Why did the Concorde stop flying?

The Concorde entered service in January 1976 with Air France and British Airways, and only twenty were built, fourteen of them for commercial use. It crossed the Atlantic at Mach 2 in about three and a half hours, but with barely a hundred seats and four afterburning Olympus engines that burned far more fuel per seat than any subsonic jet. Tickets were extremely expensive and profitability depended on a handful of routes, chiefly Paris and London to New York. Sonic booms banned supersonic flight over land, which limited its market from the outset.

On July 25, 2000, Air France flight 4590 crashed shortly after taking off from Paris-Charles de Gaulle when a tire burst after hitting a metal strip on the runway; 113 people died. The entire fleet was grounded for over a year while fuel tanks were reinforced with Kevlar liners and tires were redesigned. Flights resumed in November 2001, right after the September 11 attacks, when transatlantic business travel, its core customer base, had collapsed.

With low occupancy, airframes already around 25 years old and increasingly costly maintenance, Airbus, heir to the program, announced in 2003 that it would stop supporting the type, which made keeping the certification unsustainable. Air France operated its last commercial flight on May 31, 2003, and British Airways closed the supersonic era on October 24, 2003, with three consecutive landings at Heathrow. The surviving aircraft are preserved in museums across Europe and the United States.