and sales support actually cost the airline more than the additional revenue resulting from franchise fees and the connecting traffic its franchise partners generated. Therefore, as far as the bigger picture was concerned, BA's senior management felt that the franchise agreements with its various franchisees, all of which were profitable in their own right, had benefited the franchisees more than itself. The second reason was related to maintaining good industrial relations between management and the workforce, especially those working for the mainline short haul operation at Gatwick. These workers had always regarded the concept of franchising generally and CityFlyer Express in particular as a Trojan horse. They feared that BA's long-term strategy was to hand over its entire, heavily loss-making, mainline short haul operation to profitable franchisees such as CityFlyer, thereby threatening many jobs and the terms of employment of the remaining mainline employees. They also feared that BA would eventually resemble a "virtual" airline. Therefore, BA's senior management decided that it was prudent to reduce the number of franchise agreements and to make use of franchisees only if it gave BA a presence in markets it did not already serve itself and where there was no prospect of providing such a service profitably through its mainline operation. Following the integration of CityFlyer Express into BA's mainline short haul operation at Gatwick, all former CityFlyer employees other than flight crew and engineers working on the jet fleet were made redundant. The ex-CityFlyer flight crew and engineers whom BA continued to employ were transferred along with their equipment to BA's regional bases in Birmingham and Manchester. BA's subsequent decision to retire the former CityFlyer turboprop fleet, resulted in the withdrawal of the airline's services from Gatwick to Antwerp, Guernsey and Rotterdam. In addition, the fact that the integration of low-cost CityFlyer Express into the high-cost BA mainline short haul operation at Gatwick inevitably meant that formerly profitable CityFlyer routes were now burdened with the expensive BA mainline overheads, necessitated the withdrawal of additional BA short haul services from Gatwick over the course of a few years, including CityFlyer's routes to Cologne and Düsseldorf. At the same time, British Regional Airlines, another British Airways franchise operator based on the Isle of Man, was acquired by British Airways as well and in 2002 was merged with British Airways' wholly owned regional subsidiary Brymon Airways to form British Airways Citiexpress, which would assume the