White elephant

From Includipedia, the inclusionist encyclopedia

For other uses, see White elephant (disambiguation).

A white elephant in 19th century Thai art.

A white elephant is a supposedly valuable possession whose cost (particularly cost of upkeep) exceeds its usefulness, and it is therefore a liability. The term derives from the sacred white elephants kept by traditional Southeast Asian monarchs in Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. To possess a white elephant was regarded (and still is regarded, in Thailand and Burma) as a sign that the monarch was ruling with justice and the kingdom was blessed with peace and prosperity.^[1] The tradition derives from tales in the scriptures which associate a white elephant with the birth of Buddha, as his mother was reputed to have dreamed of a white elephant presenting her with a lotus flower, a symbol of wisdom and purity, on the eve of giving birth.^[2] Because the animals were considered sacred and laws protected them from labor, receiving a “gift” of a white elephant from a monarch was both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because of the animal’s sacred nature and a curse because the animal could be put to no practical use.

[edit] Examples of alleged white elephants

Bristol Brabazon, an airliner built by the Bristol Aeroplane Company (BAC) in 1949 to fly a large number of passengers on transatlantic routes from England to the United States. [1]
Concorde, a supersonic transport built by Aérospatiale and British Aircraft Corporation, intended to allow high-speed intercontinental travel. Only fourteen examples saw service, though development costs were to be amortized over hundreds of units. [2] Concorde was a technological triumph however, flew the transatlantic route for over two decades and made a large operating profit for British Airways.^{[citation needed]} The Soviet Tu-144 proved a technical and commercial disaster, crashing at the Paris Airshow and was quickly withdrawn from its very limited service within the Soviet Union.
Nimrod AEW 3. A failed Airborne Early Warning system. [3]
SS Great Eastern, a ship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. She was the largest ship ever built at the time of her launch in 1858, and had the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers around the world without refuelling. However, her hold was later gutted and converted to lay the successful 1865 transatlantic telegraph cable, an impossible task for a smaller vessel.^[3]
Montréal-Mirabel International Airport is North America's largest airport (even bigger than KDEN) but abandoned as a passenger airport^[4]^[5]
Lambert-St. Louis International Airport runway 11/29 was conceived on the basis of traffic projections made in the 1980s and 1990s that warned of impending strains on the airport and the national air traffic system as a result of predicted growth in traffic at the airport.^[6] The $1 billion runway expansion was designed in part to allow for simultaneous operations on parallel runways in bad weather. Construction began in 1998, and continued even after traffic at the airport declined following the 9/11 attacks, and the purchase of Trans World Airlines by American Airlines in April of 2001 and subsequent cuts in flights to the airport by American Airlines in 2003.^[7]^[8] The project required the relocation of seven major roads and the destruction of approximately 2,000 homes in Bridgeton, Missouri.^[9] ^[10] In addition to providing superfluous extra capacity for flight operations at the airport, use of the runway is shunned by fuel-conscious pilots and airlines due to its distance from the terminals.^[11] Even John Krekeler, one of the airport commissioners, deemed the project a "white elephant". ^[12]
The Department of Defense-commissioned Ada programming language came to be known as the "Green Elephant", a play on the phrase White Elephant combined with color code used to keep contract selection unbiased. Ada was designed to be a silver bullet by a DoD assembled committee. However due to the fact that most programmers do not write embedded programs, many find Ada too unwieldy to use and of little benefit. [4]
The Millenium Dome in London, built at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds in Greenwich in London to celebrate the millenium, was commonly termed a white elephant [5] [6]. The exhibition it initially housed was less successful than hoped and the widely criticised building struggled to find a role after the event. It is now the "O2" stadium and entertainment centre.