Watching a programme called Near Miss was probably not the best thing to do before taking a trip to London last week. I was able to tell myself that the documentary focused on the US not London, but it still didn't help to know that airlines regard any aircraft sitting on the ground as wasting money.

We were in a long queue to head out of Dublin and, with every passing second, I could imagine some bean-counter looking miserable and muttering about precious euros disappearing in a cloud of vapour while urging the controller to let us take-off into the fog immediately.

The TV programme shared lots of information about the safe distance between planes which depend on the size of the aircraft - obviously being close to a 747 gives you the opportunity to be turned over by a great deal more turbulence than a Cessna.

The sight of around 25 planes lined up and burning precious fuel at Newark as they waited to takeoff was as awesome as it was scary - but Dublin was pretty crowded too. It's interesting, therefore, to see that battle lines are being drawn between Aer Lingus, which now wants to fly into London City, and CityJet, which doesn't want it to.

I've lost track of the number of partners CityJet seems to have had, but currently it is running the route in alliance with Jersey European Airways.

It appears that CityJet and Aer Lingus had been in discussion about running the route together but the deal fell apart and now Aer Lingus is planning to go it alone. Most of the people I know like flying into London City more than any other British airport.

The fact that you can walk through the terminal building in less than two minutes has a lot to do with it. I can see why Aer Lingus thinks it can make a profit on the route - mind you, since so many of those who use it are business passengers, I wonder what the chances are of the airline providing its gents and ladies shaving gel to prospective customers?

Meanwhile, at the low-cost segment of the market, the news that Debonair has come a cropper is disappointing but perhaps not entirely unexpected. Another recent TV programme (I don't watch that much, but what I watch is always worrying!) about low-cost airlines made much of the fact that the airlines concerned have to find airports with low landing charges to keep costs under control.

As well as that, they must fly planes with low fuel consumption and low maintenance requirements. It seems that Debonair didn't. And the big mistake the airline made - in the whole realm of low-cost - was to provide a business class.

Let's face it, business class and low-cost don't exactly go hand in hand. Maybe they thought that charging a lot to provide a few people with food and a couple of snipes of champagne made it all worthwhile, but obviously not.

Debonair, not unnaturally, blames the arrival of the British Airways low-cost subsidiary Go for its troubles. Franco Mancassola, the founder of Debonair, complained that small players end up fighting big players without any help from the regulators.

I've always been sympathetic to small companies. I've worked for them and I understand the difficulty of competing in a market with the big hitters. But I don't think that Franco could really expect the regulators to make things easier for him. The thing about running a small company is that you find a niche and you go for it - a lot of the time very profitably.

But if you try to move out of your niche you come to the attention of a bigger company that either buys you out or squeezes you out. Given that most companies (despite saying that they're all for customer service and providing a better deal for their clients) are made up of people who actually want to make money, they usually end up being bought out.

Quite often they run as profitable subsidiaries of the larger company, but they've lost the independence that they had before. There's always someone bigger than you!

Not necessarily in terms of size, of course. Sometimes it can be in terms of power. I see that Mary Harney is keen on the idea of winding down the Central Bank and bringing financial regulation under one authority.

I certainly agree with the idea of one regulator for the entire financial services industry, although it seems to me that closing the Central Bank is a pretty radical step. There are more regulators in there than anywhere else. But they're like tracker dogs, you have to give them the right scent to go after. As long as the viability of the financial system was the Bank's main function, the closing down of institutions wasn't going to be high on its agenda.

Mind you, one of its problems is that it doesn't seem to have anyone with retail or wholesale banking experience on its staff. Most of the traffic from the Central Bank is outwards. People learn and leave. Or they go on secondments to institutions like the IMF or the World Bank. Or take up positions in the ECB in Frankfurt which, I'm told, pays extremely well. And just think of all the paid trips on full-fare airlines that they can take.

In business-class, of course. It's just as well that Diana Ross wasn't on the return leg of our journey though. For whatever reason, I was called aside for the body-search that distressed the diva when she passed through London recently. I can see how Diana lost the cool but it's different for me. Bond Dealer Goes Bonkers in City Airport is probably a reasonable headline, but not in the same league as Diana Ross grabbing the boobs of a security guard.

Sheila O'Flanagan is a fixed-income specialist at NCB Stockbrokers