The world’s favourite airline

paul holdstock

i lost all sympathy for BA after they participated in a devious deal between blair and the french.
after the air france crash, all BA concordes' were modified, at great expense, to ensure a similar tragedy could'nt happen again. the justification by BA was that it would extend the aircraft' service life by at least 25 years.
shortly after returning to the skies, BA was filling most concorde flights, air france could not manage the same. a sneaky deal, to remove ALL concordes from service was hatched by blair and the french, and we lost what was, due to the tax payers funding half their costs, a national asset.
therfore BA lost all claim on the title, 'national carrier', and are simply another airline.
let them sink, or swim.

Dean

Having lost a planned touring holiday in the States in summer 2004 due to a BA strike, I too have long since given up hope that BA can be relied on to transport me to my destination. Nowadays I only travel by BA when I have no choice or when someone else is paying.

What amazes me, however, is the resilience of the brand. British package holiday operators such as Classic and Cadogan still trumpet the fact that they use BA as a carrier as though it were a kitemark of quality! When are people going to wise up and realise that this is consistently one of the developed world's least reliable airlines, and thus definitely to be avoided if you have invested significant sums of money in your holiday?

DavidDP

Although to be fair, Willie Walsh is hardly setting an example, giving himself a rather large payrise last year even though the company made a huge loss.

Chuck Unsworth

The only times I've used BA is travelling between London and Basel to meet with my business colleagues. Good enough if you travel Club. The Swiss bus and train services to and from Basel/Mulhouse are exemplary - cheap, punctual and scrupulously clean. We all use them.

By contrast, public transport on this side of the Channel to and from Heathrow is embarassingly poor, to the extent that I never allow my Swiss friends to use them, preferring to have them collected from the airport by car.

BA is living on its past reputation. It is no longer up to the job. It would be a great pity to see the national flag-carrier disappear, but something quite radical is needed to save BA, and that is not taxpayers' money.

egh

One more erstwhile British institution - gone u/s, as they used to say. I was so proud of them, when they were the best, the very Speedbird.

Then they turned into what they are today. I say if the staff find themselves out of work, it's their own fault: you can't conduct a war against the customers and expect them to keep coming back for punishment!!

logdon

For me they lost all credibility when, whilst simultaneously allowing headscarves, turbans, Sikh bracelets they picked on the oh, so easy target of Christianity.

By banning that tiny cross, they exposed the crassness of diversity obsession, pc and a jobsworth attitude all too prevalent in corporate and public life.

Pathetic, bullying pointscoring which rebounded big time. All bragadaccio, no doubt, as they hounded the poor woman with the trite lines and lies. Look where it got them?

If that's how their management goes about HR they deserve to fail.

Verity

Dean - "this is consistently one of the developed world's least reliable airlines, and thus definitely to be avoided."

I posted volubly on this on Coffee House before they put up a separate thread. The Indonesian Airline Garuda is far, far superior to BA. Their staff are gracious and helpful and, for the most part, very nice looking. They also have beautiful manners. Compare and contrast with BA flight attendants. Malaysian Airlines likewise. Fluent English, charming, good-humoured. The food on Singapore Airlines, MAS and Garuda is also outstanding.

It baffles me that anyone would willingly subject themselves to the komandants - ooops! - flight attendants - on BA.

quadratus

Paul Holdstock @ 1640
I do not follow your argument. From what is printed it would appear rather that B.A was a victim of a Blair/French stitch-up.

biggestaspidistra

As I say every time I pass through: Terminal 5 will put British Airways out of business, it is a ludicrous and unusable facility.

paul holdstock

quadratus,
without the active connivance of the then BA board, it simply would'nt have happened. can you imagine the outrage if it had been disclosed that we had to lose concorde because the french could'nt get enough passengers to make theirs' viable.
nor could they stomach the national embarrassment of admitting that the british could?
i doubt even blair could've spun that one.

Unixman

The rest of the airline industry have lost all patience with the BA Cabin Crew if PPrune is anything to go by....

http://www.pprune.org.uk/

daifromwales

How odd to criticise Terminal 5. It's the best terminal I have used. It's a simple rectangular box, in which it's virtually impossible to get lost. Security is the quickest and most efficient anywhere. Its the best argument for flying by BA.
Heaven knows how long it will take all those delegates to escape from Copenhagen! And if the conference was in Hong Kong, they'd lose themselves like the Flying Dutchman...
Why do we talk Heathrow down so much? Have the nay-sayers tried other airports? The differences are at most marginal. But you'll wear out your shoes in Denver before you reach your plane. etc. etc.

