I've never quite understood the mentality of people who decry BA for rationalising and retreating to their most profitable hub, and then have a go at the name.

Does anyone really care what they're called?

Perhaps I missed the article in the ANO where it describes how an operator's name must directly relate to the city of its main base.

Don't mind me, I'm off to start a petition to get Atlantic Airlines renamed as Coventry Cargo Airlines. :p

CC Check the relevant airports for the number of rotations into BCN + MAD by RYR + EZY and the rest. Those routes have been hacked to ribbons and any main carrier must look to serve routes that are new or have some special edge that the LCCs cannot get at. For, once they get their teeth into a route, then it is best to leave it for dead.

after reading the BE website, looks like BE are planning a all out attack on france, new routes nothing to do with the BACON take over

moi? a chip? nah!
 

and Gonzo's profile says LHR which says it all really. Tell you what, sometime watch the British Broadcasting Corporation weather forecast and see if they spend 2 minutes describing conditions in assorted parts of Northern Scotland, and then with a dismissive wave of the hand "and fair weather in the rest of the country, byee"

it is awful having to hack down to London for a trip to someplace else in the world. Generally the total travel time is doubled, and the cost is nearly doubled. Eg it'll be £120 pound to get from Leeds to LHR via GNER and underground, and the fare to New York is £260 thereabouts. Plus you'll start at say 10am and be at LHR at say 4pm but couldn't safe book a flight before 8pm really for a flight time of 8 hours to New York!

But you couldn't get me out of the Yorkshire Dales to nasty SE England for love money or a whippet!

Anyway, this is way off topic..

S

groundbum

Yes, that's where I work. Not where I live. What has that got to do with anything?

Yes, I wholeheartedly agree. Which is why last time I flew to NY, I used Bristol with Continental.

Which means by concentrating at LHR, BA are losing out on my custom. But I don't really care about that, because other airlines provide for my needs, and someone at BA, a commercial company, has made a decision that they can make more profit from business class connecting traffic through LHR than they can by providing flights to NY from Bristol.

I really don't see why the name of the company is relevant. I'm sure I saw a QANTAS aeroplane at work yesterday. Long way from Queensland and Northern Territories. ;)

not forgetting Mr Brown
 

From yesterday....
"On the face of it, losing regional connections would be disappointing .........but the more you look at it, the less you see there is to lose. If you're from the regions, who needs LHR/BA anyway? Huge numbers have chosen to use KL via AMS as their preferred hub and this continues to grow, what with KL being an airline which is happy to embrace the UK with open arms. If you need to get to London then there's BD/VG/CB/EZY/FR/LS/AB or the train. If you need Oz/NZ then go on EK from MAN/BHX/GLA/NCL.
Huge numbers of people have already voted with their feet, showing their displeasure at the attempts to funnel them through LHR, which is not the most user friendly hub in Europe, and have found better options. Just look at the CAA domestic passenger figures ex LHR and you'll see that all domestic routes are down, most of them heavily.
Whilst I wholeheartedly dislike BA's contempt to anything outside of London, we are fortunate that there are other carriers that care to put the effort in and are perhaps more worthy of our cash."


Picking up on Regional to LHR/LGW hubs or Regional to European hubs.
Apart from the fact that the main non-UK hubs are much more transit-friendly it is also cheaper as you are not liable for Mr Brown's slice of the pie when going longhaul ex Europe!

Aviance to take over BA Mainline ground handling in the UK regions
 

BA are talking exclusively to Aviance UK for ALL ground handling services at BA destination-Regional UK airports.
There will be NO BA uniform precence at these airports, but there will be a BA 'Duty Manager' overseeing the contract on a daily basis...
Wonder how much the tender came in at 'per aircraft turnaround', as BA quoted the current figure of doing it in-house at approx £300.00 per turnaround. By keeping BA staff to do it, loosing the Connect flights and only having LHR,LGW and LCY the figure rises to an amazing £800.00!!!
Aviance have certainly been spending money to no end, with brand new tugs, GPUs and cargo-kings arriving at EDI recently (before BA officially announcing Aviance as preferred handling agent). Looking to recruit staff too, with BA staff being prime targets to smooth the transition.

Heard a rumour that Mainline groundstaff at MAN were given 90 days notice yesterday.

Is this true?

What Next
 

This was mensioned down here a couple of weeks back, to take back front of house operations that was given up when Midland cut there sevices to the Island.
With Midland now back operating the Heathrow service from the 25th March they are growing again in the Island as well as baby operations increasing.
This must have been going on for a number of months now and as the Flybe and BAcon take over is signed this is just anoth step for we willie and his companions at Speedbird house so what else will they have in store?

