They applied for antitrust immunity in 1997 and 2001 from the United States Department of Transport, but on both occasions the regulator said they had to give up a large number of landing slots at Heathrow, a price that British Airways considered too high to pay.
Each machine will support hard drives as large as 180 gigabytes and will have slots for up to four drives, giving them a maximum storage capacity of 720 gigabytes.