Sorry guys, I'm sick of all this BA-bashing. No, I do not work for them, but am privileged to fly with them frequently. Always very professional both in the cabin and cockpit (sometimes the groundies are drips but that's industry-wide), rather than other airlines who hire their space-waitresses primarily on looks and their ability to keep the lip-gloss on for 8 hours. I know who I'll be looking to when I need help getting out of a bent tube. In any case, BA has been a plc for 13 years now - so it's learnt to compete. For most of that time, it was the world's most profitable airline - so it grew organically. So one gets rather flustered when one hears of someone who usually pleads for open competition, but only when he's been bailed out by a largely state-owned enterprise, now bleating about needing more regulation to be competitive!! the real issue is when the US will open THEIR skies... but I digress. Sure, BA have made mistakes - buying 50-odd 744s was one of them - and as we all know, airline managers the world over are idiotic ogres who should all be on the next Voyager rocket - but BA are a professinal outfit in the air, whose home base exposes them to more competition than any other major (ie. more people want to fly in/out of LHR than pretty much anywhere else) but they generally still manage to turn a quid. Bit of a lesson to most of us, really...