Queen Mary Project "Holds"

In some of your talks it was mentioned that what was then called the "Queen Mary Project" was put on hold two or three times because the cost was becoming too expensive. How did you and your design colleagues break through that to restart the project? Was it the decision to break the Panama Canal envelope?

Dear BlueRiband,

Every passenger ship, like many things in life, has to make a requisite return on investment for the project to be viable.

Queen Mary 2 was a very expensive ship, largely due to her "liner" pedigree which will be discussed in other posts. It was largely a case of maximising the number of cabins, particularly balcony cabins, to generate sufficient return to make the project worthwhile. This involved consideration into the number of decks and the length of the superstructure. It was not easy but I think the result works well. When the project stalled I simply had to go back and tweak the design until the sums added up.

Thank you for your question.

Stephen