Well, noone has told me it's about to retire.
To answer a few points made earlier:
BA are not dropping services - we fly 7 JFKs in Summer and 6 jfks plus one BGI in Winter. Occasionally, a JFK is left out of the timetable (not cancelled) e.g. Christmas or when the extra BGIs are run near xmas.
Five BA Concs (not 3) have returned to flight status, the sixth is on hold until market conditions are more favourable, the seventh would only be required when a board decision was taken to return to running a very comprehensive charter programme. The Liners and seats were purchased for all seven.
Some parts have always been hard to procure, there is no significant change there.
Someone said Load factors had been low - we ran all Summer, Autumn and most of the Winter with LFs in excess of 80%. Break even is dependent onfuel prices but is 15-25%. There are hard times ahead, which is why there are no plans to restart a double-daily at this time.
Yield eater? Not so - a glance at the PIL shows the high-paying pax are more often than no connecting to or from the Conc. These are pax who, but for SSC, would be travelling First from the nearest hub and so often not with BA.
The Fes are a more sensitive matter. The fleet was deliberately over-established with FEs when the classic retired in order to maintain the programme to 2010-2015. Since Gonesse the fleet has gone from double-daily JFK plus Winter BGI plus a BIG charter programme, to just 7 flights a week. Even before Gonesse a surplus of flt crew was caused by the decision to curtail the charters and some were going to leave the fleet. Post Gonesse only a few pilots made it back (approx 2/5 of the previous). The FEs had nowhere to go and 10 are apparently not going to be required owing to the reduced flying programme. They have our utmost sympathy.
There are grim times ahead, not just for Conc but for everyone flying the Atlantic. There are going to be low load-factors for all premium traffic. But - when the current tribulations are over - the core market is still there and there will be no replacement. A company that grounded this aircraft because of the current climate would be so short-sighted it probably would not weather the storm anyway. I give them more credit at the moment.