What really doomed it was the proliferation of small airports where large planes can easily land The way I've heard it expressed is that the commercial aviator

What really doomed it was the proliferation of small airports where large planes can easily land The way I've heard it expressed is that the commercial aviators are moving away from the hub-and-spoke model: it used to be that there were few long-haul airports in any region, and to get to the smaller airports you'd need to transfer at the hub. But nowadays it's much more common to fly directly on a regional airport, even for long-haul flights. That means the passenger number per long-haul flight gets smaller (it no longer includes the regional destinations), and the regional airports don't have the size nor the capacity to handle these large planes. The airlines flying these planes are the ones still using a hub-and-spoke model, like Emirates.