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 ...

Being taken over by Tata? :8

Overstress - you said it not me!

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.

Green monster
 

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!!!

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.

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.

"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 ......

WW

All my finest irony was wasted on you :{

Skipness.

Add huge number of case lawyers to that list!

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." :yuk::=:mad:

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.

Slippy:

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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..:ugh:

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 :mad:!!!

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.

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.

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?

Brilliant! lets call it Hotel California, that ll help BA.....

overstress said - .:8

For Tata, read Open Skies. Interesting also to see my old pal Tandem suggesting that BA is in terminal decline but that he'll pull the roof in anyway. I seem to remember he said something similar about maintaining the Pension Scheme.....
(I'm very surprise the regulator doesn't pick up on the shambolic state of the maintenance as alleged by Filler Dent.)

Great post by markl again, I rather think that BA has already become a music hall joke - the BALPA problem is trying to drum up public sympathy for people with six figure salaries - it just doesn't work. Doubtless some on here will say that public support is not needed, doubtless some will think that the letter to the City will work. The City will only change its view when profits are seriously affected on a future basis, and BALPA have a habit of caving to management and calling it a win. True, a genuine strike, (if legal??:bored:), (if fully supported;)), would certainly concentrate the minds, but by then it would effectively be too late, because the damage that would do to the perception of the fare paying public would be truly gargantuan!!!! The other problem of course is that having a six figure salary is all very well, but it tends to involve a similarly matched mortgage and/or alimony payments, school fees, the loan on the Porsche, etc etc. The strike fund won't cover much of those.....

Dead interesting to watch though, I have zero symapthy for Walsh having seen BA destroy my last but one employer. Trouble is, I have negligible sympathy for BA pilots either, having watched them prioritise narrow self interest against fellow professional aviators in the same Company ownership. In Shakespearian terms, they deserve each other - a plague on both your houses! :ok: I imagine shares in Bmi etc will be looking good whatever happens....hopefully OS will end up being publicly quoted too.:hmm:

Always good to read a post from a balanced individual - in this case a chip on both shoulders.

What a cliche to imply that all BA pilots are on six figure salaries.

Thanks for your erudite(sic) contribution.

M.Mouse
 

I've read a number of your posts, and I respect your inside knowledge and your opinions. So please tell me what's wrong with this:

BA management is totally useless + Heathrow is opening more to quality competition = BA is doomed to disappear in the next 10 years.

Other airlines, with other T's & C's, will fill the void. The young pilots will more and more think of their future as being outside of BA, not within it.

Kurtz
 

You seem a somewhat bitter fellow for some reason as yet unexplained. I don't work for BA but I can see the possibility that if those at the top of the foodchain maintain their positions then there is a better chance that I might maintain my own somewhat lower position.

In terms of the strike fund - just how long do you think it will take before the large institutional investors have a complete sense of humour failure. I note the share price has roughly halved since May last year and it may also be worth noting that it has more or less steadily declined. Now I readily accept that generally shares have had a rough time but they haven't all steadily decreased at the rate of BA's. I'm no expert but I would imagine that a 2 week strike say will cause real damage to BA shares and make todays price look enormous.

Now WW has already taken a big gamble with T5 and lost, (granted he was taking a gamble with other people's cash - i.e. the shareholders) but do you really think those same shareholders are going to let him have another go?

I predict that WW and a significant portion of the leadership team will be walking into the sunset within 6 months at the outside. They will of course be well rewarded for their utter failure as is the British way, but walk they will and then there is a chance that BA can again become the airline icon that it once was. If I am wrong and WW and his team remain then the future looks bleak indead for shareholders and the staff.


I wish the BA Pilots and indeed all BA staff the very best for the future.


Regards
Exeng

Where is MY six figure salary?

Are you senior guys and gals keeping it all for yourselves?

I love learning more about the company I work for from the well informed masses...sorry individuals. Enlightening stuff.

I suppose I should just stay quiet and watch my future disintegrate at the hands of an incompetent 'leadership team' rather than voice my concerns legally through my union.

Any other suggestions on how to procede Kurtz or do you prefer to bend over and pass back the KY? :O

I'm with Dysag, and I'm bl00dy glad I'm not on the stage with the BA guys. The question is, which organ grinder is conducting the orchestra!

