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A330 vs. Concorde - Comparison of sizes
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A330 vs Concorde - Comparison

A330
Concorde
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A330

A330

The Airbus A330 is a wide-body airliner made by Airbus. In the mid-1970s, Airbus conceived several derivatives of the A300, its first airliner, and developed the A330 twinjet in parallel with the A340 quadjet. In June 1987, Airbus launched both designs with their first orders. The A330-300, the first variant, took its maiden flight in November 1992 and entered service with Air Inter in January 1994. The slightly shorter A330-200 variant followed in 1998. In 2014, Airbus launched the A330neo, re-engined with Trent 7000 turbofans, which entered service in November 2018. The A330 shares its airframe with the early A340 variants, having two engines instead of four, two main landing gear legs instead of three, lower weights and slightly different lengths. Both airliners have fly-by-wire controls, which was first introduced on the A320, as well as a similar glass cockpit. The A330 was Airbus's first airliner to offer a choice of three engines: the General Electric CF6, Pratt & Whitney PW4000, or the Rolls-Royce Trent 700.



The A330-300 has a range of 11,750 km or 6,350 nmi with 277 passengers, while the shorter A330-200 can cover 13,450 km or 7,250 nmi with 247 passengers. Later variants include the A330-200F dedicated freighter, the A330 MRTT military tanker, and the ACJ330 corporate jet. The A330 MRTT was proposed as the EADS/Northrop Grumman KC-45 for the US Air Force's KC-X competition, but lost to the Boeing KC-46 in appeal after an initial win. As of December 2019, A330 orders stand at 1,823 of which 1,492 have been delivered and 1,443 remain in operation. Its largest operator is Turkish Airlines with 68 aircraft. The A330 has allowed Airbus to expand its wide-body market share. It competes with the Boeing 767 and smaller variants of the 777 and the 787. It is complemented by the larger Airbus A350 XWB which succeeded the A340.

Source: Wikipedia
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Concorde

Concorde

The Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde () is a Franco-British turbojet-powered supersonic airliner that was operated from 1976 until 2003. It had a maximum speed over twice the speed of sound, at Mach 2.04 (1,354 mph or 2,180 km/h at cruise altitude), with seating for 92 to 128 passengers. First flown in 1969, Concorde entered service in 1976 and operated for 27 years. It is one of only two supersonic jetliner models to operate commercially; the other is the Soviet-built Tupolev Tu-144, which operated in the late 1970s.Concorde was jointly developed and manufactured by Sud Aviation (later Aérospatiale) and the British Aircraft Corporation under an Anglo-French treaty. Twenty aircraft were built, including six prototypes and development aircraft. Air France and British Airways were the only airlines to purchase and fly Concorde. The aircraft was used mainly by wealthy passengers who could afford to pay a high price for the aircraft's speed and luxury service. In 1997, the round-trip ticket price from New York to London was $7,995 (equivalent to $12,900 in 2020), more than 30 times the cost of the least expensive scheduled flight for this route.The original programme cost estimate was £70 million before 1962, (£1.39 billion in 2020). The programme experienced huge cost overruns and delays, with the programme eventually costing between £1.5 and £2.1 billion in 1976, (£9.44 billion-13.2 billion in 2020). This extreme cost was the main reason the production run was much smaller than expected. Another factor that affected the viability of all supersonic transport programmes was that supersonic flight could be used only on ocean-crossing routes, to prevent sonic boom disturbance over populated areas.



With only seven airframes each being operated by the British and French, the per-unit cost was impossible to recoup, so the French and British governments absorbed the development costs. British Airways and Air France were able to operate Concorde at a profit after purchasing their aircraft from their respective governments at a steep discount in comparison to the programme's development and procurement costs.Among other destinations, Concorde flew regular transatlantic flights from London's Heathrow Airport and Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia, and Grantley Adams International Airport in Barbados; it flew these routes in less than half the time of other airliners. While subsonic commercial jets took eight hours to fly from Paris to New York (seven hours from New York to Paris), the average supersonic flight time on the transatlantic routes was just under 3.5 hours. Concorde aircraft were retired in 2003, three years after the crash of Air France Flight 4590, in which all passengers and crew members on board were killed; this was the only fatal incident involving Concorde. The general downturn in the commercial aviation industry after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the end of maintenance support for Concorde by Airbus, the successor to Aérospatiale, contributed to the aircraft's retirement.

Source: Wikipedia

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