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As an American, I parsed the title as "a British aerospace company..." not "the British Aerospace company..."

Indeed. The capitalisation was what threw me originally, but I understand that the title isn't wrong - hence the use of "unfortunate" rather than "incorrect".

As an Englishman, I parsed the title the same way as you did, though I did wonder if it meant BA.

BA is British Airways. BAE Systems is the new name for what used to be British Aerospace, which used BAe as its abbreviation, to avoid confusion with BA.

I don't know why it bothers me, but I really dislike the used-to-be-an-acronym-but-not-any-more names. For example SRI (not affiliated with Stanford so the S doesn't mean that any more), and my least favourite "HRL Laboratories" which we have to pretend does not expand to "Hughes Research Laboratories Laboratories". Yuk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome

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