Walsh? or McAuslan?

I suspect either/both will have nothing to lose, unlike the PBI.

Kurtz: the 6-figure salary bit was very funny. I almost smiled - are you going to make up the difference from my take-home to the figure you mentioned?

Six figures? There aren't enough hours in the year for me to earn that sort of money.

When BA was a nationalised industry it had a deserved reputation for being an appalling airline in every respect. In the late 80s, when I was working for another U.K. airline, BA started to advertise for direct entry pilots and a pal encouraged me to apply. I did so with only half a mind to actually wanting to join, at the time I was content where I was.

I positioned (with BA) down to the LHR recruitment centre several times for the various stages of the interview process. As things progressed and I observed BA staff from a passenger perspective and spoke to several as well I was struck how enthusiastic everybody was and, don't laugh, what a pleasure flying with BA was on the three occasions I did so. I ended up really wanting to join them. I felt very lucky to be offered a job.

In the late 80s/early 90s the job was a joy. The airline functioned well, I believe we enjoyed a reputation for being reliable and efficient and actually deserved the advertising epithet 'The world's favourite airline'. Somewhere it all slowly unravelled. The world was changing and BA's cost base and legendary overmanning had to be tackled but like so many bloated organisations (NHS anybody?) removing the deadwood which needed removing in my simple view was akin to asking turkeys to vote for Christmas.

The savage (and necessary) cost cutting, from my simple observations, has disproportionately fallen on the very areas which have the most impact on the ability of the airline to function efficiently i.e. the front line.

Slowly but surely we have become a standing joke for punctuality, lost baggage, lack of ground staff, etc, etc. This has been capped by the continuing debacle of T5. I cannot tell you how desparately sad and depressed it makes me and many of my colleagues when we think about the sorry mess which BA has become.

Militant unions can indeed share some of the blame but we had militant unions during privatisation. The difference between then and now is the quality of the people at the very top. With the exception of Rod Eddington we have suffered at the hands of two CEOs who have/had nowhere near the skills exhibited by the likes of Sir Colin Marshall or Lord King.

Under the right leadership I hope and pray that BA can once again become the leading airline that we surely were in the recent past. I do not believe it will happen while we have WW at the helm. The effort required to salvage our tattered reputation and win back the justifiably angry and disillusioned long suffering passengers is gargantuan but we do have many people such as myself who will go to the ends of the earth to achieve that goal. We cannot do it alone without strong and visionary leadership.

I am near the end of my career but I stand to lose much of my projected pension should BA fold (late joiner with less than 25 years in the still very much underfunded pension scheme).

Your statement will be sadly true if we do not get our act together, and quickly.

I cannot argue with that. Regarding Ts and Cs I believe it will just accelerate the headlong rush to the bottom. Given the lifestyle and Ts and Cs enjoyed? by some of my friends in other airlines I doubt I would follow the same career path if I had my time again. While BA survives with Ts and Cs well above comparable jobs, certainly in the UK, that downward slide will be slower than if we did not exist.

Pass the cheese!
 

That's actually an exceptionally good post. Doesn't it make you depressed to see what BA management have done to their staff. You really couldn't make this up - on a personal note Mr Mouse, may I wish you and your colleagues the very best of luck. :D
I worked for an airline once where I despised the management, and I know how I felt as I saw them destroy morale, hope, ambition - the managers were all BA placemen or BA wannabees. Given though that turkeys don't vote for Christmas, I just cannot see how you can clean ship and recover the situation - still, I suppose it's better to go with a bang than a whimper.

Skipness One Echo:

I don't work for BA, but I've held a quite a wide variety of senior management roles, and started as professional engineer in an airline.

Skippy, sorry mate, you've got it bass ackwards.

I'd like to introduce you to the "reverse pyramid" theory of management and also the concept of time horizons.

For your airline to succeed, it not only has to win new customers, it has to retain its existing customers. So having bright young things dreaming up new marketing campaigns, complete with operatic themes, is no bloody use if the product you are selling stinks to high heaven and your customers disembark thinking "never again". Arguably this is where BA, and quite a few other airlines are right now.

