How hard did BA try to make regional long-haul work though? Now they've made their bed at LHR, they're now suffering the consequences of focusing on premium capacity on their aircraft when many companies are putting a squeeze on their travel budgets and so becoming "Northern-like". It's also noticable that a lot of people who when responding gripes about the centralisation of BA services at LHR tend to make idiotic remarks such as "long haul network out of every airstrip in the country" when we know that it's predominantley MAN, BHX and GLA/EDI that would be the focus of them. All these airports had substantial BA networks that somehow BA failed to convert into offering a seamless travel product routing Europe-"regional UK"-JFK in much the same way that they are obsessed in routing "Europe/Regional UK"-LHR-USA. They have the ability to codeshare the transatlantic flights from Regional UK with AA but how hard did they bother to do that? How will it be ok for AA to operate JFK-MAN stating AA has feed at JFK when BA would have had ample opportunity to do tap into the same feed?