BA has a definite advantage for passengers wanting to fly to the UK and some nearby business cities in Europe. But what about the beyond traffic? Plenty of North and South Americans fly to India, ME and Eastern Africa. BA used to be a logical first or second choice, but now Emirates, Qatar, Etihad and Turkish have increased both the one-stop options to those regions (in many cases offering far more destination choices) and the level of quality service. It is difficult to compete with EK's A380 and it's business and first class options. Of course, having loyalty programs help BA retain some business passengers, but Turkish and Qatar have recently joined alliances as well and can offer bolstered loyalty points for those passengers who want them.

It will be interesting to see how BA adapts with the new 787s, A350s and Super A380s in the future and perhaps develops higher levels of service in the future. :ok:

British Airways 787 has been painted with blue engines:http://kpae.********.co.uk/2013/04/p...l#comment-form

That's a relief, orange ones would have clashed horribly with the rest of the colour scheme.

Not to all those companies that produce desktop models/posters etc who followed Boeings word and made everything with white nacelles :{

http://mymahoganymodel.com/images_so...20Solo%202.jpg

Ooops

http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/fl...r/ba787_sm.jpg

To be honest the sort of people who buy these hideous impersonations aren't really going to care. It actually seems as though they took the Concorde nose and then stitched a 767 onto it... just look at it

http://www.modelbuffs.com/mpm/upload...20Solo%201.jpg

http://mymahoganymodel.com/images_so...20Solo%202.jpg

If I'd paid good money for a model like that, I'd be more concerned about that ridiculous nose/flight deck profile than about the colour of the nacelles. :O

My preferred route to Manila is Birmingham-Amsterdam-Manila, good long rest and avoids Hellrow.

Never, never, never via Dubai again!

If BA introduced similar flights, it would be worth looking at, only problem would be strikes, On more than one occasion we have been fortunate not to be flying BA as they were affected by strikes at the time, and as our final flight in the Philippines has to be booked separately, we would have had to pay again for it after the delay.

(I am NOT commenting on the merit of any strikes, only on the effect it has/could have on our travels(

But nobody in BA is going on strike - or do you mean in the Philippines?

I'm certainly not keen on the real nose /flight deck profile. It looks a plain ugly duckling to me at the front end. I suppose another 10 mpg is what they wanted though

I'm not sure why some people think slots are an issue for BA regarding reasonable levels of long haul expansion.
Each long haul flight obviously would only need one slot pair assuming it runs daily (and many new routes would start at lower frequency than that)

Whats MAN running at frequency wise now - 10 or 11 a day? Cut that to 7 or 8 like it often was pre BMI merger.
Cancel the 3* slotsitter that is LBA
Cancel the 3* slot sitter that is RTM
Stop messing around with Palma and Ibiza etc.
You've just created 9 or 10 slot pairs.
OK, they might not all be ideally timed for long haul, but thats for the schedulers to sort out!
The reality is that it is likely to take BA 3 years+ to launch that amount of new long haul routes..............

But, without wishing to restart the whole LHR expansion debate again, this is just stop-gap stuff. Over the next 20 years or so, there will be a substantial increase in the number of economically important destinations in Asia, LatAm and Africa which will require direct service to/from LHR if London / UK is to remain a pre-eminent business and tourist destination, and successive governments have just continued to dodge the issue. Already it seems certain that LHR will not have the capacity compete in the connecting traffic market - even if it wanted to - but at the very least it needs to provide unfettered access for those wishing to come to London as final destination.

BA seems to be building the appropriate fleet for this type of operation - 787s and A350s - but whether they will be able to exploit their capabilities fully 10 - 20 years from now is an open question.

which airport is RTM ?

Rotterdam

http://www.google.com/search?q=RTM+IATA+CODE

Seems a little harsh to bin LBA/RTM completeley given the LBA loads are picking up nicely now the flight operates to T5. A reduction in MAN probably wouldn't hurt too much to free up LH slots but at the end of the day you have to use each slot to maximise your profits so sadly I can't see LBA/RTM lasting unless slots from elsewhere become available.

MAN is currently 10 per day and currently running at about 87% LF on average (yes, some quiet flights/days, but on the whole, very busy.)

Given that MAN will rise to 13 per day again in October, LHR-MAN-LHR obviously quite a lucrative feeder market for them.

Whats also interesting with MAN, there seems to be a growing market for 'reverse' connections.
Over the past few months, Ive seen more people start to travel LHR-MAN-GOT/AAR/BLL/JFK/ORD. Yes, its still quite a small market (about 10-20 pax per day), but, an interesting trend either way.

Uv got to admit she does look ansum !!


cs

Seems a little harsh to bin LBA/RTM completeley given the LBA loads are picking up nicely now the flight operates to T5. A reduction in MAN probably wouldn't hurt too much to free up LH slots but at the end of the day you have to use each slot to maximise your profits so sadly I can't see LBA/RTM lasting unless slots from elsewhere become available.

Surely the whole purpose of the BMI acquisition was to provide a substantial increase in BA available slots, given that BMI were the second largest slot holder at Heathrow and that only a fraction of their flights have been carried forward. Apart from a few new Virgin domestic flights, I'm not quite sure where the BMI slots have gone.

I understood that the real crunch for BA now is the capacity of T5, especially airside in terms of gates. Of course, with the consistent arrivals which find the ramp staff are still in the tea room rather than in position to allow direct taxying onto stand (there isn't another carrier/airport I have ever experienced like this), and the T5 stand layout which then means they hold blocking others, a little reorganisation of the ground crew might work wonders.

There's no cul de sacs so you can work around for the most part unlike T1 and T4 thank goodness. In other completely unrelated news, British Airways entire ramp Gatwick operation was outsourced to Swissport in October removing a major staff cost from the business and modernising working practices in line with industry standards. Unrelated as I said, much like GLA / EDI / MAN etc are with Menzies and NCL / LBA / BHD are with local handlers as well.