Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Friday the 16th of January.

If you've been good enough to be listening all week, you will have heard a lot from Blake Scholl.

He is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, whose Overture aircraft is hopefully coming to an airport, possibly near you,

by the end of the decade. I wanted to round off the week to get a view from, well, the leading

airline revenue economist, that's Oliver Ransom, who is the editor of airline revenue

economics, and Oliver, you've been studying

the use cases for the overture aircraft looking at three particular routes and timings

and assessing whether you think they would work. Boom Supersonic had published on their website

three particular use cases for how they envision real passengers,

not necessarily high-flying Master of the Universe top-level business people, but ordinary business travelers

might be able to make the most of the service that the boom overture is going to offer.

Let's have a look at the first use case.

This involves a flight from New York at 7 a.m. getting into London at 3.40 in the afternoon.

That's right, Simon.

And I think it's really interesting that they've focused on the eastbound direction here

because the business case for flying on Concord

was always easy for a certain type of senior Master of the Universe businessman to make.

They would leave London after breakfast, then fly to New York in time for another breakfast

when they'd have meetings all day and then fly back.

So Concord was quite literally for them heading westbound, a time machine.

But the eastbound flight was a bit more tricky because it leaves in the morning and then

arrives in London in the evening. So an unkind person would say that you waste a lot of the day

...