Concorde costs
Sir: Immediately after reading Bernard Dixon's statement (June 3)
that Concorde cost ES for every man, woman and child in Britain, I saw an ITV programme on which all parties agreed that (I) research and development costs to date were £650 million. (2) Some £350m more would be necessary under the same heading before the project produced fully saleable results. (3) That preduction would be uneconomic untila break-e-fen point of 150 sold was reached. (4) That current confirmed orders totalled five, guaranteed by the same Government' which sponsored the project. On my calculation, costs to date approximate £10 per head, will be £16 before we start selling properly, after which any results are uncertain. The -difference is significant, and which figures are correct? When one_ considers what the ordinary household (let alone the poorest) could do with E36 extra spending money (or even, on Bernard Dixon's fignres, with E12) one wonders why the BBC, in a following programme claiming to be a full-dress investigation of causes of inflation, never mentioned uneconomiC public expenditure as a .c.possible contributory cause.
Douglas W. Franklin Dhoon Plat, Maughold, Ramsey, Isle of Man
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