Sir Richard arrives at Luton airport on a scheduled flight from Majorca with his wife, Joan, and travels in a Virgin Atlantic Volvo limousine to the airline's hangar at Heathrow airport for media interviews to put his case against the BA-American alliance.
Virgin opposes the tie-up, for which the two are seeking clearance from competition authorities to co-ordinate capacity, schedules, routes and prices, and share revenue between Europe and North America to increase sales and streamline operations. Sir Richard has campaigned against similar plans before, in 1997 and 2001. Then, regulators required BA and American to shed valuable take-off and landing slots at Heathrow – a price that was too high for the airlines to swallow.
"It seems too unbelievable that the two biggest carriers in the world would be allowed by the competition authorities to effectively merge. BA and American together will have something like 65 per cent of the market between the UK and the States and their dominance will be extremely damaging to smaller competitors and so we have to spend, as we have done twice before, an inordinate amount of time, effort and finances to stop it," he says.
"Both regulators before made the right decision and it wasn't allowed to go through."
7am
Once installed in the hangar, Sir Richard has a cup of tea to set himself up for a series of broadcast interviews. On the BBC's Today programme he goes head to head with Willie Walsh, BA's chief executive, who argues that Sir Richard is fighting an old battle that does not take account of increased competition brought about by the US-European Union Open Skies agreement in March.
"Heathrow is closed. All the slots have gone. BA talks about 60 airlines or whatever but he [Mr Walsh] knows that there are only four airlines with any strength out of Heathrow ... There is no new competition."
The two men trade statistics as Sir Richard accuses Mr Walsh of omitting millions of passengers from the 51 per cent market share that BA and American say they have – passengers who either book directly with them or transfer on to their flights – and that their share is really about 65 per cent. Sir Richard has been battling BA ever since he launched Virgin Atlantic in 1984. In the companies' most famous spat, BA agreed in 1993 to pay £610,000 in damages to Sir Richard and Virgin Atlantic and apologised for a "dirty tricks" campaign against Virgin Atlantic.
Sir Richard insists his latest bid to thwart BA is not personal, though he accuses Mr Walsh of trying to reduce the dispute to a clash of personalities. "I don't wage personal battles, though I do think there is an element of the other side trying to make it personal."
9am
Sir Richard holds an hour-long press conference at the Heathrow hangar. At the end he unveils a Virgin Atlantic plane emblazoned with the slogan "No Way BA-AA", one of the tactics he has used in the past.
"Sadly I have got other things to do but I will spend whatever time it takes to get our message across. We are digging out the old full-page advertisements showing what BA and American have said in the past."
10am
More interviews with the press and broadcast media from the UK and the US, as well as from the Middle East.
BA argues that the deal will provide customers with extra discounted fares, smoother connections and more frequent-flyer benefits. So why is Virgin so worried?
Sir Richard says BA and American would be so dominant that they would be able to dictate terms to travel agents, requiring the agents to give them more and more business each year. The deal would also threaten Virgin's "life blood" of corporations flying executives between Europe and the US. Again, with such a stranglehold Virgin's bigger rivals would be able to demand more and more business from companies in exchange for discounts, he argues.
Critics say Sir Richard should pipe down and rely on the quality of his service to thwart BA and American but he insists that the question is one of potential market dominance and the "leverage" that would give his rivals, which would overcome better quality service. Mr Walsh has said Sir Richard should form his own alliance, but the bearded Virgin boss argues that this "distorts" the issue, which is about the creation of extremely uncompetitive conditions.
10.30am
A one-minute tea break before launching back into the interviews.
11.30am
Sir Richard travels to a hotel near Heathrow for internal meetings to discuss Virgin and its future plans. He then gets in the car to head back to Luton airport. In the car he holds a meeting to update him on what Virgin is doing to help stranded customers of XL, the collapsed tour operator, get home. Virgin has space on flights from Orlando, Florida, to Manchester that night. The passengers will either have their fare paid by the travel industry rescue scheme or can buy a one-way ticket at a reduced price of $349.
1pm
After another couple of telephone interviews he flies with Joan on a chartered plane from Luton to his parents' house near Montpelier in the South of France, where he is spending the weekend.
3pm
Sir Richard arrives in France and will spend the afternoon and evening making telephone calls, including further interviews for the campaign, as well as checking on Virgin's interests in the United States. The campaign has got off to a frantic start but there is a long way to go. "I would be utterly flabbergasted if we don't succeed," Sir Richard says. "The perceived wisdom is that this time they will pull it off because the economic climate is not that great," but that is a dangerous road for competition regulators to go down, he adds. "I personally can't see the competition authorities letting this happen this time as they didn't last time."
Out of the office
Sir Richard made his first fortune in the music industry through his Virgin record label and megastore shops but he is vague about what he has on his iPod. "Er, I've got the Stereophonics." Anything else? "I can't really remember. I've got Stereophonics."
He is keener to talk about the last book he read, Nigel Lawson's An Appeal to Reason, which challenges the conventional wisdom on global warming. He has spoken out frequently on the threat and says he still believes it is a major problem, but that the book raised interesting questions. "I would like to dig deeper," he says, adding that he felt like writing to Lord Lawson to tell him how refreshing the ideas were.
Sir Richard spent his main holiday this year with family and friends on Necker, the Caribbean island he owns. Things were not all serene, though. "I had a wonderful stomach bug and managed to lose a stone and a half," he says. "I do feel a lot lighter."
