and conveniently timed connections. In addition, Eddington also felt that Gatwick's operation was far too fragmented, in terms of what he called the airport's "bewildering array" of operators and their equipment, which substantially increased costs. At the time, in addition to BA's mainline operation, which accounted for the bulk of the airline's scheduled services at Gatwick, all of its UK-based franchisees (with the exception of British Mediterranean and Loganair) as well as the company's subsidiaries and partners provided scheduled services at the airport as well, in some cases with a single aircraft on one route only, operating all aircraft types in their combined inventory except Concorde and some of the smaller commuter planes. Independent analysts were also of the opinion that the long haul routes BA chose to transfer from Heathrow to Gatwick mainly served what many people considered secondary destinations in Africa and Latin America. These were generally not the type of destinations to which business people, including those living in Gatwick's catchment area, were travelling. On the other hand, popular destinations for business and leisure travel, such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Hong Kong or Singapore were either under-served or not served at all. For instance, at the time BA operated Gatwick's only daily service to New York JFK and there were no direct services from the airport to any of the other aforementioned destinations. These analysts furthermore pointed to the extent and speed of BA's growth in employment at the airport during that time as a major cause of the huge loss incurred by that operation. Within a relatively short time span of only three years, the airline had increased its headcount at Gatwick alone to 8,500. This was more than the entire 7,700-strong worldwide workforce of British Caledonian at its peak during the early part of the summer in 1986. BA had effectively created a miniature version of its Heathrow-based organisational hierarchy at Gatwick, thereby multiplying its overheads and increasing its cost base at the latter airport. In October 2000 BA publicly announced its decision to de-hub Gatwick and to turn it into a regional Southeast airport primarily serving leisure-orientated point-to-point routes where most of the demand originated in the Gatwick catchment area. This was part of a new strategy designed to provide services from Gatwick only if there was sufficient demand in the local catchment area and to do it at a cost the