Originally Posted by
wiggy
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Thing is at the likes St Petes and Helsinki BA are probably chucking a handful of airframes a day into the hands of an experienced/practiced set of driving teams.....at LHR BA would be throwing several hundred airframe a day in the direction of teams who see proper snowfall once or twice a winter, if that. I’m sure if enough money was thrown at the driving we wouldn’t see the sort of problems we had yesterday....but someone, somewhere has made a decision (cost v benefit).....
Not so. Helsinki is a notably busy airport (it has more runways than Heathrow) and BA will be just one of many catered for by a handling agent. nevertheless EVERYBODY seems to get handled efficiently.
Just because snowfall or icing at Heathrow is less common does not mean at all that the teams should be less competent. And I get the impression that, once again, it was not the actual handling of the situation itself but the general business support. De-icing fluid run out because procurement have run their stocks stupidly low. Employees coming in but unable to get into their workplace because the car park has not been snow cleared. Snow forecast accurately (it was) in advance, but nobody would call in the extra resources just in case it didn't happen. And similar.
It's well known that stand provision at T5 is at a premium for the number of movements. This can actually work fine, even in adverse conditions, provided you organise an adequate number of The Troops to work with the situation. Alternatively, if you want to run with minimal staff levels, having spare space gives you some leeway. BA's problem is they do both, probably organised by disconnected departments within the business. One group schedules the stand usage up to the maximum, while on the next floor they are plotting to minimise the staff numbers available to handle this. You can see this any day, not just in bad weather. I would say that in 50% or more of my BA arrivals at T5 there is some hangup, either for stand availability or staff not in position, or queues out of the door at immigration, etc. Yet in recent years I have never experienced any of this at a BA outstation.
Theoretically Alex Cruz should be in position to reconcile these different competing targets of different areas of the business. Enough said .....