A funny thing happened on PPRUNE yesterday.
Someone posted a copy of an article by Jim French which had appeared a couple of days ago in
ABTN and (in a slightly longer form) on
the flyBE web site. It was about how the industry had developed, his vision for the future, etc. - all quite interesting stuff. (Thread title was "flyBE and its vision" or something similar.) But there was one sentence in the version posted here which differed from the published version.
Paragraph from published version (from flyBE website):
Regional airports have a massive role in environmental benefits. Flybe’s development at Southampton over the last year has taken over 17 million car miles off our motorway system by offering the service from a local airport as opposed to having to drive to one of the London airports. We should broadcast all of the facts, not just defending ourselves from attacks by the various pressure groups!
Same paragraph from version posted on PPRUNE (approximately):
Regional airports have a massive role in environmental benefits. Flybe’s development at Southampton over the last year has taken over 17 million car miles off our motorway system by offering the service from a local airport as opposed to having to drive to one of the London airports. Over the next two years we'll phase out older aircraft and we will have clean A319s from October 2005. We should broadcast all of the facts, not just defending ourselves from attacks by the various pressure groups!
I say "approximately" because the sentence in bold above (my emphasis) is from memory - I posted a message yesterday highlighting this A319 comment and asking whether it meant that flyBE's choice of A319s was official now, and the whole thread was promptly deleted (I assume by the original poster, as is their right).
This could imply that flyBE's original intention was to have an A319 deal public by the time the article was published last weekend, and hence that a draft version of the article (I'm assuming that the version posted here yesterday was a draft) included a reference to the aircraft. But that would suggest that the decision regarding aircraft choice has been made.
There's a second possibility, of course: the version posted here was a fake, with an unofficial sentence about A319s added into Jim French's original article by someone else and meant as some sort of inside joke.
Thoughts? Comments? Or did I dream the whole thing?
C. (intrigued)