With so many failures in aviation, it is sad to see such incredible programs like the Concorde and the Nasa Space shuttle become such failures. As fly on crap there will be lots of people defending both programs but it was the total failure to achieve program objectives that puts these two vehicles in this class.
NASA SHUTTLE
The entire idea was a cost effective, quick turnaround launch vehicle that wold have a very low failure rate of 1 in 100,000
"Space Shuttle record we compare the 2 fatal Space Shuttle accidents out of 113 flights. That works out to 1770 fatal accidents per 100,000 flights. 1770 for the Shuttle divided by 0.057 for smaller commercial aircraft works out to an accident rate that is over 31,000 times greater for the shuttle than for small craft commercial aviation."
The shuttle was designed to be cheaper than a one time launch vehicle and it became Big, Heavy, complex and difficult to test and prep for launch. The theory of a few launches a month turned into a few launches a year.
To know the shuttle is to love the shuttle and all Americans have the Dream of looking out of our atmosphere. It was wonderful but yet it did not achieve any of its objectives.
Concorde
The dream that everyone would fly at Mach 2+ and our cargo would fly first class in a slow lumbering 747 doing a mere Mach .8
They were looking to build fleets of these aircraft and sell them to the airlines....This never happened. The Government paid for them and not one air-frame was sold at anything remotely close to a good sale price. No company would purchase a Concorde and they were cash sucking failure until BA changed their business plan. The technology would have been good as a government project for military where cost would have been acceptable but for the private sector, Grace and Beauty as 60,000 feet and Mach 2.+ seemed to overshadow the high fuel cost and noise....but rarely talked about was the program was a financial loss for the designers and no aircraft were actually purchased in the entire program.
Where there any other failures on such a large scale?
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