>>1783849The government may not have been payed back, but by the time the concorde was retired, BA claimed it had made 1.75 billion pounds in revenue vs 1 billion pounds in expenses, or 750 million in profit, and while their profit margin was smaller air france was in a similar position.
https://newsakmi.com/travel-news/did-british-airways-make-a-profit-flying-concorde/>>1781208>>1783989It´s worse than that. This is probably the best video reconstruction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NYPWip7H2gNote how in the actual video it´s flying much closer compared to the reconstruction (the lateral spacing between them is LESS that the f104's 22 feet wingspan), so it wasn´t actually able to see the wing tip without looking back and to the left. And it´s likely that collision happened because the t-tail horizontal stabilizer was caught by the wing tip vortex, making the f104 uncontrollably pitch up and thus the wing tips collided.
The xb-70A kept flying straight after the crash, but when it started to slip (i.e fly sideways) with the dropped wingtips and without the horizontal stabilizers, the plane was left with an overall anhedral, meaning that it started to roll into the slip rather than away from it (which is an unstable way of flying - planes usually have some amount of dihedral to be able to keep flying straight). Without the rudder the pilot tried to correct the roll by giving afterburner to the rightmost engine, but that made the slip worse and it snap rolled. Arguably the only chance they had was to raise the wingtips and to use the left ailerons as spoilers (like a b-2), but they weren´t trained to do that.
The pilot managed to eject, but when it started to tumble down the g forces got so severe that it eventually disabled the escape capsule's mechanism, preventing the co-pilot from ejecting (if he was even conscious at that point).
