The claim in the article, "Concorde burned 52% of its fuel just taxiing down the runway", is completely wrong and kind of ruins my confidence in the article. A Concorde used less than 1% of its fuel taxiing down the runway, not 52%.

Source: Air France Flight 4590 Accident Report states that the plane had 95 t of fuel on board when the aircraft started out and used 800 kilos of fuel during taxiing (page 17) and 200 kilos after taxiing before takeoff (page 159). https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-11/Concorde_Acc...

(Since there's a bunch of discussion about how to reduce taxiing consumption, I'll point out that one tonne of aviation fuel is about $700, so there's not much money to be saved by creating battery-powered tugs or whatnot.)

As far as takeoff, "at the start of cruise 20% of the total fuel burnoff will have been consumed while only 9% of the total distance will have been covered." From "Operation Experience on Concorde", a paper by the Design Director. While 20% is a lot, it is much less than 52%. https://www.icas.org/icas_archive/ICAS1976/Page%20563.pdf

Yes, it sounds like the repetition of a mangled version of the SR71 stories. Burning 45 tonnes of fuel on the runway would be completely insane.

Checking various links on taxiing burn yields about 2 tonnes which is a lot more realistic and reasonable (a previous HN comment indicates the 767 burns about a tonne taxiing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283386 concorde burning twice that sounds fair)

The OP might have gotten confused reading articles like https://simpleflying.com/concorde-fuel-consumption/ stating concorde burned half its tank from the gate to cruise (mach 2 at FL600)

The article is just generally sloppy.

> .. my recent trip from Abu Dhabi to LA. 24 hours door-to-door. We have the technology to reduce that to under 10.

The direct flight (by Emirates) takes 16h15 mins, so that leaves 7h45 mins not in flight. If we want to bring that down to 10 hours just by making the flight supersonic then that would require a flight time of 2h15, corresponding to a (ridiculous) speed well over Mach 4.

Roughly that figure (45%) was used to get to Mach 2.0 at 60,000 feet, about 45 minutes after takeoff from LHR (normally over the Bristol channel) to JFK.

Takeoff and climb / accel to Mach 1.7 was done with re-heat (afterburners), which did use a lot of fuel. After that, normal power (no re-heat) was used to get to Mach 2.0 and cruising (supercruise).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283386

They did burn a crazy amount of fuel on getting up to supersonic speeds though.

It used about half of its fuel for taxiing, takeoff, climb, and acceleration to cruising speed. Maybe that's where the number came from originally and it got mangled in translation.

American coverage of the Concorde has to try and make out that it was technically bad, otherwise they would have to face up to the fact that their country squashed the possibility of supersonic travel, through political bullying and protectionism of their own aircraft industry