Originally Posted by
scottishpoet
I have never known ba to mive the curtain to squeeze economy back leaving an empty CE.
Indeed, what I see it that they do try to ensure that at OLCI - and for a period after - the system tries to ensure that CE passengers can select a window or aisle seat, even if that removes that option from ET passengers. At the same time BA does try to ensure it has some ET seating available for sale at the last moment, even if they are middle ones, for last minute purchases. So there isn't a specific policy to ram down ET seating.
Flights generally run quite full on BA, so that's your starting assumption, and you're more likely to end up with an empty middle seat in three places: if there are not many status passengers then exit rows can be good choices - for TXL you can give up on that idea though! Non status passengers would normally have to pay a lot extra to sit there and so that and TS often means the middle exit rows stay empty. The second area is in the final 20% of the aircraft, almost everyone prefers a front seat. Then at T-72 it's often the case that the front 2 or 3 seats which were blocked are opened up, and again TS comes into play to block out middle seats if a Silver or Gold moves to one of those previously blocked rows. However then there is Curtain Roulette that comes into play so it's double jeopardy there.