I don't think it's that disappointing. The airlines moved from larger flights to more frequent flights between more destinations. These days, you can miss a t

I don't think it's that disappointing. The airlines moved from larger flights to more frequent flights between more destinations. These days, you can miss a transcontinental flight and only be an hour late to your destination, because there are 15 flights a day instead of 2. You are also likely to be able to fly non-stop between any two city pairs. (I looked some up at random, and you can do things like Montreal - Casablanca nonstop instead of Montreal-Toronto-LHR-Casablanca; probably cutting your door-to-door time in half.) Losing Concorde was unfortunate, but there were just too many limitations to make it viable. Flying supersonic means you produce a shockwave that breaks stuff on the ground, limiting it to flying supersonic over oceans. Flying supersonic means that you have to produce kinetic energy that goes up like the square of your speed, meaning you need more fuel, and you need more fuel to carry the fuel. It barely worked for JFK-LHR (relatively short distance, mostly over the ocean), and there just weren't other routes where it was viable. With no viable routes, it wasn't going to sell in any volume, and there is some critical amount of volume you need to justify the program (some fixed human overhead for every airframe project; if you sell 10000 of them, that rounds to zero, if you sell only 20 of them, that rounds to a lot). Might be pessimistic but I don't think we'll ever see a supersonic airliner again. The sonic boom kills them. Those people that want to drill tunnels through the earth to get better-than-great-circle distances might be the future. But I'll probably be dead before anyone gets funding to do that.