Virgin has launched a major campaign to highlight its disagreement with BA/AA’s proposed merger.

Virgin’s President Sir Richard Branson has “waged a major battle on BA” in an attempt to highlight his belief that a British Airways (BA) /American Airlines (AA) alliance is anti-competitive.

On the BBC’s Today programme, Sir Richard also stated that he would re-paint the ‘No Way BA/AA’ slogan onto the sides of Virgin planes, as he did when BA first announced a proposed merger. This is the third time that BA and AA have proposed an alliance, along with Iberia airlines – the first was in 1997 and the second 2000.

Virgin has also stated that the figures given by BA and AA to the regulators are incorrect and “fail to give regulators or the public a true picture of their market share between London Heathrow and the US”.

Sir Richard commented at the unveiling of the plane slogans: “Make no mistake – if this monster monopoly is approved it will be third time unlucky for consumers. It will still be bad for passengers, bad for competition, and bad for the UK and US aviation industry.”

Virgin’s main disagreement with the proposed merger is that it would create a dominant alliance that would lead to higher prices and less choice for customers – and would create a stranglehold on Heathrow-US flights, despite the OpenSkies agreement which now allows any airline to fly between the US and Europe.

However, in a discussion on the Today programme, BA’s Chief Executive Willie Walsh defended the proposal to merge with AA and Iberia: “We’ve seen the introduction of OpenSkies since the end of March this year, we’ve seen new carriers come into the market, we’ve seen a 22% increase in capacity of transatlantic flights to Heathrow – so this is a completely different environment to the last time we made our application back in 2000.”