Frequent flyer

I make around 20 return flights p.a. to Australia, HK, SA and he USA and remain puzzled why anyone would want to use BA unless there was no viable alternative. Only destination. Have had to use them was Lagos and my experience of their largely overbearing and unhelpful crew was a salient reminder of the wisdom of using other airlines. BA have virtually nothing to offer other than scheduling to some destinations. Cathay, Qatar, Singapore and especially Etihad are streets ahead and generally cheaper. My business is time critical as are most people's annual holidays so BAs penchant for strikes at peak seasons are just one food reasonto avoid them. I feel sorry for those affected by tha action and hope they find suitable alternatives. We need a good relaible national carrier but won't get this until BA goes thorugh some form of bankruptcy procedins so they can start with a clean sheet.

Snowman

it will take less than twelve months for the outfit to sink. Their business model is unworkable.

David Parker

Neither the union nor their members ( BA cabin staff et al) are doing themselves any favours by timing this action to maximise disruption and despair to their ordinary customers.

The company itself is struggling to survive and if it fails this will inevitably mean more job losses than currently proposed.

For either unions or staff to pretend that that they did not deliberately intend to harm customers and particularly some of their most vulnerable ones, is sheer hypocricy, not to mention stupidity.

Badly paid though cabin staff may feel to be, if they think that they would beter of on benefits, then there is something very wrong with our benefits system.

Koakona

I have had several long haul flights in the past 4 years and on all but one occasion I flew with KLM transferring in Schipol. The odd occasion was with BA.

I had a horrendous experience with BA, I found the KLM planes to be tidier, the staff to be more presentable and friendly and Schipol is for me the model transfer airport, Heathrow5 is a nightmare, I went through 4 or 5 security checks at Heathrow5 compared to the 1 for transfers in Schipol (sure I am misspelling the name).

KLM > BA regardless of my allegiance to the UK, and I definitely do not want 1p of my tax money propping it up!

Dean

daifromwales - as you say, Terminal 5 looks great and is simple to use. What a pity it is wasted on a shoddy airline like BA. Watch out for the embarrassing TV footage of T5 - angry crowds, makeshift tents, free bottles of mineral water et. al. - when the strike starts in a few days' time. It won't be a pretty sight.

Gary Williams

Nationalisation?
What conceivable justification would there be for re-nationalisation? What would be next - the remnants of British Steel? There is ambition, there is overreaching, and there is stupidity, but that would be insanity.

Beer Moth

Those multi-culti tail fins of a few years back, signalled the wrong-headedness of the management.

Hysteria

Sorry Daifromwales - but I think Terminal 5 still sucks - been there a number of times - ground transport to the hotels is pathetic and expensive - waited 40 minutes for a bus while watching several (empty) staff buses collect their people (mainly BA) thus re-inforcing the impression that the customers are just an inconvenience. Compare and contrast with the US where each airport hotel generally have their own, free, buses.

Layout inside ? You tried going from departures to the BA lounge? Turn right to the big BA logo and you get directed half way back down that level, down one level, back underneath where you just came from then up two levels to the lounge entrance.

Last time - computer failure for the US immigration system. No contingency plan " we only have to provide meal vouchers if the delay is more than 2hours" quoted the young "customer service rep" (hiding behind EU rules wibble)- when I pointed out he has a perfectly good arrivals lounge, and that further, my contract to travel was with BA not BAA or the EU, he agreed we could wait in the arrivals Gallery until they got the system fixed.

They have certainly lost my business (as I have vented elsewhere) - rant over - sorry.

Fergus Pickering

Does this matter at all? BA is an airline. Theer are lots of others. TWA disappeared and who cared? Except for the employees of course - I feel for them. Walsh is a bit of a nob, is he not (in the Matthew Hoggart sense of the word).

oldtimer

The threatened cabin staff strike has a very nasty whiff of the 1970s about it. Heads in the sand; a possible political dimension - a couple of banks already nationalised so what about an airline next?

Walsh has no time to pussyfoot about this. When push comes to shove he should write to his cabin staff to invite them to work normally on Monday or deemed in breach of their contracts and therefore no longer employed by BA.

daniel maris

Well I think most people are fed up with attacks on the conditions of employment of ordinary workers. Why should workers acquiesce in their own pauperisation by these big firms. The postal workers saw off one attack. The BA staff may also succeed. I hope so, but if not it's better to go down fighting.