Wonder if they will move Jersey back to LHR from LGW !

Not quite true Tristar500.

Contrary to rumours being circulated by certain competitor organisations, BA Mainline Engineers will be present in the regions for the forseeable future.. :ok:

TURIN - Ok, BA Mainline engineers WILL still be on-site and in an 'engineering' capacity only - ergo 'airside' and in BA engineering style uniforms, however this will not help passengers identify customer service staff in the terminals...
Having NO customer service staff in BA uniforms is just another fool-hardy move by the FLUMPS at Waterworld... Roll on T5. The end of BAs troubles - I THINK NOT :ugh:

TURIN
 

Yes 90 days notice was served on 05/03/07.

BA name change
 

The reason i ask bout whether BA should become LA or whatever is that it really donestn serve the british public anymore does it, basically now it serves the london/southeast catchement area, i have nothing against people down south ..just think as Jet 2 claimto be the norths fave airline..maybe BA could be londons fave airline...or would easy/ryanair/thomson/virgin have that one tied up????does anyone remember in the eighties when they claimed to be 'the worlds favourite....' , what happened?

This might come as a shock to some posters... have you seen the three little letters that BA put after their name on their letterheads?

plc.

It means they have shareholders to satisfy, and will therefore act to make a return for them. It may be that it does this in such a way as to make regional services unprofitable for them; that is their model.

But to say that they have to provide a service to the whole nation if they are to carry the moniker "British" is just plain daft. You could equally argue that Brussels Airlines should refuse your money if you live in Antwerp....

TA

So take-off.

Have British Airways ceased flying to Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle, Manchester, and all the other 'mainline' domestic routes?

I must have missed THAT big announcement!

Tell you what. Maybe you're right. Perhaps they SHOULD rename themselves. Maybe they SHOULD operate to every tin-pot regional airport. Then they could call themselves British Regional Airlines (BRAL).

Tandemrotor

You certainly did not miss the big announcement just a lot of little announcements when they pulled out of Cardiff, thats right part of Britain. Also the fact that they no longerr fly to Northern Ireland, not technically Britain but the UK, other than in the guise of Loganair, a franchisee but for how much longer.
BA do fly from the sirports you mentioned but all flights are to one of the London airports.
Yes BA are London Airways.

PF

In the here-and-now Tandem you are right of course. However there are 2 angles that annoy many about BA that you don't address:

As a nationalised airline, and then as a privatised one, with fuselage titles changed to just 'British' they made a big thing over the years of being the national airline, and the one that the country expected to serve them all, not just those in the South East.

There is a huge feeling outside of London that it didn't have to be like this. From the position they had got themselves into in the regions over the last 10 years where it has ended up was probably inevitable. However had they had management with greater vision and foresight it could have all turned out much differently.

Many times on these pages the Waterworld overhead that was imposed on the regional operations (compared to the days when they were Brymon etc) has drawn comment as giving BACon and its forerunners a huge disadvantage. It will be interesting how things go now that that burden can't be shared around so much how BA fare, as I doubt that the Waterworld bill will be slashed pro rata (= proportionally higher overhead for the LGW/LHR/LCY operation).

As has been commented by others previously, I think the increasing number of eggs that are in the one basket that is T5 will prove decisive to BA's existence in the decade from 2010.

That BA is a plc is doubtless true but what's also true is that places like MAN and BHX and GLA have huge catchments which would keep entire airlines going in other countries - like the one a few deg. West. It's not that BA can't make a buck in the regions, it's that their strategy and corporate structure prevents them from doing so.

It seems inevitable to me that while it will be difficult for governments to restrict LH travel, SH can and will be if *reasonable* alternatives exist so MAN-LHR will start getting pricier.

How about this - BA set up a franchise operation in MAN or use GB and give them the three G-ZZZ* frames which will probably leave the fleet anyway to maintain and operate from there. Give them a free hand with routes subject to aircraft range and bilaterals together with a starter route of MAN-JFK as previously operated by BACX. See what happens.

Try the Unions puting a block on it at the outset. That has been a big contribution to the regional failure since the year dot. BA will encounter still more problems in the future as they have still to address a large number of T & C issues at LHR and LGW.

Now theres an idea... Longhaul from regional airports!

