Of course the best way to ease yourself into one of those Connolly leather seats, and to be wined and dined in a bid to distract you from the absurdly cramped cabin, was to join the airline. BA has routinely offered Concorde flights to staff for a fraction of normal fares. They call it the Rocket, with curious echoes of both the first successful rail locomotive and the Apollo space missions. But this month BA will cease to be the only supersonic airline in the world.When flights 001 and 002 are erased from the schedules, the remaining Concorde Lounges at Heathrow and New York JFK will be shut down. They join an eccentric list of airports that enjoyed a spell in the supersonic sun.Sure, there were a few big hitters among the scheduled destinations: Paris, Washington, Miami, Dallas-Fort Worth and Singapore.

But promising to save travellers precious hours to places such as Santa Maria in the Azores, Dakar in Senegal and the mad Venezuelan capital, Caracas, does not amount to much of a marketing campaign. On journeys where supersonic flight could have made a significant difference, such as from Europe to Australia or between North America and Asia, fuel stops eroded most of the time savings. When a Concorde charter flew from London to Sydney, it took over 17 hours – just four hours faster than today’s 747s. What Britain and France built was over-ambitious, over-engineered and over-priced. What the world wanted was cheap and simple.Before you get too misty-eyed about the demise of aviation’s grandest dame, think about the lost opportunities.

Never mind the benefits that could have accrued by investing those wasted billions in health, education and industrial regeneration; if the money had to be spent on aggrandising aviation in France and Britain, it should have gone on creating a mass-produced, low-cost aircraft to democratise travel. We could have created Airbus a decade earlier, extending the horizons of millions, and doing wonders to accelerate post-war European integration.Europe’s real aviation revolution is only now under way. Surprisingly for a nation that has invested barely a euro in aviation, Ireland is in the vanguard of 21st-century transport. Ryanair has done what decades of conflict and nationalism have failed to achieve: bringing the continent together using Boeing 737s, the Routemaster of the skies.No-frills airline pilots earn more than bus drivers, but are not paid as generously as Concorde’s flight crews They have to work rather harder, too. Supersonic pilots are in the air for an average of less than one hour a day, the sort of workload that drivers of Routemaster buses must envy when they find themselves stuck in traffic, watching the minutes tick away Time was the essence of Concorde. For the aircraft to succeed, wealthy companies and individuals had to place an extraordinarily high value on the 225 minutes that could be saved on the world’s premier intercontinental air route, between London Heathrow and New York JFK. But the value of time has tumbled, and travellers have become used to slower, more utilitarian journeys.C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas l’avenir, as they are no doubt muttering in Toulouse Concorde is magnificent, but it is not the future.