Feline

Markrl's post certainly stirs a chord with me: having "flown the flag" as SLF since the days when the branding was BEA or BOAC, I well remember that settling down in my seat in some far flung (or near flung) place made me feel that I was already back in England.
Maybe the analogy to BL is pushing it a bit far - BL had, as I recall, a far more militant labour force - whereas BA suffers more from problems at the other end - management which is totally and utterly out of touch with the realities of the coal face.
I sense that there are people within BA who are still, despite everything, doing their utmost to make it happen. But above them are layers of management who simply don't have the competence to support the people who make it actually happen. And there is a layer of people right down at the coalface, where the airline meets the customer, who haven't got the training, the competence, or the experience and maturity to make the difference.
What needs to happen is that top management needs move on, to make way for some new top management who have the guts and vision to do what is necessary to make middle management shape up or ship out.
The people at the coal face need the support and encouragement of the people above them - they need to led by example, they need to be trained to be better than the competition.
And the whole organisation needs to take note of what has happened to Jaguar and Land Rover ... Not saying that that's a good thing or a bad thing - but I'm not sure that's what BA needs ...

overstress

Being taken over by Tata?

Feline

Overstress - you said it not me!

FlyingTom

If you walk through BA HQ, Waterwold, in uniform or displaying an airside pass you become concious of hundreds of aggressive eyes peering at you from behind capuccinos with the question "what's he doing here"?

BA has so many support staff it is almost impossible for it not to be the best airline on Earth. However these poor souls have been fighting their own rear-gaurd action for the past few years. Indeed in the run up to T5 they have been very focussed on re-applying for their own jobs in a game of pass the parcel musical chairs.

BA is top-down rather than bottom-up and as a result customer service is a**** about **t. There is no way the front line, customer facing, staff should want for anything, the reality is the opposite.

As you leave Waterworld you can hear the front door re-allignment committee discussing how to move the main entrance to the north side, away from the noisy airport.

Willie Wash

Flyingtom - I think you are one paranoid pilot, those aggressive eyes your refering to are 'Jealous eyes'. THe reason, you have a real skill, a real job and real comradeship and support from your colleagues.They lead their boring little office lives, the odd coffee being their most exciting bit of the day.THe pampered pooches at Waterworld are not as essential as our pilot, engineer, customer service, despatchers, ground ops personnel who you really need to get a flight away on time.I could tell you a thing or two about waterworld, I have many good examples of antics and just sheer waste. I'm sorry I won't be able to post as people are watching!!!

spacedog

At the moment 99pc of the staff are all still trying to sort out the shambolic mess that T5 is. The ramp staff are working as hard as I have ever seem them. Most of the ramp staff are worried that this is their last chance, if T5 does not work with them, they could be sold off (contracted off) to another company.
The vast majority of staff are 100pc behind BA and want it to work all they require is a managment team to provide them with the correct equipment and enough bodies to do the job. believe me without the support/goodwill of the staff this T5 opening would have been an even bigger disaster. Willie Walsh's Management team have a lot to answer for.

markrl

Thanks for the welcome to the forum, my comparison with British Leyland may have been rather harsh but to people outside BA i.e. the customers this is the way its beginning to look and I worry that BA may well soon find itself fighting for its very life, particularly if this now escalates into a series of pilots strikes. The damage to reputation very quickly lost will be very difficult to restore. Once you become a music hall joke in the minds of the public as happened at dear old BL no amount of expensive advertising will be able to reverse the damage. Let’s face it the ongoing lost luggage fiasco is certainly helping that along. When you have pilots making announcements to passengers to the effect that the company is crap and that they are ashamed to be working for BA (maybe words not quite that strong but we here what you say and certainly get the message) can you really blame people for taking the ABBA route (Anything But British Airways). What has been so bewildering is the sudden descent from what was clearly one of the world’s best airlines only a few years ago into the chaos we have at the moment. To be fair BA is also having an extraordinary run of bad luck just to prove the old adage that it doesn’t just rains it pours. I can not however understand how given recent events Willie Walsh is still in post, nobody at the top seems to be taking any kind of responsibility. I suppose the real worry is your shareholders will loose confidence and sell out to the first would be buyer who will be interested in BA only for its valuable routes. I accept that from the inside things may look different and not so bad but speaking as an outsider it looks worrying, and I’m sure in your hearts you must all be feeling some sense of danger with the way things are moving. Ultimately BA needs its customers far more then its customer’s need BA, the world after all is not short of airlines and your customers will start voting with their feet.

