BAA Decides to Fight To Keep All It's Airports

BAA has decided that it isn't going to give up any of it's airports without a fight. It seems that they have decided to waste more of their money pursuing this idea despite the fact that, to just about everyone else, it seems like a good idea to stimulate a bit of competition. Could it be because of the price since recent estimates seem to value Gatwick at a lot less than they do?
And yet it seems they have have thrown the towel in as well.
I had a letter from BAA World Points telling me that they would no longer be available from Gatwick (my preferred airport from which to fly) from the end of June. World Points is the BAA loyalty system which operates across all of their airports. You get points for booking car parking, spending money in the duty free and so on.
Now if BAA really planned a fight of it wouldn't you have thought they would keep their loyalty system going? Doesn't this one act alone tell you that they were prepared to let Gatwick at least go?
Or is this just a case of one hand not knowing what the other is doing.

BAA told to sell off Gatwick, Stansted & Edinburgh

On this, the 105th anniversay of the first manned flight by the Wright Brothers, the Competition Commssion (CC), has issued a report (over 107 pages plus appendices) saying these three airports should be sold;- maybe.
Why maybe?
Because this isn't the final report. That is due next February/March so I suppose the CC could change its recommendations. Just how long will this decision making last? The original referral to the CC was as long ago as March 2007
Ever since the public ownership of BAA, it has seemed anti-competitive to some that one body should control virtually all of the airports around London and the three major ones in Scotland(Aberdeen is the other one they own). As a result Gatwick, for example, has lost a great deal of it's transatlantic flights because why should BAA Gatwick resist the moves? BAA would win whatever happened. Ferovial had even recognised that change would come by putting Gatwick up for sale last August.
So this is a non-news story. Because a definate final decision won't be made till next year.
Perhaps.

M.P.'s, Terminal 5 and "national embarrassment"

Cast you minds back. To 6 months ago. When Heathrow's Terminal 5 opened and there were all those problems. Seems a long time ago since then we have reported that. Like all new openings, there were teething problems and those may have been worse than elsewhere or may have been overblown by the media. Now it seems to be working pretty well and we don't here many complaints at all.
Within 10 days of the problem, it was pretty widely reported that the problems were due to BA/BAA issues and baggage software problems.
So all hail the Commons Select Committee on Transport who have issued their report on the problems six months after the rest of us knew. They talk about "serious failings,"and "national embarrassment." In fairness, the committee says that it waited until the problems were resolved before investigating. So it didn't really take them them six months to find out what the rest of us were pretty sure were the problems.
Why do "official" investigations take so long?
By the time this report came out BA and BAA would have fixed those problems otherwise there would be passengers screaming from the building. Journalists would have booked every room at local hotels and be standing at 5am to tell us grisly stories. So why tell us what we know? When it happens again at another opening, can whoever owns that have learnt from what went wrong at Terminal 5? Probably but not from the report, it will have come from all the other information that was around months ago.
I think its because politicians must be seen to be doing things. If they sit on their hands, us voters will think they are doing nothing even if reports like this take ages to produce. Investigation should be done quickly for it to be of much value. So if they get around to having a report on why fuel surcharges take so long to drop, we will probably be using an entirely different fuel by the time the report is published!