Why not allow Longhaul flts out of the 'regional' airports? In fact the only reason there are no flights presently (with the exception of MAN-JFK) is that British Airways - sorry London Airways, are greedy to the extreme and they are about to pay the price for this attitude with all their eggs in the one basket - Terminal 5 at LHR. :ugh:

Fact - GLA-JFK did make good money, even though pax figures were not always high. The magic profit-making aspect to the operation was CARGO on the flight. Crew who flew this route confirmed that the cargo was making megabucks. BUT as usual BA claimed that passengers were not using the flight, so it was being withdrawn...

Fact - BA didnt promote the route properly with sales staff encouraged to offer alternative routes - and in some instances not even mention the GLA-JFK service! Former BA call centre staff have confirmed this.
EDI and GLA have (had until Monday) the skilled staff in place to handle Longhaul services from said airports. B757/767 aircraft ideally suited to USA, Canada and seasonal Carribean routes. The airports are big enough to operate the aircraft and there IS demand for these flights.

Why should pax fly south to catch a longhaul flight, then fly back up north over Scotland? Why cant pax fly north to join the service in Scotland?
The number of 'through-checked' pax from Scotland to North America is amazing. Pax from as far away as Newcastle come to EDI to fly out on holiday.

Continental, US Airways, American Airlines (BA partner no less), Delta and now Globespan are all jumping on the bandwagon, cashing in on flights direct to the USA. Now you can argue till the cows come home about how they structure the costs etc, but look at the evidence and the pax loads.
BA being the strongest UK airline should be ashamed at not flying out of Scotland on Longhaul routes. You want it all out of LHR so hell mend you when the fog comes down, your staff walk out on strike for no reason at all or your caterers give give you a bad bout of the sh**s!

Dont be greedy chaps. Spread the joy and create a truly British Airline by flying out of other airports. LHR will be your downfall. Slots and available airspace in the south is becomming a very scarce commodity... Maybe now the 'open sky' policy looks as though its going to be relaxed, you (BA) will come running with open arms to airports in Scotland, offering to fly longhaul routes as LHR looks to be shaking on its foundations with every man and his dog with an aircraft ready to jump in and start operating in competition with you :ok:

PS - Remember, Virgin are trialing a flight from GLA-MCO this summer (ok, it starts in MAN first, but at least they are testing the market) :D

Don't forget BA is first and foremost a business, whose principal aim is to maximise profit- BA feel they can do this most effectively from London. Yes, you may be right that BA could make a profit from flying from Edinburgh to New York (or whatever other prestige route you think), but they have decided that it is a better use of resources to concentrate on a single hub- And yes, other airlines are flying from Scotland, but BA would be entirely reliant on O&D traffic.

BA may lose a lot of passengers from the regions to other companies, but there is simply no obligation for them to fly from what are seemingly low yielding routes from the regions- they are not a government owned company. There is no doubt a reason that BA has been one of Europe's better performing legacy carriers in the last few years.

All the airline examples you list operate to Scotland from their hubs. That is how the airline industry works in the vast majority of cases.

The fact that CO fly EWR-EDI is entirely different to BA flying that same route. CO will fill a huge amount of their plane with people connecting onto the flight from all over the US, the same with all the other US airlines that fly into the UK regions.

BA act in exactly the same way, feeding people down to their hub in London, and then flying them directly to their destination. If they operated a direct flight from Scotland to the US then they would be competing with their operations out of Heathrow. This is frankly stupid unless you have a very very strong independent business case, as is seen with the MAN-JFK flight.

The hub system is the mainstay of aviation, and despite cyclical trends detracting from it (poor infrastructure in places like LHR currently, or the advent of new aircraft like the 787) this method will prevail for many many years.

BA Regional Longhaul.
 

:) Hi Tristar500 , I-d like to challenge a few of yr "facts"...

1/Don-t think GLA/JFK ever made a profit , in fact I think the losses were a high ratio of the revenue earned.

2/Cargo didn-t make a mega profit.
Capacity on a LHL 757 is fairly limited.
Cargo yields are usually very low....cargo doesn-t complain if it gets trucked around so many Shippers will use whichever route offers ths lowest rates and are happy to truck hundreds of miles before and after the flight if the rates are keen e,g they will fly cargo to Detroit or Chicgo if thats where the lowest rates are and truck back to the East Coast.
Not up to date with currernt MKT rates but in the past a full belly hold
of 20tonnes wasn-t worth a lot more than 6 or 7 business class psgrs.