Skipness One Echo

"Willie Walsh". there's a lot of truth in what you say, however there needs to be a realisation that without a large number of analysts, marketeers and professionals, the only thing you'll be flying around the world is fresh air. There's a lot of bright hard working people burning the midnight oil trying to keep BA ahead of the competition. Stop bitching at people because you often don't understand what they do. It takes a varied and large team to run a 24/7 21st century people business. HOWEVER, a lot of these guys have been let down by the top too, for their efforts are often misdirected and bad ideas get through with good intentions because as we have siad middle management is missing the front line aviation experience. Don't tar all the white collar guys at Waterside with the same brush. It's becoming snidey and if you go too far down that path, pitting one part of the business hard against the other, you're screwed.
It's looking like make or break for BA now. You might have a working new Terminal and a new CEO by Christmas, or you might be losing millions in a strike so the real Wee Willie can screw your Ts & Cs through Jetstar II aka Open Skies. I won't be flying with BA until the dust settles. I hope you hold it together and remember it's the guys at the top that you should be aiming at ......

FlyingTom

WW

All my finest irony was wasted on you

Skipness.

Add huge number of case lawyers to that list!

Megaton

Does anyone remember the award presented to the chap last year from Waterside for his work on punctuality? You couldn't make it up. We were running hours late every and management were back-slapping for their work on how they'd improved our time-keeping.

As for those fatuous, condescending, irritating, pointless little reminders to "swipe on time."

slip and turn

greatwhitehunter, it doesn't require a union to create a demarcation issue. PP management allows stilted informal powerbases to be created at quite junior levels, especially in complex technical areas such as IT who notoriously work to the narrow rule of the specification and who rarely are properly motivated to be interested in the purpose or success of the overall project. You end up with the typical management dilemma of 'can't live with them / can't live without them' and then the weak management conclusion 'better live with them' and all that ensues.

Sunfish

Slippy:

Oh dear! I didn't think it was that bad.

herbaceous

I dont work for BA and prob never will. I guess all companies suffer from some form of internal politics but I think I it points to a pretty unpleasant working environment when I see a man every morning on my bus, in full BA uniform (not pilot or customer facing I might add, engineering of some sort) drinking a can of beer on the way to work!!!
Cant blame him really.

slip and turn

No-one drinks beer on the way to work unless they have an alcohol problem.

So if your story is true, herbaceous, then he must be reported to BA. No one airside or working on aircraft is permitted to be under the influence for very obvious reasons.

Live and let live just doesn't cut it in such an instance.

Tandemrotor

markri

Your comparison with BL is entirely appropriate. I recently flew out of T5 with a colleague who had originally started his working life at Austin Rover. He said there were indeed some stark similarities between then and now!

My problem is, that there is precious little I can do to halt the (terminal?) decline of this once proud company. All I can achieve is to do my very best for our paying customers IN SPITE of the incompetence with which I am 'managed'!

As far as our strike is concerned, I believe I am faced with 'Hobson's choice'. I do not want to strike. (there hasn't been a pilot's strike in 30 years, AND BALPA have a track record of finding 'partnership' solutions) Nobody can seriously accuse BALPA of militancy!

