BA Kindly Waives Fuel Surcharge Increase For Most Wasteful Flights

The world’s favourite airline to hate, British Airways, announced today that its long-suffering long-haul passengers will have an extra £10 per flight extracted from their threadbare wallets, in order to subsidise people who are too bloody impatient to travel short distances by road, rail or sea.

Coming soon to the Reading-Heathrow bus link

“Yes, of course most of the fuel is burnt up hauling a hulking great lump of metal up into the stratosphere,” admitted a smiling BA spokescreep, when questioned about the illogical decision. “Once it’s up there and bowling merrily along at 500mph, those enormous turbofans can just tick over on low revs for hours on end - which is why you can fly all the way to Florida and back for just £350, albeit not with us.”

“On your typical British domestic route, however, no sooner have you got up to 40,000ft than it’s time to come back down again,” he pointed out, after sneezing into a £50 note and casually dropping it into a shredder. “Short-haul commercial flying represents the least efficient form of mass transit that mankind has ever devised, unless perhaps somebody, somewhere is trundling about on a bus whose rear axle is driven from a reduction gear attached to the convection fan of a log-effect electric fire.”

“What you must bear in mind,” he explained, “Is that if ticket prices actually bore any relation to fuel usage, a lot of very impatient people could come to the reluctant conclusion that putting up with a couple of hours aboard one of Beardy Branson’s ghastly cattle trucks probably wouldn’t kill them after all.”