[jrockway]

I don't think price was the problem, it was scale. It's cheap and easy to fly a 737 because there are a lot of them, and there are a lot of parts and a lot of expertise on how to fix them. Concorde, not so much; there were only a few, and so there was no secondary market of parts and labor and extra planes.

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.

[forgottenpaswrd]

"I don't think price was the problem, it was scale."

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.

[Nick_C]

The real problem was noise. Everything was predicated on being able to do cross-continent mach 1+ flights. When the US then Europe closed off faster-than-sound flights over land, that was it.

After that, it couldn't make money. Then everything else started to become more significant and you could see the writing on the wall.