You mention safety as one of your issues in regards to reduced crew levels. If the "one down" payment is given to each crew member, would it be more safe or less safe?
I genuinely don't understand the question? Payment has no relevance to safety. Ideally a flight should have it's full crew compliment rather than leave one down, for both customer service reasons and safety issues. Circumstances do happen in large organisations whereby standard operating procedures have on occasions to be circumvented but this should be the exception and not the rule for exactly the reasons mentioned.
you mention that there are airlines that are to CAA minimums. Do you deem the BA LGW operation as less safe than BA LHR operation? I would certainly hope you don't.
Yes I believe BA LHR WW operated flights to have a greater built in safety margin compared to BA LGW as a direct result of having an extra crew member. It has nothing to do with the individual skills or abilities of each crew member.
I'm not sure as to what kind of safety you are specifically concerned about. For example, there are 8 doors on a B777, the minimum crew, leaving base, 3 class, is 10. That means there are 2 crew members more than doors. I'm not advocating that the crew levels should be cut further, by the way.
You want me to paint a possible scenario? I never wish anything like this to occur! ...eg. A medical instance on board during service, 1 crew attends flight deck to talk with medlink, 2 other crew dealing with the medical instant, other crew in cabin maintaining the service, a toilet fire occurs just after the last check in one of the rear toilets and goes unnoticed for AT LEAST 20mins until the next check as there is no presence in the rear galley as all out in the cabin(smoke filled cabin is time dependent)....My point is that there is a 'healthy' number of cabin crew to have on board over and above the minimum. Any decent 'system' has 'layers' of safety as back up. Do you have an alarm on your house? Do you leave the doors open? It's unlikely you will be burgled the very night you turn your alarm off and leave your doors open, but it's better to have layers of safety precautions is it not?.....At it's crudest, more crew = more eyes and ears for dealing with and avoiding potential problems. I believe we are either getting very close to or indeed are at an 'unhealthy' low number of crew. A layer of safety has been taken away with the new proposals.
As regards the customer experience and standards they expect of the British Airways brand, again this in my opinion is most definetly compromised by reduced crew.
Please bear in mind that it is the CAA's rules we have to adhere to. If the CAA deems it safe, then that's the way it is. I really don't understand why, after LGW has operated with fewer crew for 3 1/2 years, that all of a sudden it's not deemed safe in your eyes. Please explain how you come to such a conclusion if you don't mind.
There is nothing "sudden" in my belief that LGW is inherently a less safe operation than LHR through no fault of the crew operating the service.