The Finnair 757’s have 227 seats. MTOW of 115T. Compared with the RR 757’s the PW ones have a higher MZFW and MLAW.

BMI are using the baby brand to sell their lower priced fares on BMI mainline. If you try to book say GLA-LHR on bmibaby you are then re-directed to the BMI mainline website where the fares are displayed.

Best thing BMI could do is keep the Baby fare structure and roll everything back under the one brand again.

The 1 issue is what would happen when you came to a runway exit.

As for the second issue, I have not seen anything like this discussed at all, have you a source? I am disappointed if the industry press has not reported on this. But either way it is unlikely to happen, unless of course France and Germany want to make their airlines uncompetitive on the world stage.

Mostly on PPRUNE – that ever reliable source of fact :rolleyes:

You are right when you say that such a tax would make the airlines of France and Germany uncompetitive. Can you then imagine the problems that would be created if they were able to force such a tax onto the rest of Europe.

As for a tax on the fuel itself, this is probably also completely unworkeable – you could end up with the situation where it is left to individual countries to set the tax level and the airlines then decide to take more fuel or tech stop en-route to avoid paying the higher tax levels.

Pressure from the environmental lobby in Europe will grow over the coming years to tax aviation – fuel seems to be their prime target area for tax. You will probably find that Airbus, Boeing and the engine manufacturers will argue for such a tax to be levied on those airlines that use older aircraft that burn more fuel than the newer build aircraft.
Technology will be developed that will allow the environmental impact of aircraft to be significantly reduced. Take the 787 for instance – the APU will reportedly use fuel cell technology that will allow it to use a small fraction of the amount of fuel used at present to power it.

Instead of taxing the aviation industry, the EU and EEC should be encouraging companies like RR, GE, Airbus and Boeing to develop the new technologies that will help to make the aviation industry more acceptable to the environmentalists. To achieve this, maybe they could start by using some of the money that goes on the Common Agricultural Policy to research and develop such new technologies.

In the UK the whole of the transport system needs to be better integrated. For instance the West Coast Main Line Train network should run via LHR, with a high speed link between LHR and Manchester.

The DC-9 belongs to the US Navy.

All of the FCA long haul programme is now operated on the 767-300.
The past 2 weeks G-OOAN has been operating the GLA flights.
Their 767’s have a 62J/196Y seating config – 258 seats in total.
Seat pitch will not be an issue.