped supporting it, the owner would be stuck with the task of dealing with any ongoing airworthiness issues with the FAA and foreign equivalents, which could be expensive and complicated and wind up requiring not just flight crew and mechanics, but engineers on retainer as well.
Just drive it around Queens and someone will offer to fix it for $100.