Virgin Atlantic Airways Limited
It operates between the United Kingdom and North America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia from main bases at Gatwick and London Heathrow Airport. The company holds a CAA Type A Operating Licence to carry passengers, cargo, and mail on aircraft with 20 or more seats. In the year to February 2009, Virgin Atlantic carried 5.77 million passengers and made an annual profit of 68.4 million Euro on turnover of £2,580 million.
These Airplane Model are finely handcrafted, and hand painted by our artists – to scale and museum quality. 18” inches in length with custom models available.
In stock and available to be dispatched within 24 hours of receiving your order
“Dirty tricks” controversy
The decision to abolish the London Air Traffic Distribution Rules and to let Virgin Atlantic Models operate at Heathrow in competition with British Airways became the trigger for BA’s so-called “dirty tricks” campaign against Virgin. In 1993 BA’s PR director, David Burnside, published an article in “BA News”, British Airways’ internal magazine, which argued that Branson’s protests against British Airways were a publicity stunt. Branson sued British Airways for libel, using the services of George Carman QC. BA settled out of court when its lawyers found the lengths to which the company went to try to kill off Virgin. BA had a legal bill of up to £3m, damages to Branson of £500,000 and a further £110,000 to his airline.
In the 1990s, Virgin Atlantic jets were painted with “No-Way BA/AA” in opposition to the attempted merger between British Airways and American Airlines. In 1997, following British Airways’ announcement that it was to remove the Union Flag from its tailfins in favour of World Images, Virgin introduced a union flag design on the winglets of its aircraft and changed the red dress on the Scarlet Lady on the nose of aircraft to the union flag with the tag line “Britain’s Flag Carrier”. This was a tongue-in-cheek challenge to BA’s traditional role as the UK’s flag carrier.
Relations with British Airways models improved with the arrival of Rod Eddington as BA CEO though rivalry continued. Eddington replaced Robert Ayling, involved in the dirty tricks affair, who was dismissed by Lord Marshall, the long-serving BA chairman and Ayling’s mentor, on behalf of BA’s main institutional shareholders after BA had its first net loss since privatisation during Ayling’s time during its 1999/2000 Financial year.
In June 2006, a tip-off from Virgin Atlantic led US and UK competition authorities to investigate alleged price-fixing between Virgin Atlantic and British Airways. In August 2007, BA was fined £271 million by the UK’s Office of Fair Trading and the US Department of Justice though this was upheld on account of a guilty plea. Virgin Atlantic was not fined as it was given immunity for reporting the cartel to regulators.
About the A340-600:
The Airbus A340 models is a long-range four-engined wide-body commercial passenger airliner manufactured by Airbus, a subsidiary of EADS. It seats between 261 and 380 passengers, and has a range between 6,700 and 9,000 NM(12400 to 16600 km). It is similar in design to the twin-engined A330. Initial A340 versions share the fuselage and wing of the A330 while later models are longer and have larger wings.
Specification:
Length – 75.3m (247ft)
Wing span – 63.4m
Range – 7200nm or 14 hours
Number of seats – 311 seats – 56 more than an A340-300
Crew – 15 cabin crew and between 2 and 4 pilots
Max Take off Weight- 368,000kg
Cargo capacity – 20,000kg Engines – 4 Rolls Royce Trent engines
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