I miss what Concorde and Barbados did for each other
We were bigger than the sum of our parts – Barbados and Concorde. The world’s fastest, most expensive, classiest passenger jet plus Barbados: vacation paradise chosen by the who’s who of the rich and famous.
Twenty years ago they would pay ten thousand US dollars a bottom to fly from the UK to Bim – sipping champagne and taking their photos by the Mach display. The Concorde became the unofficial flag of a tiny Caribbean island. The Concorde was synonymous with Barbados – but unlike Rihanna it was all positive and upscale. God, how I loved to see that bird on final with everyone waving and taking photos and videos.
A 747 is a taxi. The Concorde was the Space Shuttle.
Had a chance one time, but I thought the price was too expensive.
I can’t tell you what I did with the US$7,000 I “saved” by not flying the Concorde home, but looking back – a single photo of me standing beside the Mach meter with champagne in hand would have been worth US$7,000.
I can’t tell you what I did with that money. Maybe I paid my phone bills or repaired my car. Maybe I fixed my teeth.
But had I spent that 7k on a Concorde ticket, I could tell you what I did with the money. I could tell you that, for a time, I LIVED and did something special.
I have few regrets in my life, but one of my regrets is that I never flew Concorde. I (wrongly) thought it was too expensive.
The other regret?
I should have crawled back to her and done anything to make her forgive me.
But we cannot live thinking every day of our mistakes.
I should have flown Concorde. 🙂
Robert
Barbados Free Press 
and “What ws their experience at customs??”
and “What was their experience at customs??”
I’d rather get my teeth fixed. The Concorde was overpriced and overhyped. All it did was get you there a little faster. I guess if you have money to burn, that’s OK. If not, you did the right thing!
I flew it over to UK in 2000. BA had a special on, and they flew us out for free, since we had booked Club Class. We had to fly back economy, but it was worth it. what an experience!
RIP Concorde. It was nice knowing you while you were still affordable (even if just by the 1%). Unfortunately your retirement from service was inevitable as the cost of fuel kept rising to the point where the BA and Air France bean counters decided that even the 1% would start to balk at paying the real cost of a ticket to fly their butts at 2X the speed of sound to their winter holiday villa in Barbados or to attend a high rollers’ business meeting in NYC, Paris or London,
It seems Concorde met Peak Oil.
Time to Worry: World Oil Production Finishes Six Years of No Growth
As oil prices rose ever higher in the last decade, the optimists kept predicting rising production capacity and plummeting prices. Looks like they got it wrong.
We are entering what may be the longest stretch of no growth in world oil production since the early 1980s. But the reasons for that lack of growth differ in ways that ought to make us all uncomfortable.
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Six years from the ostensible topping out of conventional petroleum production, prices remain considerably higher. Oil prices finished 2005 around $50 a barrel. As of this writing, they are around $90 for Nymex crude and around $110 for Brent crude. This, of course, is exactly the opposite of the trend which occurred in the six years following the 1980 peak. Today, the often predicted rise in conventional supplies has failed to materialize, flummoxing the optimists so much that they simply ignore the data and talk of wonders yet to come.
Total Liquids observers will say that this is not the whole picture. After all, high prices for a resource also stimulate substitutes for that resource. And, true enough, the substitutes for oil are starting to arrive. But the big question is: Will they arrive soon enough and at a scale that is large enough to make up for the current stagnation in the rate of oil production and the eventual and certain decline in that rate? So far the answer is no.
What the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which is the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, used to call “total oil production” has now morphed into so-called “total liquids production.” It’s a tacit admission that conventional oil supplies cannot meet all our needs. But even total liquids production–which includes ethanol, biodiesel and natural gas liquids–has moved up only a paltry 2.6 percent during the entire period from the end of 2005 to today. Hence, the continuing high prices for liquid fuels.
Now, it’s not as if high prices haven’t sent people looking for more oil and working on more substitutes. The problem is that all of this activity is facing a considerable headwind. It’s called depletion. And, as they say in the oil patch, depletion never sleeps. It’s going on in every operating well in every country around the clock, 365 days a year. Estimates suggest that the decline in current production capacity might be around 4 percent per year. That means that 4 percent of the current production capacity for oil must be replaced each year just to break even. And, of course, to grow supplies, new production capacity must exceed this amount. But it hasn’t, and oil substitutes haven’t really grown by any significant amount in the last six years either.
The media loves to announce new seemingly large discoveries of oil as if they are the solution to what is really an unfolding liquid fuels crisis. They point to the Tupi field off Brazil which is purported to have 8 billion barrels of oil in it. And, they point to discoveries in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico thought to contain between 3 and 15 billion barrels. And, they point to the 4 billion barrels in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. It all sounds like a lot. When I ask audiences how long a billion barrels of oil will last the world at current rates of consumption, I often get replies that range anywhere from three months to 5 years. The correct answer is 12 days. Just multiply these multi-billion-barrel discoveries by 12, and you’ll realize right away that they are not going to overcome the constraints we are experiencing in oil supplies.
Something else has to give, and that something is probably going to be consumption. Either consumption will decline as the result of a new slump in the economy–a slump partly caused by high oil prices–or it will decline because high prices will encourage people to be more frugal in their energy use. Many of the poorest in the world will no doubt have to do without.
http://scitizen.com/future-energies/time-to-worry-world-oil-production-finishes-six-years-of-no-growth_a-14-3714.html