With regard to the "new" BA, probably worth reminding ourselves of Alex Cruz's words from March of last year, when asked about BA considering long haul flying from MAN:
“I’ll give you the same answer I have given my staff, and the answer is “not yet.” We are serving Manchester. We have an inherent interest in the city of Manchester because we have a pretty large call centre there and we have a fairly large number of Executive Club members from the Manchester area who are coming to Heathrow to fly to a number of places, so while I wouldn’t rule it out, at this particular time there are no plans to do so at the moment.
“We will continue to monitor what opportunities surface, however. UK carriers’ Manchester propositions are mostly leisure from Manchester – Las Vegas, Florida, etc. Otherwise Manchester is being connected by non-British carriers coming in from the US or the Gulf. So how would BA fit in with that when BA is not strictly a leisure carrier? I don’t know. It’s not entirely out of the radar but it’s not in the immediate radar.”
This chap is obviously a paid up graduate of the Sir Humphrey Appleby University.
