McVitie said that Branson would be "making the same mistake twice" if he went on to commit to one of Airbus' newest models, the A350 extra wide body plane.
Southwest Airlines has had a "customer of size policy" for more than 20 years, requiring passengers to buy a second seat on a full plane if their body crosses the armrest boundary.
Honda mounted the jet's engines on top of the wings and close to the body of the plane, a foolish design, most airplane experts would say.
Thus, since the military would no longer require any new C-17s, the one active American manufacturing line that is capable of building wide body military transport plane would be allowed to go dormant - possibly forever.
The plane's racy design, smooth fiberglass-composite body, BMW-like interior, dazzling computer instrumentation and an onboard parachute ready to float both the plane and passengers to a life-saving landing, if necessary, formed a clean break from the past.
The design, a more radical triangular wing-body shape, combines the plane's fuselage with the wings and has no tail.
In part, that is because it is impractical to distribute a full plane's worth of tablets on wide-body jets with hundreds of passengers, they say.
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After the Christmas airplane bomb scare, full-body scanners have been getting lots of attention as a way to make plane travel safer.
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Rescuers searched through the wreckage of the plane that crashed and sparked a fire in rocky terrain in Calabasas and found the body of one person believed to be the only one aboard, Los Angeles County sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said.
When the door was closed on that plane, I knew we were finally safe, and a wave of overwhelming relief swept throughout my body.
Researchers at MIT, led by Dr Mark Drela and tasked by NASA, have come up with a double-wide design: instead of the traditional single cylindrical body, two partial cylinders are joined together with three engines at the back of the plane between the double tail.
His body was flown into RAF Brize Norton, where the Union flag-draped coffin was carried from the plane, with full military honours.
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