I'd have thought the fact that Air France owns KLM (and doesn't KLM own a chunk of Northwest?) makes all the difference. I haven't looked at the detail of what BA and American are proposing but from what I heard reported on BBC Radio 4 this evening it strikes me as a far from radical. I imagine that, for example, there'll be an integration of the two airlines' LHR-JFK schedules so that it looks similar to what now exists between BA and Iberia, say, on the London to Madrid route.