Another nonsense you will be familiar with on short haul is the refusal to treat a transit through Heathrow just like any other aiport and to require minimum layover times there which make it impossible to roster short haul aircraft, pilots and cabin crew to operate through it and stay together through the day's work. All 3 are rostered separately which results in massive disruption and cancellations once bad weather or whatever interrupts the schedules.The earlier in the day the problem occurs the greater the damage. The extended cabin crew LHR transist also mean that 4 sector days become impossible, thus generating more night stops=more crew=higher costs. One result is that other than as a feeder to long haul BA can not make money on nearly all of short haul despite the massive investment in aircraft etc it requires and would be well shot of it."Go" was probably the answer, failing which franchises which provided a BA branded operation at no cost to BA.
Skylion,
This sort of rostering practice hapens at LGW too, despite us having less restrictions. We can report for a 2 day 6 sector trip and throughout that trip change aircraft and flight crew 3 times. Ironically, the flight crew we start with are often also on a similiar 2 day 6 and we'll bump into them again as we all check out at the end of the trip. Why don't they keep us together? It's never made much sense to me but then again, very little about BA's scheduling system makes sense! (Sore subject at the moment as trying to adjust from my run of late and deep night flights that finished at 0720 yesterday to the 0605 report for a 2 day 6 starting tomorrow...
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