costs
The figures were around £1M to move by road but somewhere in the region of £5M-£10M to make the journey by air.
AA's care and maintenance programme was suspended in eary 2002, when it became clear the airline would only need 6 aircraft....and needed AA to help with parts.
If another one of the fleet had had to be grounded for any resson, eg fatigue, she would have been returned to flight.
Alpha-Alpha was to have been the last modified as she was out of hours for an inter check 4 days before the grounding in Mid August. They planned to do the check and the mods after the other 6 had been done. This was when they expected the tanks mods to take 6 weeks per a/c not 3-4 months!
Last flight was Aug 12th 2000 as the BA002 JFK-LHR. She was landed for the Final Time by SFO James Bedforth