The facts are (a) society is stupendously more productive than 40 years ago but (b) private companies now don't provide proper pension schemes for their staff and (c) we have a vast mass of sofa-dwelling welfare dependents.

Capitalism as currently conceived is not delivering much.

Olaf Rye

I have many reasons not to use British Airways--the first being how miserable and inefficient Heathrow happens to be, and this is on a good day. I know this is the fault of BAA, but I refuse to use that aeroport anymore and prefer to go through Schipol or JFK for North American transfers. Secondly, the management has a rubbish attitude. On other airlines I get full airmiles for my flights, and an enhancement if I go business class. BA only gives you a proportion of the miles depending on how much you paid for the ticket, hence, a full-price ticket gets you the full airmiles. If this is how they treat their customers, screw them and let them fail.

Andy Leeds

I stopped using BA longtime ago. They canned the Manchester/New York flight so there is no point, and as there is no link to Heathrow from Leeds/Bradford I have no incentive to use them. I always found a good service with BA, and unlike many the worst cabin staff I have ever met were on TWA - bloody rude is a polite description. Of course TWA went bust.

Boudicca

Many years ago, Ronald Reagan dismissed all the air traffic controllers who were blackmailing the US air industry. He recruited a new lot who weren't so militant.

It would be justice if someone did the same to the overpaid glorified waitresses on board at BA.

General Zod

It beggars belief that these idiot union leaders haven't considered the examples of TWA and PanAm.

Where are they now? Bust, of course.

Snowman

daniel maris @ 9.41:

what capitalism, if I may ask? On any criteria you choose to measure it - income/expenditure/output/employment - you know what is the proportion of many a region in this country accounted for by the state rather than private capital?

Almost half of the wealth created by this country gets sucked in by the Treasury and is then spend by apparatchiks on our behalf. That, mate, ain’t capitalism by any stretch of the imagination.

China answers to the name of capitalism more than this country.

and another thing: during my working life I had many jobs. No time had I gone on strike asking for more money. When I felt my wages undervalued my contribution I left and got more elsewhere. You see anything wrong with that?

THX1138

The cabin crew are lovely when you're sitting in 2K.

JohnOfEnfield

Brown/Darling/Balls would LOVE to Nationalise BA. So would Unite. By May 6 next year - you mark my words.

They should be allowed to go bust - or at least a "pre-pack".

egh

....... maybe the union's trying to destroy the airline? Isn't that what they (?Teamsters) did to Eastern Air Lines, in the US? So is BA cabin crew's union still a branch of something similar - the T&GWU? I think that's who they were when BOAC/BA became a closed shop in the '60/'70s.

Presumably the destruction is in line with the shutdown of everything else that helped make Britain great - and is therefore part of the euro agenda. Perhaps some outfit from the euSSR plans to take it over and eliminate British control and influence in aviation, too. I guess BA lost the 'Royal Mail' status and income years ago, since everything now goes through germany.

Very sad though, when you consider the history and heritage they're squandering. It was one of the first airlines in the world, and I remain proud of having known it in those better days.

As for Heathrow - well, those guys who used to live in the tunnel took it over, didn't they? Turned it into the ugliest and biggest warehouse in the world.
Gatwick's not too great either - last time I went through there some german security guard (airside) got all vicious with me because I had a pedicure kit. "Shut Up!" he yelled every time I tried to explain. "You came here vith British Airvays? Obey orders. Do as you are told. Shut up!"

So after they'd found out it was just pedicure, and got in a twist over the mouthwash that was just that - I managed to say to him: "Well seeg heil and all that!" Would have liked to say worse, but I had a timetable to keep!

JohnAnt

I quite like BA: it's quite friendly. But it does often feel like being flown by a BBC Met Office announcer, supervised by the HR department of Dixons and fed by the catering staff of BHS.

Beer Moth

THX What is 2K ?

