Quote BEagle Several years ago, a chum who joined Virgin at just the right moment after leaving the RAF was whingeing about the fact that he was temporarily having to fly from Gatwick and that the company had only given him a company parking pass for his normal base at Heathrow.
Q. "Do they provide transport between Heathrow and Gatwick" A. "Yes"
Q. "What if you use your own car and drive to Gatwick?" A. "They pay the Heathrow-Gatwick mileage".
Q. "Even if you drive, as I bŁoody well know you do, direct to Gatwick?" A. "Yes".
Q. "When did you last do SDO, you whingeing git?"
I hope this wasn't me!
Actually, the big bone of contention about this was about the way the company expected you to get to Gatwick. Virgin used to roster people from both LHR and LGW but tried to get away with it by having 'London' as a base in the contract. (Not legal unter FTLs.) When the CAA pointed this out, they then got the LGW crews to report to LHR one hour before and put ''Limo'' on the roster. Except there was no "Limo'', you had to get the regular shuttle bus which left every hour. Which meant if you were unlucky with your timings, you could have to get the bus 1 hr 55 minutes before report time at LGW. Add the 45 mins it took to park at the staff car park and get to the Queens building at LHR, it wasn't far off three hours you had to arrive at Heathrow before reporting for a two crew flight to the Caribbean using the "Florida 2'' variation to the FTLs - which was also being abused by VS. So it could lead to a very long and tiring day. Considering you could do this several times a month every month, it was getting beyond a joke. VS management's answer was "tough''.
So some of the more militant bods decided to do something about it and were turing up at LHR one hour before report at LGW and demanding the non-existant limo. After several flights were delayed and the crews had to go into discretion regularly, the CAA took notice and put a stop to it. That's when we got the LGW free parking. There wasn't any travel allowance for driving between LHR and LGW, and having to pay for the LGW parking several times a month put a big dent in the then very meagre VS pay.
Stop Start is right on with ''the grass certainly isn't greener outside, merely fertilised with a different type of sh*t.''