and injured dozens more.

Without cooling this will melt aluminium, and is, Mr Varvill says, "literally too hot to handle".Fast forward three decades to October 2024 and Reaction Engines was bringing the heat exchanger to life at sites in the UK and US.

UK Ministry of Defence funding took the company into hypersonic research with Rolls-Royce for an unmanned aircraft. But that was not enough to keep the business afloat.Rolls-Royce declines to go into details about Reaction's collapse, but Mr Varvill is more specific."Rolls-Royce said it had other priorities and the UK military has very little money."

Aviation is a business with a very long gestation time for a product. It can take 20 years to develop an aircraft. This unforgiving journey is known as crossing the Valley of Death.Mr Varvill knew the business had to raise more funds towards the end of 2024 but big investors were reluctant to jump on board.

"The game was being played right to the very end, but to cross the Valley of Death in aerospace is very hard."

What was the atmosphere like in those last days as the administrators moved in?I ask Ms Tremblay if she's worried. "Yes, sure," she says, "As everybody is."

But that is all she will say on the matter. French winemakers are walking on eggshells at the moment, fearful of saying anything that might aggravate the situation.Perhaps their representatives will be more forthcoming? I get in my car and drive over to one of her neighbours - François Labet. He is the president of the Burgundy Wine Board, which represents this region's 3,500 winemakers.

"The US is the largest export market for the whole region. Definitely," he tells me. "They are the biggest in volume and the biggest in value."And, until Donald Trump's re-election, the US market was booming. While French wines and spirits global exports