Dear Reader

REGRETS? I’ve had a few — and on the list somewhere fairly high up is never having flown on Concorde. I remember watching its final flight from an office building in London’s Canary Wharf in 2003 and getting all misty-eyed.

And I always liked seeing the Concorde model standing guard outside Heathrow Airport — a prime spot now occupied by an A380 carrying the logo of moneybags Emirates, which pays the British Airports Authority some £1.5 million a year for the privilege.

So count me in for the 1,300 mph (1.7 times the speed of sound) Overture ‘son of Concorde’, which is scheduled to start operating commercially in 2029 if all goes well with Boom Supersonic, a Colorado-based start-up with big ideas.

The plane will carry about 80 passengers and take little more than three hours to make the 3,459- mile trip to New York.

No doubt it will be pricey and I wonder what baggage allowance you’ll be given. People who can afford to fly on this bird might want to take some proper luggage with them.

Hopefully, you’ll never be kicked off the flight at the last minute, something that nearly happened to a colleague this week, travelling with his wife and two children.

We’ve all heard of overbooking but this was different. At the gate, passengers were told that the plane flying them to Zakynthos ( pictured) in Greece was on duty somewhere else and the only alternative was a smaller aircraft. That meant 48 people were going nowhere.

But how to decide who would miss out? No one knew for sure. Then, it was a case of shuffling forward, presenting your boarding card and praying.

Every now and again, some wretched soul was told to go home. Random selection? Not quite. It turned out that the last people to check in were the first people to lose out.

But weren’t we told just the other day not to check in too early?