AO - I doubt BASSA have the intellect to think like that. WW isn't going anywhere. He will be CEO of the BA/Iberia Topco and I can't see the new BA Opco CEO Keith Williams (currently CFO) being much different in approach.
To give an indication of how New Fleet could render BASSA redundant, look at what happened after the ash cloud disruption.
BA wanted to fly an additional empty aircraft to HKG with a crew to bring stranded passengers back home, but with the 2 night stop reduced to 1 night. BASSA said no because CC would be "operating" on the empty outbound flight (an aircraft with a full complement of crew and no passengers must be such hard work!), instead of just positioning.
So what happened? BA crewed the flight largely with volunteer cabin crew and existing CC lost work (the first sign of the law of unintended consequences from the strike contingency plans).
When New Fleet gains critical mass (which given the fact there is no seniority and fewer supervisory positions, is unlikely to be heavily unionised) with none of the restrictive practices enjoyed by current CC, BASSA's negotiating strength will diminish hugely. When it comes to new routes, product changes, disruption, if they don't play ball they will be sidelined.
If BASSA were really playing the long game they would have seen that the biggest threat to their influence (which is what this dispute is really about) is New Fleet and they would have negotiated over BA's initially (by comparison) very modest proposals and negotiated hard to obtain assurances that there would be no New Fleet.
Last edited by LD12986; 4th May 2010 at 20:46.