British Airways has begun talks on a possible alliance with Air France and Delta that could lead to the breakup of the UK carrier's oneworld alliance, the Sunday Times said at http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/p...snws01005.html

I believe the report but find it highly unlikely that BA and AF will end up in bed together. There are too many differences between the Brits and the French.

There is a nice symmetry though: AA and DL would basically trade BA and SR as their key European partners.

Interesting point of view. AA would be the loser, though: SR is in a terrible position (thin local traffic from a small base, tiny hub (ZRH) with only one runway and geographically locked) and SN isn't in a great one either (talk about a small local market!). The question is whether a BA/DL combination would get the transatlantic immunity that would make such an alliance preferable over the BA/AA one -- and I personally doubt it would.

I dunno, hillrider. The big sticking point with BA/AA is domination of Heathrow, which wouldn't be an issue with BA/DL. DL serves Gatwick, not Heathrow, and with a handful of second-tier flights to ATL and CVG. DL "sprays" flights from JFK and ATL to a bunch of European destinations (the descendant of the old Pan Am system); BA "sprays" flights from LHR to 25 or so North American destinations. There's very little overlap and no joint domination of any single city-pair. So I think BA/DL could indeed pass muster.

Exactly. BA and DL only overlap on two city pairs. ATL - LGW: they have a combined five daily flights with no competition, but I think BD wants to start flights there. JFK - MAN, but DL is dropping that route soon. And BOS - London when DL launches its flight to LGW. The only troublesome route from a competition standpoint would be ATL - LGW.

And maybe BA could fix that by moving its ATL services to LHR.

Before BA could do that, the Bermuda II treaty would have to be changed (or scrapped in favor of Open Skies) since ATL is not one of the cities that can currently be served nonstop from LHR according to this treaty. For that matter, no DL hub except JFK can be served from LHR. ATL, CVG, DFW, SLC and MCO would all have to be served from LGW. That's why AA's service to DFW, its hometown hub, is still from LGW.

[This message has been edited by leroy11 (edited 10-26-2000).]

Copy of a forum post on Airwise:
"I just finished talking with Leo Mullin, CEO of Delta. I was able to speak with him for about 20 minutes. I asked him about the future of Oneworld and Skyteam. As he put it, oneworld is a disfunctional family. AA is going to start things by leaving, followed by CX. What surprised me, even after the information that I was given a few days ago, is that CX and QF are both interested in the DL/AF/KE/AM/CS/ SkyTeam Alliance. To hear the info come straight from the head man's mouth, it's to be more so true. So, with that in mind now, I think the whole Alliance game is going to change as even I didn't know about QF.
To read more about DL and the SkyTeam Alliance, go to the Delta post on this forum."

I started a fire auction thread over on the *A thread..
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum82/HTML/000257.html

Sorry!

Dorian


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