It was the small, slow 737 and A320 that really changed aviation. I can fly between cities for less than $50 (on special) in 2011. Price won out over service and speed.
Another problem might have been that Concorde was not priced highly enough. Today's first class costs as much as Concorde did, and it's twice as slow... and people still buy it.
And it was a scale problem because the other little problems:
1-Price(>6000USD for London-NY USD is high enough for me)
2-Contamination(look at the tail of the one taking of in the article, an environmental hazard )
3-Noise
4-Poor performance, breaking the sound barrier means increment exponentially the resistance. Fuel is not "free" anymore as it was.
5-With Internet an small jet planes, not needed anymore.
After that, it couldn't make money. Then everything else started to become more significant and you could see the writing on the wall.
Hmm, wait that isn't right...
It's interesting how the world has changed. Any political entity with the ability to make war has realized that wars do not help them get richer, and so everyone pretty much gets along. It's the people with nothing to lose that want to start wars now.
I'll take the Taliban over the Soviets or Axis as a primary threat, easily. The couple of generations before mine worried about the bomb, and the generation before that worried about the Japanese landing in San Francisco. All we have to worry about is having airplanes hijacked? That's success, not failure.