the Oneworld global airline alliance together controlled about 40% of all take-off and landing slots at Gatwick and used a fleet of more than 100 aircraft to serve around 120 destinations worldwide from the airport, more than any other airline from any airport in the UK. Together they carried 8m passengers through Gatwick annually. This accounted for almost 30% of the total number of passengers passing through the airport each year during that period. 45% of the passengers travelling with BA and its affiliated carriers through Gatwick were changing flights there. At the time, CityFlyer Express and the other BA franchisees as well as its subsidiaries and partner airlines at Gatwick accounted for 1,000 of these passengers each day. Ultimately, BA's attempt to make its Gatwick operation profitable by building it up into a full-scale hub-and-spoke operation failed. When Rod Eddington took over as BA's chief executive in 2000, he initiated a root-and-branch review of the airline's worldwide operation with the aim of improving profitability after it had incurred its first net loss since privatisation during the 1999/2000 financial year. This included a review of the loss-making Gatwick operation. At the time Eddington stated that BA's Gatwick operation alone had incurred a loss of £40mn before allocating overheads, in spite of having £4.5bn of assets at the airport, and that it was destroying shareholder value. (Industry sources estimated that during the aforesaid period the total loss for the airline's entire Gatwick operation was £200mn after allocating all overheads.) Eddington attributed this loss to Gatwick's failure to attract sufficient high-yield traffic. He furthermore stated that Gatwick's loss was entirely accounted for by its mainline short haul operation whose schedules were primarily designed to feed BA's long haul services at the airport. Eddington was of the opinion that this was the wrong way around because there were not enough early morning departures and late-evening arrivals that could have attracted a greater number of locally based business and leisure passengers requiring same-day-return facilities. Also, the long haul route network BA operated from Gatwick at the time strangely resembled the long haul route structure British Caledonian had inherited from British United at the time of its inception three decades earlier. Moreover, in his opinion, the physical constraints imposed on BA's Gatwick operation by the airport's single runway and two terminals meant that the airline could not offer truly competitive schedules, in terms of frequencies