I'm at work BAW, but what with the holiday season coming up and all, it's rather quiet here
A few snippets from various news trawls:
A former BA executive who had a 20-year career at the airline has sympathies for both sides. Some union representatives at BA can be "malicious trouble-makers" and cabin crew can be guilty of displaying a "precious attitude", he says.
Douglas McNeill, analyst at Astaire Securities, estimates that a two-day strike will cost BA £50m. McNeill argues that, with access to nearly £2bn in cash, BA can afford to absorb the blows from a trade union's biggest weapon. "In financial terms a strike of limited duration would be manageable for BA," he says. "In a sense the timing is good because in a year in which the airline is already on course to incur substantial losses, the impact of a strike will be much less apparent than it might otherwise be."
(The Guardian)
Those pesky climate change people are threatening your jobs as well:
Four ways to curb air travel, according to the committee on climate change
1 A carbon tax on flights, which could be imposed after airlines join the European Union emissions trading scheme in 2012. The scheme alone is likely to force up fares because airlines will have to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions, but the committee says that is not enough.
2 Limiting runway growth to a select number of airports, possibly Heathrow, Stansted and Edinburgh.
3 Restrictions on take-off and landing slots at airports.
4 Setting out a new growth strategy for UK airports in a national policy statement.
Yowch! And how about this:
The airline industry may need to spend as much as 35 billion euros ($52 billion) between 2012 and 2020 on carbon permits.
Full Bloomberg article here:
CO2 Price Surge Needed to Limit Jet Industry, U.K. Adviser Says - Bloomberg.com