Why did the Concorde disappear?

Concorde, developed by Aérospatiale and the British Aircraft Corporation, first flew in 1969 and entered service in January 1976. It crossed the Atlantic at Mach 2.02 in about three and a half hours, but doing so meant burning an enormous amount of fuel with only 100 passengers on board. Its four afterburning Olympus engines were noisy, and the sonic boom banned it from flying supersonic over land, which confined it to transoceanic routes. Only 20 units were ever built, 14 of them in service with Air France and British Airways, and the airlines received them at a token price because no other company wanted them. There was never enough scale to recoup the development cost or to make spare parts cheaper.

On 25 July 2000, Air France Flight 4590 crashed shortly after taking off from Paris-Charles de Gaulle: a metal strip that had fallen from another aircraft burst a tyre, whose fragments punctured a fuel tank and caused a fire; 113 people died. The fleet was grounded until November 2001, returning with kevlar-reinforced tanks and new tyres, but it resumed flying just weeks after the September 11 attacks, right as the business travel that filled its cabins collapsed.

With aircraft nearly thirty years old, rising maintenance costs and demand that never recovered, Airbus, the programme's heir, announced in 2003 that it would stop providing technical support. Air France flew its last commercial flight on 31 May 2003, and British Airways on 24 October that year. No civil supersonic aircraft has operated since, though several projects are trying to revive the concept with quieter, non-afterburning engines.