RichardMEL...I thought you said you weren't going to produce new figures, but obviously curiosity got to you.

Again, you have put some serious time into collating and presenting the data. I was with you until the 10:1 long/short haul part...maybe I need to re-read it for the subsequent data to filter through to my head (must have been the 15 hour day I had yesterday)..

Of course, the greatest challenge is that the theoretical hypotheses you use may only suit a limited number of people - if they knew what their flying was going to be like (all long/all short or an exact 50/50 mix) and could choose the program (according to your figures) to suit their purposes.

Most of us would probably be somewhere between the two..like some of us at QF-land where we have short, medium and long haul Dom (short = <1K miles, medium = >1k <2.7K, long = >2.7K) & Intl flights (short = NZ, PNG; medium = Asia, Hawaii; long = the rest of the world).

Perhaps we are the minority (because I place myself in that category of true mixed travel) - mine in the past year would be 20% Dom SH, 10% Dom MH, 10% Dom LH, 10% Intl SH, 20% Intl ML, 30% Intl LH, so we need to do our own calculations based on perhaps our last 12 months travel and see which suits.

(Going a little off-topic on a related subject still to this thread)...Of course, as I am about to embark on a WT+ BNE QF MEL BA SIN BA LHR BA DUB BA LHR BA SIN QF BNE, I have toyed with the idea of either :

1. Using QF program to help me towards Gold/Plat requal, or
2. Joining AA and using "Plat challenge" (equiv to QF Gold/OW Saph)

If I wasn't already a QF Plat (OW Em, I'd be jumping at the AA program. But for me, Plat requal is more important. Had I been a newbie...AA would have been the go!

(Edited to correct spelling, spacing and add paragraph)

[This message has been edited by QF WP (edited 07-10-2003).]