Strange bedfellas? Virgin Atlantic and British Air, at odds for years over landing slots at Heathrow Airport, with BA zealously guarding its domination of that airport, have suddeny teamed up to defeat a recently proposed (or passed?) EU law about allowing any national carrier to serve any route in the EU - meaning i guess Air France could serve Heathrow from the States and then onto Paris, etc.
But BA and VA are together to scotch this consumer-benefitting move and keep the other EU airlines out.
Sorry don't have specifics on the new EU thing but just caught this on BBC News recently.
Never thought i'd see the day BA and Virgin cozying up to each other. Branson caving in? Or just the old mighty pound dictating the day?

Unlike say the US government & US airlines who have conspired to keep European airlines out of the US and to prevent non-Americans from owning more than 25% of US airlines

Guess Branson is still a bit peeved about Virgin America.

He just appointed some old Bush administration hack on his VAmerican board, thinking this will help. Yes a ridiculous stipulation.
What is needed is some supreme aviation authority to mandate real competition on all routes. Why are airlines special?
Years before European dereg that allowed likes of EasyJet and RyanAir to flourish national carriers kept air fares sky high and would be air travelers at bay.

Both BA and VS have their largest hubs at LHR. Their interest in the Open Sky issue is of course similar.

Virgin America has won tentative approval from the U.S. DOT recently but is not yet quite given clearance to take off as "other interested parties have 21 days to file objections to its decision and another seven days for rebuttals.

DOT that Virgin American apparently caved in to include:

replacing CEO Fred Reid as CEO and as well as a non-voting board member was the key decision

that Reid be replaced with a U.S. citizen who "has no prior affiliation with the Virgin Group" (DOT objected to Reid in large part because they felt, since he had been appointed by Sir Richard Branson himself in the earliest stages of the new airline's conceptions he would be beholding more to Branson's Virgin Group than to the new airline's board.

Reid, former Delta president, would be allowed to stay on for 6 months.

DOT also ordered the airline to liberalize the airline's licensing agreement with the Virgin Group, giving the airline permission to fly more routes if it dropped the Virgin name.

"Why are airlines special?" Because, IMO, like banks, they have very powerful lobbies.

Remember when the Government wanted to screen all airline passnegers after 9/11 and the airlines whined that the "public wouldn't stand for it" and Congress believed them!

They conspire to keep competition out of the US airline market.

They cave in to naive nationalism, by stopping a British company selling its docks in the US to America's strongest ally in the Middle EAst.

They prevent Unocal from selling to the highest bidder on the preposterous grounds that its 0.6% of US oil consumption would be a threat to national security.

They run up a budget deficit on a scale only banana republics or African kleptocracies would tolerate. And debauch the currency so it's less reliable than the Turkish lira or the Romanian leu.

When are the neocons going to come clean and admit that they're socialists who might have once got mugged by reality but have quickly reverted to their Marxist origins?

And when will the Republicans expel them as an election-losing disgrace to the once civilised, sound-money, free trade, conservative party of Eisenhower and Reagan?

If Neo-Cons are socialists i dare to ponder what you'd call the Democrat power makers.

Don't forget that Hillary was once a Goldwater Girl at GOP '64 convention.

And my God if any of the stuff Tony Blair and even UK Tories tout - national health care, gay civil unions, decriminalizing pot, etc. if any candidate endorsed that he/she'd be dead in the water.

And on C-SPAN the other day the author i think of Bush's Brain (aka Karl Rove) said that he had it on impeachable sourcing that well after the Iraq Invasion W was walking with his father and asked Poppy "what's a Neo-Con?" Absolutely true he claims.

Probably mostly money talking, OP - but I had heard that relations had improved considerably when the BA CEO changed (some time after the infamous 'dirty tricks' campaign).