Actually, the fact that premium traffic has increased less than capacity is a an extremely significant measure for the airline industry, but it is precisely because I don't expect people to content themselves with my mention of a headline fact that, unlike many posters, I included the direct links to IAG's own documents which give you very specific details and show that in fact for BA per se the decrease in premium load factor has been far more significant yet than for the rest of IAG. What is more, as paradoxically shown by irishguy28, the current trend in the airline industry is for an increase in load factor at the same time as capacity (including for premium), and not a decrease in premium load factor.

That said, in the spirit of Petrus's request, I won't comment on that issue any further.

With regards to the topic of the new seat, it seems to me that we know as little as before and will probably need to wait till the introduction of the A350 (I believe in 2017) to know what's coming. I am still a bit puzzled by BA's tendency to patent multiple seat designs and I suspect that it means that they are still considering several designs.

My suspicion (as often) is that different parts of the BA machine have different priorities and probably push for different evolutions. The accountants certainly do not want to lose density, whilst at the same time, the people responsible for product are aware of the evolution of competitors' products and probably worried about what will happen if BA does not up the game in years to come. It is likely that engineers are trying to find solutions that would bridge the gap between those somewhat contradictory priorities and whether they are able to find such a thing or not is anyone's guess at this stage.

For what it's worth, airlines have typically gone "either/or" instead, with airlines like IB, AZ, AF, DL, etc going for strong quality improvement at the cost of sacrificing some space, whilst LH and TK have chosen to go for a minimal improvement of the hard product (and notably no single seats) to protect density, but at the cost of accepting to be a second rate product in today's market. My personal guess is that there is probably no "best of both worlds" and that BA will end up needing to choose between those two strategies (and I personally expect them to choose strategy no2 because cost cutting seems to have taken the edge in terms of current wars of influence within the BA machine).