Mike Towl

For those of you old enough to remember life back in the 70's you will recall we were then also at the "dog end" of a useless Labour government. Like the current crop of miscreants in power, they too were totally unable to control their union paymasters, who then sensed, just as now, an impotent leader without the will to stand up for the good of the country as a whole, much less risk a party cash flow crisis with an election around the corner. It was then in their interest, and that of the Kremlin, to have Britain on it's knees. To the Russians a UK general election was a win win prospect, either way. At best, a socialist government sympathetic to Moscow or at worst, some woman they had never heard of from Lincolnshire presumably spending the evenings knitting in No.10.
Fortunately, we got the vote right and the Ruskies got it all wrong.
So, what are the unions after now. Presumably Putin and Co. don't care whose in Downing St. Perhaps neither do Unite, or the Rail unions or the Post Office Union. After all their members are all extremely well remunerated:- BA Cabin (staff 29.5K is only average) long haulers on up to 60K (D.Telegraph this am), Train drivers up to 40K, Posties 35K, and all with extremely favourable pension rights and working terms and conditions. So what's this latest winter of discontent all about? Do they see Dave as weak and are warming up for a Tory confrontation? (Scargill's revenge on Maggie's heirs). Is it a Caledonian plot (Sorry FW) designed to damage London's economy? (Lot's of Glasgow accents on the UNITE management). Why does this Union appear to want to bring down one of the world's biggest air lines,(BA seem to be managing that quiet nicely on their own) and the national flag carrier to boot!
What's it all about boys and girls? Can anyone help me? All that springs to my mind, is in the words of that oft quoted sage Yogi Berra:- "Seems like deja vu all over again!"

Alfred T Mahan

That 36% of lefties would nationalise BA tells you all you need to know about why, astoundingly, there are still people who'd vote for Labour.

Beer Moth - second row, starboard window seat. Usually first class on long haul, business class on short.

Charles

BeerMoth - I think he is refering to seat 2K on a long haul flight...of vourse that means he is only the 6th most important person on the flight... (!a, 1k, 4a, 4k, 2a, 2k...)

With the exception of the fair comment on the lounge layout (which is a nightmare unles you can use the Concorde Room) T5 is a great facility. I travel, mainly with BA, 2-3 times a week, including about 20-25 long haul flights a year and although I am sick of the shopping centre that you have to walk through several times the whole set up is probably the best terminal I have been to.

That said, the unions are being frankly ridiculous. I assume that they are planning to settle here and just trying the maximise their leverage, but I hope that Walsh faces them down (although I am supposed to be heading off on holiday with BA post Christmas).

daifromwales

ejh has it. The unions want to destroy BA simply because its example in recent years as a successful capitalist enterprise makes it an attractive target. They did it with the car industry and ship building - does anyone elde remember how the shipyard had to take the QE2 out to sea sooner than it should have done to stop its interior fittings being pilfered away by an unruly (and now unemplyed) workforce?

Lots of the cabin crew are clearly dim witted. As lots of contributers have said; they are not always the most amenable in the airline industry, and they ought to be. But there are also stories (and I believe them) of ex-employees voting, and vote rigging, packing meetings, filibustering etc are all normal behaviour for the communist trades unions. Of course: in a real Communist State they'd be first to be shot...if they hadn't already got the guns.
Daniel Maris's complaint against caplitalism seems to be based on the fact that it creates enough wealth to support an over-blown welfare state. I'm a bit lost with that argument...

Enoch was Right

egh and Mike Towl

You have analysed it correctly. This is all about the Hard left and union power. Margaret Thatcher faced them down last time. Who is big enough to do it in the next Parliament?

biggestaspidistra

T5 is very nice to look at, in an abfab kind of way, but static. It is not designed for movement and flow. All signage and queues will lead you eventually into a wall or space under a staircase. And that is if you understand English, what the non-english speaking make of signs that say 'escalator to elevator it may be quicker to take the lift + arrow' I cannot imagine. And the security trays that may not be lifted off the conveyor belt which result in passengers hopping along shoeless. The consequence of design by computers, comical or aggravating. Admittedly a British muddle.

Negotiator

I hope that all the people whose Christmas holidays are ruined will remember how much the Unite union supports the Labour Party when they vote in the upcoming general election.

Beer Moth

Charles.

Thank you for the information.

My Airmiles

BA runs both BA Miles and owns the subsidary for Airmiles. If it goes under what will happen to years of saving for a well earned holiday with free flights !!!
Will they be protected or just vanish .....

Osmond-Jones

The BA Concorde now languishes hidden behind hangers at Heathrow - that splendid and exciting aircraft, what a disgrace. BA with its failing service and overpaid cabin crew deserve to go bust - maybe something good will come out of it - BOAC!

Nandibear

TXH138 Actually 2K on Qantas or Cathay is a dream