Sud Aviation Super-Caravelle

The Super-Caravelle was an early supersonic transport design from Sud Aviation, drawn up from 1960 and announced at the 1961 Paris Air Show. Unlike most rival supersonic designs, which imagined larger transatlantic aircraft, it was a smaller, shorter-range airliner meant to replace the successful Caravelle, carrying up to 109 passengers over 2,000 to 3,000 km at about Mach 2. Its ogive wing planform and general layout resembled a smaller Concorde, and its size and range were chosen to suit Air France routes in Europe and Africa. In November 1962 the work was merged with similar British work at the British Aircraft Corporation, originally the Bristol 223, to create the Concorde project. The consortium first planned a long-range and a short-range version, but customers showed no interest in the smaller one and it was dropped. The Super-Caravelle name was afterwards reused for a lengthened Caravelle, the SE-210B. It remained a design study and was never built.