Concorde at least made more money than it cost to operate (and maintain).

The TU-144 made 102 commercial flights, with 55 of those carrying passengers -- the others I assume were cargo.

Not 102 flights per day or month -- 102 flights TOTAL between the first commercial flight in December 1975 and retirement from passenger service in 1978 and from all commercial service in 1983.

With 16 built, that's an average of 6 flights each in their lifetime.

SpaceX has Falcon 9 rocket boosters with 4x as many hypersonic flights on them.

    > Concorde at least made more money than it cost to operate (and maintain).

This overlooks development costs. Wiki says:

    > Delays and cost overruns increased the programme cost to £1.5–2.1 billion in 1976, (£11–16 billion in 2023).

That is an astonishing price for 20 aeroplanes!

I didn't overlook development costs, I SPECIFICALLY excluded them, and SAID that I was doing so.

But you can't just exclude them. They are part of the cost.

Of course you can exclude them, to determine whether the aircraft themselves are a viable commercial proposition for the people who bought them (the airlines) -- which they were, just as other aircraft such as the A380 today are. The people who bought A380s are happy, and will be using them for decades. Emirates would still like to buy more (and may end up buying used ones from less successful airlines)

The fact that the aircraft manufacturer spent far too much on development relative to the sales they made is of course important to the manufacturer -- or at least to whoever is financing the manufacturer, but that is a DIFFERENT question. In fact more than one question.

There is the question of whether the price they were sold to airlines for was greater or less than the incremental cost to build one aircraft. If the price was greater than the cost then there was some hope for a successful program, and they simply overspent on development and/or didn't sell enough copies.

If they were sold to airlines for less than the marginal cost then it's just an all-around manufacturing screwup that could never be solved by any amount of sales.

£16 billion in inflation-adjusted development costs is peanuts.

You should look at the costs of the F-35 :)

But of the F-35 there are >1000 planes to amortise the costs over. Which is two orders of magnitude larger than the concorde

F35s are now selling for $81m on average per plane - https://www.airandspaceforces.com/f-35-program-office-lockhe...

And yes, the program is expensive but there will be thousands of F35s by the end of it all (1000+ already)

What cargo would justify a supersonic flight?

They often flew mail on it as their cargo. But the plane was more a matter of national pride than something that made sense.

Anything high value and perishable, like sushi grade fish for example. Or did you mean morally justifiable?

Flying fish that are increasingly not sustainably harvested on insanely fuel in-efficient supersonic planes is exactly humanity deserves to go extinct.

Hence why everyone thinks supersonic passenger planes are a bad idea. Lots of profitable military supersonic planes, but every existing example of a civilian supersonic plane is only justified as a Cold War dick-measuring contest.

How do you measure the profitability of military aircraft?

Taxpayers willing to pay for it, and at a cost that's inclusive of the profit for the builders.

Wouldn’t that make the Tu-144 a success? And make every government purchase ever, successful?

Could we at least limit it to choices made by elected governments?

> And make every government purchase ever, successful?

yes. From the POV of the supplier, every gov't contract is going to be profitable.

That's why the military industrial complex is so big, and profitable. It's why some people go into politics to extend it. Esp. in america.

> How do you measure the profitability of military aircraft?

what you truly meant is how to do you measure the value obtained from a purchase of a military aircraft. And scholars have studied this for centuries and not arrived at a true answer.

I assume that’s the source of the doubs about Boom.