Yep me old mate Richard Branson is giving all his flight crews, that WOULD have been flying around the globe on New Years' Evil, the "night off" to "go out and enjoy themselves."

And didn't QANTAS mention that they would be doing the same thing?

LEO - where are you???

-- Andy (2000EOS@prodigy.net), May 02, 1999

Answers

posted below

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000lyQ

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000m7u

-- hot (air@balloon.com), May 02, 1999.

Andy,

I keep waiting for the headline

"Virgins Won't Fall From the Sky on Dec. 31"

to show up in the press, but nobody's taking the bait. Branson's such a good marketer, I'm surprised he didn't send out a press release saying that...

-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), May 02, 1999.

pshannon,

That's good, really good. Super idea. Maybe Old Git can send it on to someone she knows in the Old Country so it can get started rolling, err, flying. If they pick up on this we'll all know where the original idea came from and raise a pint to you. Heard at the You're Done Pub!

-- Gordon (gpconnolly@aol.com), May 02, 1999.

How many people are going to want to be flying on 1/1/2000? Far more likely, most of the population of the western world will want to fly before that date, have the party of a lifetime that night, and fly back after the hangover is gone. (I'm assuming that most will remain DGI until after the event). Since airlines will probably have to pay their staff double-bonus rates to get them to work on that day, there's surely a good purely commercial reason for most to give their staff the day off -- it's plain stupid to plan to pay extra to operate almost-empty flights!

When you hear that an airline isn't going to be flying on 3rd January 2000 (the first workday of 2000) then you know that they are really worried.

Of course, if Y2K has entered into the airlines' planning, not operating on 1/1/2000 is also good sense: no exposure to roll-over risk in the air. It's one of the few cases where a DGI manager and a GI manager will make exactly the same decision (for different reasons), and so there's absolutely no way to tell.

-- Nigel Arnot (nra@maxwell.ph.kcl.ac.uk), May 04, 1999.

Spot on Nigel,

I am ex-BA, I know whenceforth I speak!

Later,

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), May 04, 1999.