I've just realised that you're probably the
perfect audience for this little story. Most of you will know the broader history and can skip the next paragraph, but I've included it for those that don't...
Back in the 1960s, there was a lot of excitement about the possibility of supersonic airliners. Planes like the Convair B-58 and the NA XB-70 showed that the designs and aeronautics scaled well - at a price. And for national or corporate prestige, everyone was in a rush to loft the first one. By the end of the decade, Boeing even got to the point of full-scale mockup...
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=3493 ...before the Nixon administration sobered up and freaked out at all the zeroes it was seeing on the budget.
As we know, it all ended in expensive cancellations and bankrupt contractors, except in the case of Concorde. Lufthansa even paid a $700,000 deposit on three of them before the project was scaled back, and never took delivery.
But long before that, long before there was a realistic design for a supersonic airliner, Lufthansa knew that was the direction they were going to take. Here then is a model - clearly derived from the B-58 (and probably four GE-J79 engines short of being capable of going supersonic), as modeled by my grandmother:
She
wasn't impressed.
For a bit of context, they were flying Convair 340s and Super Constellations at the time.