Now what is this "product"? The answer is that its the complete experience of the airline from the moment you book via phone or internet to the time you leave the terminal at your destination.

Who delivers the product? The answer is it's delivered by the entire organisation - so the jobs of your consultants, backroom staff etc. are safe.

Now I'd like to introduce the concept of time horizons. The people at the coalface, Cabin crew, pilots, operations, engineers, check in staff can instantly, and I mean microseconds, destroy the customers experience of BA permanently. All it takes is a scowl, or a rebuke, or just plain rudeness, or not getting a window seat, or losing bags, a dirty aircraft, or a spilled cup of coffee, a late aircraft, not getting the right meal and so on.

It's the people at the coalface who deliver your product - they are your reputation and they generate your repeat business. The time horizon of the effects on your reputation are minutes and hours.

Now lets look at middle management. You deliver a marketing campaign - six months to build it and another six months to measure its results - time horizon one year. You develop a better training program for cabin crew - time before results are measurable - say two years. You agonise over a new aircraft type - time horizon at least four years before results are seen. You get my drift?

And at the top, senior management should be making decisions that have ten year to fifteen year time horizons.

So what do we do? We "incentivise" managers with annual bonuses and encourage short term thinking by people who should be thinking long term. Then we irritate, abuse, and ignore the people who deliver the product, and who are the most accurate source of day to day information on product delivery. That's not very smart.

Now let me introduce the concept of the inverted pyramid. The CEO is actually at the point of the pyramid, but the pyramid is upside down. The CEO's job is to make sure that the people in the management roles that report to him can succeed at what they are doing.

And so it goes up the pyramid, your managers job is to make sure that the people that report to him can succeed in their tasks, and so on and so on.

If you are at the coalface, and however hard you try you can't succeed in delivering a quality product, then it is the fault of your management. It is perfectly evident from the postings here about BA management, that they do not embrace this concept, and until they do, your airline is at risk, because how ever hard you market yourselves, you are not going to get repeat business, no matter what loyalty schemes they are now dreaming up.


You got this way for reasons I've posted about on the BA/BALPA lawsuit thread. Nothing will change until the Chairman of the Board is replaced. I mean, why would an institutional investor allow someone with a tobacco industry background anywhere near a people oriented business? That is the crux of the problem because it influences the selection process for the CEO and so on down the management tree.

As for Waterside, sell it, you are going to need the money. Put your administration as close to Heathrow as you can so that your management and back office staff can actually see whats going on first hand.

Hail Sunfish
 

No quips nor windups (sorry Sallyanne1234, and the spelling war!?) Sunfish, you have great insight, our post describes BA to the tee. Bravo, best post i've seen on here.WW

When Ryanair buy you then you'll really have something to moan about!

WW
Your previous incarnations as BAe and News24 were offensive. It seems the mods have now given you some rope. Don't hang yourself with it.

Spot on
 

Sunfish - spot on. I hope the whole of BA sees your post and reflects on it - starting at the very top.

Relax Sally
 

Hey Sally, relax, whether you like it or not our views are not so dissimilar. Now back to the thread, all of you who dislike the WeeWillie and feel he should resign, you can now bet on his demise! Check out http://www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/p/st...811-qqqx=1.asp

Sunfish; AKA Rod Eddington why did you adopt these ideas when you were in charge. Shame to say i do not recall you doing much to resolve the numerous issues that existed. It is depressing that so many of you clearly ID the problems. It is also not correct to slap such paudits on the shoulders of LK and LM, do not forget that they enjoyed a free hand and a bottomless pit of monies to make the temporary fixes. As a result we are still in anaweful mess with the loaders playing games and when they finish the flight crew will start. The BA staff moto Overtime / Overseas or Off.

Sorry mate, I'm not rocket Rod, and if you knew my background, you would know that the name makes me want to vomit.

Most successful consumer-facing organisations under-promise and over-deliver; BA has been guilty for a long time of over-promising and under-delivering. The T5 debacle is just the most recent and most abhorrent example of that.

Mind you, I spent Monday behind the scenes at T5, and there is scope for BA and BAA to turn buck-passing into an Olympic sport....