The article by Mr Walsh:
So we are here again. Unite's relentless insistence on Groundhog Day amounts to another cold-blooded threat to the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of innocent people trying to pursue normal lives.
Unite does not care about ordinary people. It regards the travelling public as expendable victims in its blinkered efforts to improve what is already an extremely fair package for cabin crew, especially in the very difficult financial circumstances British Airways faces.
Let's focus on the essentials. In the worst recession for 80 years, British Airways is heading for a second year of record annual losses.
Our revenue will be down £1billion this year, and we cannot hope to build a sustainable airline for the future unless we cut costs.
Many thousands of British Airways staff understand this. Our pilots and engineers agreed to efficiencies months ago. A third of our managers volunteered for redundancy.
And nearly 7,000 colleagues put their hands up for temporary pay cuts because they wanted to help our company in its time of need.
They understand that British Airways has no God-given right to exist. They understand that if you don't adapt to the changing world in which you operate, you are heading for the history books.
Look at Japan Airlines. A flag-carrying stalwart of global aviation for decades, which plunged into bankruptcy in January.
Yet Unite, to which our cabin crew belong, refuses to get the message. It prefers to believe the earth is flat.
It believes nothing changes. That economies go on growing for ever. That competition does not increase. That practices born in the cosy, nationalised industries of 40 years ago must be preserved in the global economic swirl of today.
We have been talking to Unite for more than a year about ways of reducing cabin crew costs. In all that time, the union has offered no more than temporary palliatives or grand headline figures with negligible substance.
Everyone knows that British Airways cabin crew are the best rewarded in the UK industry. According to the Civil Aviation Authority, the costs of British Airways crew are twice those of their Virgin Atlantic counterparts.
Nonetheless, we have put together a package that involves no pay cut for existing crew.
After nine months of fruitless talks with Unite about reducing crew numbers, we went ahead last October with accepting requests from 1,000 crew for voluntary redundancy and from another 3,000 crew for switches to part-time working.
Mr Walsh says Unite's plans do not take into account the feelings of 'ordinary people' by wrecking their plans to travel with British Airways this Easter
To accommodate these requests, we made a modest reduction in our onboard crew numbers on flights from Heathrow. On a 747, for example, we trimmed the complement of crew from 15 to 14. And we now include the crew supervisor in the cabin routines to maintain customer service levels.
These are the changes Unite tried to reverse through legal action - despite the fact that for years it has agreed to operate our flights from Gatwick with equivalent numbers.
The High Court rejected Unite's arguments. It ruled that our changes had not breached crews' contracts, were reasonable and implemented properly.
The judge also drew attention to the difficulties of dealing with Unite because of the 'mutual rivalry, hostility and mistrust' between officials of its two founding unions, the Transport and General Workers and Amicus. Negotiations were twice held up for days because representatives of the two factions would not sit in the same room.
The changes to onboard crew numbers would save us more than £60million a year. In the talks at the TUC, Unite came up with ideas for alternative savings that fell a long way short of this figure.
We made clear at the TUC that we were ready to be flexible and would consider refinements of the changes, provided any additional cost was offset by other adjustments in the cabin crew budget.
That offer was conditional on Unite not naming strike dates - so yesterday's decision showed they have invalidated the offer themselves.
British Airways cabin crew are rightly renowned for their professionalism and skills - and I do not believe that they want to wage war on our customers. They have been cynically misled by Unite. And many often feel reluctant to stand up to Unite's militant activists for fear of being excluded when on trips to an unfamiliar city or culture.
But if Unite thinks a strike will ground this airline, it will be disappointed. The flag will continue to fly.
We will run a full operation from London City airport. At Gatwick, we plan to fly all our long-haul services and some short-haul.
And at Heathrow, we plan to operate significant numbers of long-haul flights and, with the help of chartered aircraft and crews, short-haul services too.
I will not allow Unite to ruin this company. I will not allow it to frustrate our plans to come through this recession, strengthen our business and improve services for customers and opportunities for all staff.
That is what Unite wants to wreck. I am absolutely determined that it will fail.