3/As a couple of others have already commented the US carriers are
not selling to point to point Mkt from the UK regions ..they are selling GLA-USA , BHX-USA ,MAN-USA vis their respective Hubs...
DL @ ATL , CO @ EWR ,US @ PHL ,AA @ ORD.
I would bet a large proportion os psgrs traveling to ATL or EWR from the regions are actually going to ORLANDO/TAMPA/LAS Vegas/Los Angerles/San Franciso....these are strong volume and very low yield journeys from UK regions. The US carriers basically give away the DOM sector to get the longhaul business and if the fares are prorated and properly allocated don-t make much money.
BA uses LHR as the US carriers use their hubs and I don-t see the diff
travelling GLA to US via LHR instead of ATL or ORD and don-t tell me transiting ORDS or ATL is a whole lot easier than LHR and LHR will get a lot better when T5 brings services into one terminal.

MAN/JFK is probably the biggest PT 2 PT City pair TO US outside of LON and BA operate thius because it has some hope of making money.

4/As part of their Bankruptcy Emergence plans many of these carriers
are reducing their exposure to LOCO Domestically they are shifting capacity ( 757/767 ) to Intl service....they are losing so much domestically that even a contribution to overheads from an Intl service is better.

5/BA has excellent Premium products ...years ahead of the American carriers and slots are hard to come by at LHR so it won-t be easy for a new entrant @ LHR to compete ...BA will have bifg frequency advantage on key routes such as LHR/JFK....US recently pulled LHR/JFK as they couldn-t compete either product or frequency wise and as JFK isn-t one of their DOM hubs they couldn-t bolster with connecting traffic.


I am sure BA will be delighted to op LHL fm the regions if and when it is profitable to do so !!

BA, Long Haul & LCY?
 

Ok here is an idea to think about. BA Long haul from London City? Could an A318 do it in business configuration? Say 40 passengers? Imagine the people queueing up from the US investment banks 10 minutes away at Canary Wharf! But would BA think like this or would AF or LH beat them to it? It takes around 2 hours from Canary Wharf to Heathrow (trust me I have done it on many occasions!!)so going 10 minutes in the other direction to LCY makes a lot of sense to me!

BA empty flights to keep Heathrow slots!
 

Is this crazy or what?

From the Telegraph
(reproduced in full in case it disappears)
Eco fury at BA 'ghost flights' scandal

By Alex Berry

Last Updated: 2:19am GMT 12/03/2007
An airline has squandered £2 million flying empty passenger planes between Heathrow and Cardiff - to stop its landing slots falling into the hands of its rivals.
To keep landing slots airlines must use them regularly, or risk them being reallocated to other airlines. Competition for slots at Heathrow is so fierce that they have been known to change hands for £10 million.
But green campaigners have criticised the practice by British Mediterranean Airways (BMed) - which operates as a British Airways franchise, using its livery.
BMed has been running the empty Airbus flights between Heathrow and Cardiff and back six times a week since last October.
No tickets are sold, all 124 seats are empty, and the flights do not appear on arrival or departure boards.
It is estimated that by the end of this month the flights will have cost the airline around £2 million, with a fuel bill of £2,500 per flight, and £300,000 per month for the lease, insurance, crew and maintenance charges.
Each 140-mile flight is believed to produce more than five tons of C02.
A Friends of the Earth spokeswoman said: "It's mad to have planes flying with no passengers. It's why we've been calling for is aviation tax linked to each flight, rather than to each passenger.
"This calls into question some of the green rhetoric coming from the airlines."
The airline came up with the plan after it was forced to scrap flights to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, following civil unrest there.
David Richardson, its chief executive, said: "The Uzbek market collapsed, but we knew we would want to use those timings again this summer. It wasn't ideal, but we wanted to keep hold of it."
A spokesman for the airline said yesterday that its actions reflected "the way the flight regulations are".
Industry sources said it was an extreme and rare example of efforts made by airliners to maintain slots at heavily congested airports such as Heathrow and Frankfurt.
Other airlines have been known to operate half-empty smaller aeroplanes with seats at reduced prices.

This is not news other than it's now in the papers, was talked about in PPRuNe over two weeks ago.:ok:

The title of your thread is the usual BA bashing prejudice.

From the article. The airline is "British Mediterranean Airways (BMed)"

Probably another good reason why BMed is about to be no more.

The slots belong to BMed as do most of the routes which they operate under a BA franchise. Scheduling, routes (outside of agreed BA partner routes) and passenger loads are their OP's department responsibilities.

Can't think of any mainline BA flights that have been flown empty in the recent past except during the security scare!

