Are you really a BA pilot?. Your comments make me doubt about it.
Well, that's your prerogative. I have flown both into and over Spain many times (although not into for a while now). It's a personal opinion but one shared, I assure you, by a great deal of my colleagues on Long Haul. There again, as I say, we only use the airways and even then only to go to Africa an ocasionally to GRU. The shorthaul boys may have another opinion; conversely, they don't fly to the US.
Talking to one of our trainers recently he said to me: There are those who don't know, and know that they don't know; those who know, but don't know that they know; and those who think that they know, but don't know that they don't know. And the most dangerous in this business is the latter.
In fact, I'll let you in on a little secret: we have an event monitoring system called sesma on all our aircraft. The highest frequency of events nearly always come from airports in the US: carrying excess speed, high on app, rushed app, and last but not least, the highest number of G/A's of anywhere on our network. True it is, we have a lot of flights there but even so.....