That's the attitude BA had Skippy, look where it got them...a vastly reduced market share of UK traffic (and shrinking), losing passengers hand over fist to the ME3, US carriers and others.
On short haul european routes, which I am not particually on about anyway, the locos may well had not found MAN so easy to crack had BA handed it over on a plate. There is no way back on that front - ever.
The trick BA missed was domestic feed. How many UK airports now crave a feed into LHR ? How many domestic destinations does MAN serve today (and it could easily be more) ?. That is where BA went wrong. Their opportunity was not serving CDG, AMS etc from MAN, but providing a comprehensive domestic feed, adding to the sizable local demand, for a splattering of popular long haul destinations.
I am not having it that a well run venture could not have fed MAN from nearly every UK airport that would provided enough passengers to successfully fill a modest long haul base serving JFK, LAX, HKG and the likes.
It would even have helped BA at LHR by allowing a few services like the above to be flown from MAN instead of LHR, freeing up slots for growth to new destinations from LHR.
I never expected BA to provide a fleet of spanking 319's up here, but if they were cleverer they could easily have kept lots of these lost passengers - and profitably, whilst easing the glaringly obvious future pressure on LHR a little, by running a feeding fleet and say a dozen or so long haul a/c from MAN.
No euro routes will ever be possible now, but will BA have the sense to see what I'm saying ? The domestic feed is already there with Flybe, but despite that, and despite LHR being rammed to breaking point all but denying BA growth for the foreseeable future, I still doubt they will see the light.
I maybe looking at this far to simplistically, but with no new runway for a long time, MAN seems an obvious solution...to me anyway, buy hey, what the hell do I know !