We lucky few assembled before dawn at JFK. Driving in, we passed the billboards New York commuters pass: “Before you, the pond was an ocean. Thanks, Concorde, for 27 years.” At JFK champagne awaited, after check-in.

We saw Lord Marshall of Knightsbridge, BA’s chairman, asked to remove his shoes for a security check. One feared a Diana Ross moment, but, meekly, his lordship obliged.

We watched a video in the airport lounge, showing Corcorde’s inaugural flight. There were tears in some eyes. It was a curiously 1970s affair. The champagne was vintage and so were the celebs: Joan Collins, Bernie Ecclestone, Sir David Frost and Christie Brinkley, the supermodel once married to Billy Joel, mingled with a much larger complement from the world of hard-nosed corporate affairs: the real backbone of BA’s commercial income from Concorde.

Journalists cracked jokes, and Flight 002’s only fare-paying passenger, tall and grandfatherly Dr David Hayes and his jauntily-hatted wife Patty, from Ohio, seemed like innocents among wolves. David and Patty had bid $60,000 in a charity auction for this flight. They were naturally keen to tell us about the deserving nature of their selected children’s charities. To watch their encounter with Jeremy Clarkson and the relentlessly quipping Mirror Editor, Piers Morgan,was to witness the collision of two worlds.

I took my boarding card and walked down the elevated tunnel locked on to Concorde’s forward door. All at once I was alone. Before me stood a chariot awaiting her riders for the last time. Odd, the emotional potency of a piece of aluminium.

Concorde’s flight deck is small and cramped, the seats uphostered in grey leather. The ceiling is low and the windows tiny. It feels like business.

I took my seat: 24D. It was dawn over Manhattan. A crimson sun rose into a clear, cold sky, silhouetting hundreds of cameramen gathered on the terminal roofs like so many ambushing Apaches.

Our take-off was scheduled for 07:37.50 precisely, to catch the American news-slots.The Tarmac was crowded with ground crew and airport staff, taking snapshots. “I wanna see a burly baggage-handler weeping,” grunted a tabloid journalist. “You will, Pete, you will,” muttered a chum.

A water-cannon serenade of red, white and blue waved us off as we taxied towards the runway, scores of police, ambulance, fire and utility trucks following in our wake like small craft, lights flashing. Helicopters hovered. From Air Traffic Control (our Captain, Concorde’s chief pilot, Mike Bannister, told us) messages of goodwill were pouring in.

And at 07:37.50 precisely, we took off.

Concorde really is different. People talk about how you are pressed back into your seat — and you are — but to me it was the tearing, cracking, ripping roar as this happens, that prickled the back of the neck. All the bumph they give you — twice the speed of sound, faster than a rifle’s bullet, faster than the world is turning and 11 miles high — becomes real. The sky above really does turn toward black; the fuselage walls and windows really do heat up with friction. Beneath, a cotton-wool-flecked Atlantic really did curve at the horizon.

At 08.25 Captain Bannister announced that we passed Mach II. The TV cameramen were under everybody’s feet, the cabin crew, led by Chief Purser Julia Van Den Bosch, Concorde’s longest-serving cabin-crew member, were magnificent under pressure, the lobster the best, the smoked salmon plentiful, the caviar superb — and the wine flowed freely.

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