If they are allowed then I'll nominate the Titanic - granted it was completed but failed to reach its destination.
If we widen the scope to include aviation then this will be a very long thread.
The liner Principessa Jolanda capsized as soon as she was launched.
But does that actually make it a failed one off project though? It was part of a class of 3 simliar ships although at that time they wouldn’t be built identically on a production line basis. Follow on ships were nearly always subtly different from each other as technology moved on.
Indeed, there's the Brabazon and the Princess flying boat for starters. Although both "happened" in the sense that they flew, they did not enter service as intended.
I certainly wouldn't consider the A380 to be a total flop, it very much happened, and the Concorde was never commercially scaled but it certainly happened too.
Indeed. Neither of them were commercially successful but in the case of Concorde it succeeded in what it was intended to do: prove that the UK/European aerospace industry was not irrelevant. We couldn't go to the Moon like the USSR and USA but we could make a successful SST, something that neither of them actually managed. It's also worth noting that the Concorde we had was the 'A' model, the lessons from which would have been implemented in the 'B' model. This had several improvements over the first model that would have made it much more commercially viable. For example, it would have been able to take off without use of full reheat, and would have had trans-Pacific range.
Spruce Goose - it's debatable if that even flew!
Point to point works up to a certain level, then it gets unwieldy. CF Emirates - if they were to operate a mainly point to point model most of their routes would pass within a few hundred nautical miles of Dubai. That's why the A380 works so well for them.
It did happen. It just didn't last.
But BA never operated the A380 on the LHR-JFK route. The 747s had been downseated and, being fully written down in the books, were still economic to operate against the American carriers widebody twins. Frequency is everything in such a competitive market which, speaking of Airbus, is where the first mistake was made. They thought there was a market for a short haul widebody (hence the name of the company), the belief at the time being that people would want "wide body comfort" (!) on short haul routes. Airlines that bought the original A300 soon discovered that in order to fill it they had to reduce frequencies, which lost them customers to rivals flying more frequent services with 737s and DC-9s etc. Airbus was forced to develop a short haul narrow body, and luckily the arrival of ETOPS enabled the A300 to be developed into a medium/long range aircraft.
Which kinda makes my point. BA made money with the 747s because the capital cost had already been covered, so they made them premium-heavy and raked in the cash. It's also why they were the first to be retired - premium travel disappeared faster than the speed of light. So a big aircraft makes money operationally, as long as you have the premium passengers.
With c. 500 passenger models delivered, some operated for >30 years, they must've been on to something. American Airlines, for example, still misses theirs in routes into the Caribbean and Central America as they used to be kings for cargo. It's not unknown for the 737-800s to leave bags behind.
Those are not short haul routes. The A300, as I said, was developed into a medium haul aircraft. The original intention is that it would have been used on London-Paris and other similar city pairs
That's not entirely true. While the original concept came out of the need to replace/upgauge aircraft like the BAC 1-11, that idea didn't survive the project inception phase.
When you say "Buran was accredited to the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union" it reads like you mean that Buran was the result of the Soviet Union's bankruptcy
Good point, other way around. Ha haWhen you say "Buran was accredited to the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union" it reads like you mean that Buran was the result of the Soviet Union's bankruptcy
That's often claimed - that Buran played a large role in bankrupting the USSR but the rot had set in long before.
Yes, two expensive projects that got nowhere. The flying boat was on its way out, but Saunders-Roe didn't seem to realise that. The Brabazon attempted to compete with the luxury transatlantic ships rather than take a good number of passengers. Some of the design and production experience of the Brabazon was used with the Britannia, so it wasn't entirely wasted, but this didn't happen with the Princess, as no more flying boats of any size were produced in Britain. Saunders-Roe did have ideas of the Queen, a five-deck flying boat, 300' long with a 300' wing-span, powered by 24 (!) Conway engines, but not surprisingly this stayed on the drawing board.
The Stratocruiser was a nightmare to service and expensive to operate, but it gave Pan American and BOAC the advantage on the Atlantic (and Pacific for Pan Am) with its superior passenger experience for the first half of the fifties. Then the DC-7C, with its superior economics began usurping it, in spite of its narrow DC-4 width fuselage.
Indeed, it can't be called a failure as they operated for the better part of 20 years and carried millions of passengers.