However, I personally am prepared to pull the roof in over Open Skies (the airline) I believe my future will in any case lie elsewhere if I do not resist! There WILL be casualties, and I am absolutely prepared to accept that could include me.

Does that make me a 'dinosaur' from another era?

Anyone who thinks it does, just needs to explain to me what else I can do.

Other than just bend over and take it of course, which isn't for me I'm afraid!

greatwhitehunter

Slip and Turn,
I agree that you don't have to have a union for a demarcation dispute and I agree with your comments.The point about the union being weak is that front line staff have no protection whatsoever against poor management. Its always an individual or a small group standing up for whats right and believe me it's always a case of people pi##ing in the wind. I was provoked by the comparison to BL. Yes BA has it's problems but its not the with the boys and girls at the front.

Filler Dent

I've worked at both Heathrow and Gatwick as a line engineer for 23 years, the place on the whole is pretty shambolic, run by dozens of management grade personell, with their own "targets" (KPIs) to reach for completely meaningless and useless tasks which just frustrated the front line man. (or woman).

My day tends to run like this, raising ADDs because no spares are available, unable to do a job because the solitary 1/2" drive torque wrench has been sent for calibration (and no one thought of getting another one in), laughing at the stock level of basic items, managements complete lack of authority on a generally unmotivated workforce. The list goes on..

Over the past 2 years, we've lost many experienced and highly qualified engineers to our competitors here at Gatwick, and the management just don't care - in fact they are actively encouraging it.

So Tandemrotor "don't just bend over and take it", we've done that in Engineering for years and look at where we are at now. Totally !!!

Right Engine

The comment earlier about 'the stares' in Waterside are not made up.

We have a lovely Health Centre in Waterside where I get my Class I medical renewed. If I dare to walk into the depths of our head office in uniform and get myself a coffee, I am often surprised at how many eyes are drilling into my skull. There has been a malevolent animosity from the Waterside residents for many years now. Most of this ingrained prejudice comes from urban myths about pilots T's and C's which quite frankly are way off the mark. I have had the pleasure of dinner with one or two Watersiders and it always amazed me what they had been led to believe by the 'rumours' that abounded in their Canteen.

I wonder whether the disassociative location of Waterside has led to the way BA is now. Even Flight Operations (pilots - not cabin crew) are managed from Waterside. Feedback of an essential but non-safety related nature has no route from pilots back to managers at this moment (FCR's?). It has been that way since 2002. Pilots are famous for having the audacity to share their opinions ( ) but in BA, we have been gagged. There are, amongst our community, some very able minds, who have the ability to see problems before they arise but BA chose to ignore this rich seam of expertise to their peril. This principle has no doubt been applied through ALL departments.

Genuine receipt of Employee feedback and acting upon it, will take resources. If BA could learn one thing, they should learn to respond with the phrase "Here's a list of numbers. Get calling and report back to me when you have any results. I will pass on your report to the rest of the team when you give it me". Instead we get one of the following responses

• Your question ignored as they are too complex or sensitive
• Patronised
• or on occasions Vilified

BA need a change at the top because in its current form Willy uses the above methods on

• The Press and the
• The Senior Management (Kirkwoods face on the opening day would attest to that!)

BA needs to attract managers that see collaborative employee behaviour as an asset that could be nurtured, not, as it is now, something to be eradicated.

M.Mouse

Drinking in any BA uniform is strictly forbidden. The person you refer to has an alcohol problem. BA, for all its faults, has a very good program for helping people suffering from alcoholism.

If you are able to supply a name to me privately I will see that he receives the help he needs.

kilwhang

I retired from BA five years ago and have the utmost sympathy for the hassle that the folks at the 'coalface' are going through, because of the incompetence of the so-called management.

I offer you this, in the hope that it gives some light relief:

Heard on Radio 5Live this morning............'In some quarters, T5 is now known as 'Hotel California'.............(you can check-in any time you want - but you can never leave.)'

What on earth has happened to the company I was so proud to work for?