by the government-assisted recovery of Lufthansa and Air France, BA's main European full-service, network airline rivals, both of which had been in no position to challenge BA commercially in the early to mid-1990s as they were effectively bankrupt at that time. For all these reasons the grandiose BA-AA alliance ultimately turned out to be a very costly distraction for BA's management and was the main contributing factor that led to Robert Ayling's downfall who happened to be the BA chief executive during that period. Project Jupiter Project "Jupiter" was BA's internal working title for the strategy it had devised to turn the struggling Gatwick operation into a fully fledged hub. The airline reckoned that this would enable it to turn around the poor overall financial performance of its operation at the airport after years of heavy losses. BA decided to give its operation there the economies of scale as well as the scope, in terms of flight connections, it considered necessary to attract enough travellers who were prepared to pay fares that were sufficiently high-yield to achieve sustained profitability. The aim was to make Gatwick the second biggest hub-and-spoke operation on BA's network as well as one of the biggest outside the US. Within three years from the launch of Project "Jupiter", the BA mainline operation more than doubled the number of long haul aircraft at Gatwick and increased the number of short haul aircraft at the airport by more than half. In addition, the airline's franchisees, notably CityFlyer Express and GB Airways, increased their Gatwick-based fleets as well. During that period the number of BA passengers passing through Gatwick also doubled. The role BA had assigned its franchisees generally and CityFlyer in particular to make Project "Jupiter" work was to provide feeder services that were expected to be profitable in their own right and enable transfer passengers to connect at ease with BA's long haul services at Gatwick, thereby improving those services' load factors and increasing their profitability. Unlike some of the North American commuter carriers that operate under franchise agreements on the same routes as their mainline partners using smaller aircraft at less busy times, BA's franchisees only operated on routes the company's mainline short haul operation could not serve profitably from Gatwick itself due to its higher cost base. By the turn of the millennium, BA, the firm's franchisees as well as its subsidiaries and partners in