Typical ill informed BA bashing where the headline reads 'BA shed unprofitable franchise partner who insists on flying empty aircraft to keep LHR slots'.

Guess that doesn't make good enough headlines tho.

Has someone not done enough research into why this is being done?
Airlines dont fly for the fun of it there is always a reason.
This is how I see the picture correct me if I have not got it all correct.
Aircraft needs a check on a regular basis and aircraft go tech as well so here we go.
No room in the engineering facility at Heathrow so the aircraft needs to go somewhere else, where? the company has engineering facilities which at Cardiff.
Aircraft goes to Cardiff for a major check so it is empty, when the aircraft has finished and fit for commercial flying it postions back to Heathrow.
Or does the Governmint expect the aircraft with a full load of passengers on to drop into Cardiff on its last sector before going on check and then coach passengers down when the aircrafft is fit for its first flight again.
These things have been happening for a very long time, take good old Dan Air there major engineering facility was Lasham so they would position out of Gatwick and then postion back after the check so what is the difference when Dan Air did it and BA don,t say it is just to keep slots it is to do with costs.
So Tone and your No Ten colleagues need to understand the full ins and outs of how aviation needs to work to keep costs down.

It's nothing to do with engineering, read the posts above.

Surely all it needs is a change in the political/admin system which demands this kind of behaviour and regulates how slots are distributed? I'm sure if they had asked nicely to keep the slots without pumping tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere BAA would have told them politely to **** off. Who'd be the baddie then?

As far as I can see, the Cardiff hangar only takes 747 and 777. The BMed planes are A320-ish size? Didn't see any maintenance on them during their stay.

Qantas did same a couple of years ago with a BAe146 to Manchester to preserved slots
You could book on the flights but manny flights operated empty or with 1 or 2 pax

Ian

Gary Lager is correct.

Firstly the blame is not with the airlines, it is with BAA who insist that airlines will loose their slot if 80% frequency is not conformed to. They know that the airlines have to continue to operate using this slot empty. They are quite happy to rake in the additional landing fees knowing that it is costing the airline thousands of pounds and contributing to the CO2 emmisions.

Secondly, there are plenty of other airlines that are forced to do this as well. With the 'Open Skies' policy upcoming these empty services are more and more likely to occur as airlines are forced to operate somewhere or loose the slot that will have doubled in value when the Americans arrive.

If the Government are to do something, they should first knock on BAAs door. Of course they are less likely to do this as BAA handle so many passengers of whom the Government creams off so much money in taxes. Many of which are tourists and not actually UK citizens.

I can understand if they want to keep the slots but does bring into question the whole "green" issue.

Blue up - sorry but if Cardiff can handle 744 and 777 surely it could stick in a few A320's if need be? Just a Q?

259:suspect:

Open thine eyes and thou shalt see!
 

You are quite right. The change will be when BMI use the slots which they have bought to operate an A330 back and forward on LHR to JFK under the new european open skies agreement.

Taff's Garage doesnt have the qualified staff or equipment to handle A320 heavy checks - all of Big Airways Airbus heavy checks are now done in Glasgow.

I can't help but thinking that FoE must have more important issues to talk about, but they instead choose to focus on trivia like this. Ok, so they can ram home the point about taxing the flight, rather than the passenger, which I think is well worthy of debate, but surely positioning flights would be excluded from such measures anyway?

What really bothers me is that virtually none of these groups, who claim to speak in the name of the environment, have given any kind of detailed thought to where all the APD is going. All they have done is whinge about it not being increased enough - as if doubling it was some kind of soft measure!

LHR must raise £1bn+ in APD each year. If I lived near Heathrow, I'd want to know where my portion of that was, and what Greedy Gordon was going to do to make my neighbourhood more liveable. Instead, all we get is more bleating. The aviation industry can hold itself up to scrutiny. Try asking anyone from FoE to explain their alleged £9bn aviation subsidy (unchanged despite APD rises), then let's have a debate about who's really hiding over these issues.

Just a minor point (and I'm definitely NOT one for standing up for the BAA!), but slot allocation is nothing to do with them, it's actually Airport Coordination Ltd (ACL) who are tasked with this. I'm not sure whether ACL make the rules with regards to a certain proportion of slots having to be used, or whether these come from 'on high' at IATA. They are rules that, in my view, need to be reviewed as a matter of urgency.

Slot allocation rules are laid down in an EU Regulation of 1993, and subsequently amended twice (once to stop airlines being unduly penalised by the cancellations they made during the SARS outbreak).
The introductory paragraph on the EU site states the following: