In a fleet of 38 aircraft which are a mix of 4 engined boeing 747 and airbus a340/300/600 the average age is 6 years old........hardly tired.
Twenty one new aircraft are currently on order including the a380 and B787.
"Beardy" as you so disrespectfully call Sir Richard, is not in a rush to sell his privately owned majority stake in a national carrier.....nor is he likely to sell his private island anytime soon or the 400 other companies in his group.
He is window shopping at the moment.....as all good BILLIONAIRES can!!!

Quote "I'm sure the pilots at VS know what they are dealing with"

Seen it all before and still cant work out the smoke and mirrors tactics so I'll just hit the lnav vnav let the FD fly "you have control, I'll do radios" and wait with the other 96% to see what transpires.

farefield,
thank you for the outline. I was worried that this thread would deteriorate in to mud-slinging that was not related to the dispute.

- and a little bird tells me that unlike the other 'departments' in Virgin, the company will not release the survey results to flight crew!

I think what we know p7lot is that VIRGIN the airline, has always been Beardy's little "trainset" and the icing on the cake of his empire. He may decide to fund its losses indefinitely.

Therefore if the business is not run on established fiscal rules, it is OK for VIRGIN pilots to strike and make Branson shell out to keep his "four engines for longhaul" jets in the air.

Good luck to VS pilots!!

Richard Knows What Is Happening
 

This is not a case of the King not knowing what his executives/managers are doing.

Branson directs from on top (V.A being one of his prime investments), so he is the man pushing his management team hard to screw down wages/conidtions.

His open letter is a PR spin doctors dream document :D

You only get what you fight for, Branson is a billionaire not because he is a nice guy but a hard business man :ok:

I can only hope I am proved by Richard. :)

Looks like Branson has fallen for the poisonous HR led attack on the union. With a dismally low approval rating of just 6% for the current Flight Operations management team (independently sourced staff satisfaction survey commissioned by Virgin Atlantic) the pilots are obviously fed up with more than just the headline pay offer.

Any management team that can lead a company into a strike where an almost unprecedented, overwhelming 97% (94% of all pilots) voted for industrial action surely needs to look at where it has gone wrong. If pilots haven't been on strike for 34 years you can't call this a militant group of workers.

It would appear that this ruinous management team are hoping that the wrath of public opinion against the pilots will carry them through. Very sad as this looks like being the end for Virgin Atlantic. The pilots will strike and most probably will risk bringing the company down.

Boeing and Airbus both predict massive shortages of experienced airline pilots over the next 20 years so an experienced workforce should have little problem finding new jobs even though it will mean a period of hardship and upheaval. With Branson having swallowed the advice of his management team, he will let them try and break the union. If his company is so precariously balanced on whether he can afford to pay his pilots then perhaps it is time for the demise of his airline.

I make it 8.7 and rising.

Balpa, the pilots' union, has said that it will announce strike dates from Tuesday unless a dispute over pay is resolved.
Telegraph 1400

So from the open letter from SRB it looks as if he is not going to back down. Could be interesting times.

OK guys, here is my lowly SLF perspective;-

One of my children is in mid teens and important exams and results are looming. The family decided last year to save hard and have a "once in a lifetime" holiday whilst we are all together. I have a well paid job but tried not to live beyond my means (the car on my drive is 10 years old) and not taken many overseas holidays so this is the big one, a full three weeks away, never managed it before. Departure in a few weeks and now we are dealing with the uncertainty around the strike.

Yes I have holiday insurance but I can't book any entertainment at the destination as this would not be covered (and no, it’s not Florida). I can't make other travel arrangements because I would loose all my money as I would have cancelled. This is what I would like to do to make sure we get there but obviously cannot afford to loose the money. So the alternative is to wait until the planned departure date. In the meantime, my spouse is having trouble sleeping with worry about getting on holiday. Irrational and illogical I concede, but nevertheless this is the situation I find myself in and I am extremely worried about their health with several weeks to go before departure.

So we wait for the departure day to arrive. Now suppose the strike has resulted in disprution and we cannot travel, will there be capacity elsewhere to transport us? if there is, how long will we have to wait? What if there isn't and the only option is to get our money back or travel again within three months? OK, so I have may not have lost out financially but the time has gone. I will not take my children our of school during term time and there will be no opportunity for three weeks holiday until next summer when other circumstances dictate that it will not be possible to take three weeks.

Am I selfish? Probably - if looking after your family is selfish then yes, and proud of it!

Do I think the striking pilots are selfish? Yes, they are taking away something we have looked forward to for so long and we will not have the chance to do this again. Maybe I am lucky, my employer recognized the sacrifices the workforce made to get through the lean times and has looked after and recompensed us for thissince. I don't understand the full issues behind the ballotas I believe the press only reports "populist" views. I haven't bought a paper for years and it would be really good to get and understand the full reasons for this action.

Do I expect your sympathy? No, there will be thousands of people like me and my family and I don't expect you to alter your view or behaviour because of my "sob story", but this is the reason why strikes do not work, they punish the wrong people, they punish the innocent. If I had a dispute with my employer I would not expect that to affect third parties, as you do.

Do I expect to be "slagged" off? No, I expect my views to be treated with respect. My perspective is different to everyone else’s. This is the truth as I see it, you must consider you own situation.

Wiil I book with Virgin again? I don't know but would not rule it out. My partner says definately not but I am not that naive, however Virgin won’t be our first choice (as it was for this holiday).

What would I like to happen? Ideally the strike not to go ahead. If that is not possible we need to know the dates as soon as possible so that we can make arrangements instead of being stuck “in limbo” and think the union should make these dates public immediately so that the thousands like us can plan ahead. I heard that Virgin carry 15,000 passengers a day. If this is true then this could potentially affect around 900,000 people between 4 July (the first possible strike day as I write this) and the end of the school summer holidays. We have always found the last few weeks before a holiday an important time for planning the finer detail. That too has been taken away from us, we cannot do anything until we have some details of the strike. If we are disrupted, then we want an alternative carrier to transport us but we don’t know how realistic that will be.

Am I worried? Very. I am trying to stay calm and positive for my partner but it’s not easy. Lack of information, bland promises of “unaffected service” from the Virgin website and no tangible alternatives do not give us any comfort and confidence that we will be able to go on holiday.

So there you have it, a view from a very worried SLF.

Good luck to us all!

Maybe many of these Virgin pilots have been spending too much time in France and the "Je fais la greve" is spreading?

Accept Richard's letter and back to work as normal lads!

rcg11x, perhaps you should focus your questions on the Virgin Atlantic management who have allowed industrial relation with their pilots to deteriorate to this level rather than just blame the pilots. It takes two to tango and you have to question the quality of management that is prepared to let their customers suffer for the sake of their overblown egos.

The Virgin pilots have not been offered any pay deal which is why they have balloted for industrial action. Pay negotiations were entered into last November yet the management team will not allow the union to ballot its members on any pay offer as they refuse to allow the offer to be put to the members unless the Balpa reps recommend the deal.

The management have not budged from their initial (non) offer since November and so the pilots have decided that they have no other option but to take industrial action. The intransigence of the management by refusing to allow a ballot on their supposed offer is the main reason that the pilots are taking the action even though they know that it will do much harm, not only to the airline and its customers but also to themselves.

They are not a bunch of militant lefties but a mature, well educated individuals with large responsibilities. They have been pushed into this corner by an an HR led assault on their working conditions and derisory pay (non) offers.

The engineers at Virgin decided a few years ago to give up their collective bargaining rights and have since had similar derisory pay rises imposed upon them. The pilots are not about to follow in their footsteps and are unanimous in their determination to prevent the HR department from fulfilling their promise of destroying the union.

Please direct your frustration at the Virgin management who are the real cause of the dispute. You wont get a straight answer because they are mostly revolving door managers who are using Virgin as a cash machine and will, during the course of many pilots and other employees careers, move on to other companies where they will apply their greedy and egoistic tactics to generate yet more chaos and disruption.

I find this hard to deal with. VS pilots complaining that Virgin wants to "bust" their union, yet BALPA remained "neutral" when hundreds of its members at BA volunteered to work as cabin crew, in a dispute that was all about union busting.

Beardy says it all in his blog. He is obviously "hurt" that his pilots might strike, even though working in a fun place doesn't pay the bills. Why should a VS 747-400 pilot earn less than a BA one?

The reason why, is that for years VS had a steady supply of retired BA Captains who were happy to earn a lower wage at VIRGIN, as they had their big, fat, BA pensions to top them up. Now that the retirement age is no longer 55 at BA, that stream of pilots has dried up.

Virgin do not want to talk to BALPA as they rather the association did not exist. All I say to the VS pilots is to study what BA management attempted with its cabin crew and how their union and the reps were treated, to view the similarities with your own dispute. There is a blueprint here that management of some companies is adopting:

1. You provoke a strike

2. You quickly defeat it and the union.

3. End of collective bargaining.

BA's cabin crew much to their credit, overcame this assault and war of attrition through a principalled and tenacious resistance, that Willie Walsh said he would win.

VS flight crew must be ready for all that will be thrown at them.

Maybe I'm being daft, but why was the BA CC strike a CEO -led strike, whilst the Virgin strike is an "HR led" strike?

Surely, if the workers and Directors wish to piss of their customers as much as they have done for rcg, above, then it is a CEO - led strike?

Surely it is the CEO that wants to piss off the customers, rather than HR??

Peedoff,

Don't disagree with you, the Management have played an active/inactive (delete as you wish) part in arriving at this situation!

If you could give me the number of someone in authority, I'd glady "have a go".....

A fascinating view, but utterly wrong on every count. Reality isn't really your 'thing', is it? You might wish to go away and think about how hard it is to defeat a strike when the strikers can't be replaced by any old bod with 5 days training.

Don't fall for Sir Dickie's blackmail tactic of saying the current offer will evaporate. Keep on course and they'll offer you better behind closed doors in the run up to the action. That's my opinion of the likely outcome.

I don't think it is possible to successfully run an airline for very long, with front line staff who only have 5 days training.

VS and BA pilots can soon be replaced. There are hundreds out there who are qualified to do our jobs. Remember that Yellow Pen.

Pilots can easily be replaced? Really?

A type rating and line training takes approximately three months with approximately 12 six hour sims and 10 ten hour flights. That's 172 hours of instructor time. Multiplied by 750 pilots that's 54000 hours or 2250 days of training. Training supplied by, you guessed it, other pilots!

That's a strong bargaining point I think!

As YP states, reality really isn't your strong point.

Seemed to work pretty well at BA.

Yes, they can be replaced. But no, they can't be replaced soon. It takes 3 months to line train a pilot to BA/VS standards. Thats assuming there's simulator and training capacity available for mass training purposes, which there isn't.

In actual fact......It's got nothing to do with Sir Richard...he's as hands on and approachable as the Queen in a cash crisis. As with HRH ..he's just a face and he readily admits to leaving it to Steve Griffiths.
Steve Griffiths is the guy putting the deal on the table.
The buck stops with Steve Griffiths.
So can we have less of Dick and more of Steve.
And train some milkmen to fly the fleet.......see if it helps the company.

In these days of financial constraints it is most important that companies look after their workforce who can make or break the company so easily. A workforce with good morale are more likely to keep customers on side by going the extra mile, whereas an unhappy workforce is unlikely to be as motivated. This seems to me to be another example of managers not managing their workforce effectively because if they were then this situation would not have arisen.

To be a respected manager does not mean that you need to always say yes to your workforce, but it does mean that you need to explain situations clearly, whatever they may be, and to lead by example. It would appear that the managers at Virgin are no different to many others in that they have seperate rules for themselves. I have read that management payrises awarded in 2008 were excessively large when the workforce were awarded nothing. That certainly is not the way to achive good morale within a company nor is it for good company co-operation. I say to all Virgin pilots I hope you achieve success as too many workers in the UK, in all industries, have been neglected by their "management", who have placed their own greed before doing their primary job of managing.

It is about time in this industry that the true value of a pilot is recognised. Managers are easy to replace and many have no real qualifications wheras pilots are highly trained individuals who have taken years to achive the level of experience required for their role. Someone mentioned that theVirgin pilots could be easily replaced. Sure no one is indispensable but I know, from first hand experience in the industry, that the majors have in the past been able to recruit some of the better pilots, a fact that should be valued. Virgin are very fortunate to have such well trained and capable pilots. As a manager I would be doing my upmost to keep this most important part of the workforce onside as they are an insurance policy to a safe and effecient operation.

Oxymoron666,

No employee should subsidize their employer whan a business is profitable, and certainly not their customers. I fully accept the role Management has played. If you have made sacrifices during the hard times, you should be looked after when the better times return. Like I said, I have been lucky.

Equally, I would be prepared to pay a bit extra for my holiday if it was guaranteed to maintain and improve employees pay. Sadly, many consumers may not agree but I believe you get what you pay for in life.

Maybe I should have included the question "Do I think the Management of Virgin Atlantic is selfish?" in my original post.

In a company with union membership of around 95% of the target workgroup, a ballot return of 94%, with 97% of those returns voting for industrial action, is extremely significant. As the 'union' within the company consists solely of the company's active-duty pilots, I don't think there is any way that this can be said to have been orchestrated by a union hell bent on company destruction - I'm sure that's the last thing these pilots want. Couple this with the reported internal survey result of just 6% satisfaction with the way the flight operations department is run, and it seems pretty clear that the bones of this dispute is not about pay - it's more likely about respect, communication and leadership. Or rather, the lack of those things. A union can't call a dispute on multiple topics, especially such ephemeral topics as these, so the very extended negotiations about pay have to serve as the stalking horse in the hope that the settlement will address all the issues at stake.

SRB's letter seems to ignore the underlying issues here, and was released to the press (I believe before it was released to the pilots) - yet the pilots do not have the right of reply in the press, though of course the union does.

Such disaffection is a major issue which should concern all at Virgin, and I sincerely hope it can be addressed before the whole house of cards falls down.

I am no fan of RB by any stretch of the imagination. However I agree with a lot of what he writes.

The days of the "big buck" are gone for pilots, forever. If the strike does go ahead it will probably finish VS. If RB does cave in, all the other trades will also want a rise and I believe it when he says the money wont be there.

The pilots are not indispensable, neither is the airline. Yes as mentioned it will take time to replace pilots. W.W. must be hoping like hell you pilots do go ahead with your action. Every employee at Sabena thought they and the airline were indispensable and look what happened there. If RB pulls the plug a lot of the ex employees and their families will be in for some very hard times indeed.

If the suits are the problem why don't you threaten strike action for "regime change"? If the strike does go ahead I think it could be the beginning of the end for VS., then it will be just another airline that went bust on the long list that is already. All airlines are being priced and taxed out of existence and a lot of the travelling public have probably had a guts full of it already. Who the hell wants to travel by air in their leisure time?? I don't that's for sure.

The dream and the good times are over. If you have a job that pays the bills and you can save a bit, you are in the minority. I think things financially, will only get worse globally but I hope I am wrong.

Striker replacements?
 

Sure, you can't replace a competent pilot by "any old bod with 5 days training."
That's what the Continental pilots thought about Frank Lorenzo's antics. Didn't work out too well.

On the other hand,an aspect for management to consider is the forecast shortage of pilots worldwide as the Asian airlines continue booming, and many older pilots across the globe reach retirement age.

Does Branson want to slough off his best people for unknown quantities?:E

doubleu-anker, not sure what you mean by this.

The demands from the pilots in this case seem quite reasonable - a pay rise based on inflation etc - hardly asking for "big bucks", merely a request to be treated fairly.

What exactly are the pilots' demands?

Digitalis

An informed and unbiased testimony to exactly what is happening.:D

Hear hear Digitalis - nail on the head :D

GA Button
 

Doesn't sound too clever back at "The Office" any more.

Inspired move of yours I reckon in 2009.

I have been involved in many employee negotiations and reasonable people always win. Extreme action, extreme standpoints and extreme views never succeed. I don't know the precise details of this case so I apologise if this seems rather dismissive. When I was in business I always paid and needed to pay the highest rate possible for my best employees. Reasonable employees saw the figures and understood the constraints. If I was aVirgin pilot I would not create waves - that's a black mark in the Company's books and takes a long time to remove. Check the facts, listen to the arguments and state your point of view calmly in writing to management - without using hyperbole. But only if you feel you have to.

I worked for VS from 1990-2001. It had 6 aircraft and 500 employees and was great fun.

We survived the Gulf war, the BA dirty tricks campaign, we had the best product on the market and (IMO) the best people for most of my time there.

Sadly the whole airline started to go down the pan in around 2000. By no short measure around the time Mr B took his leave.

It went from being a fun place with great prospects to being a corporate company with nothing but £ signs.

The terrible J2000 project lost millions and it took another 5 years to get the lost Jcls pax back. Economy went from 34" seat pitch, best entertainment, great meals to what it is now..........enough said there i think.

Everyman and his dog knows that Singapore have been desperate to sell for years and every time Virgin reports a profit the Singapore trading report states otherwise. (That's the great thing about being a private company).

It is a great shame that this once great 'people' airline has come to this.

It has become everything that it once fought against and until that is sorted it has no hope of sorting out the mess it has got itself into.

"could not agree more":D

The good and the Bad
 

I support the actions of the VS pilots despite having just switched our front end business from BA to VS because of the last farce with Cabin Crew.

Some of the arguments here are so valid and eloquent but when I hear someone stating "Managers are easy to replace and many have no real qualifications whereas pilots are highly trained individuals who have taken years to achieve the level of experience required for their role" - I wonder whether this industry has any chance at all?

Whilst some may not like it, good airline managers are hard to come by and worth their weight in gold. I've had the luck to work with some of them. Many work extremely long hours - 2500hrs+ per year not including long stays away from home. Working on laptops on long haul flights then straight into meetings or back to the office. The skills required by Revenue Management (maximising ticket/freight income) is not learnt at the equivalent of flight school, it takes years of hard work. Sure there are bad managers just as there are bad pilots.

For any airline to be still in business after the last 10 years of industry change and increasing costs is almost a miracle and it has only been achieved by management, crew, front line and back room staff pulling together. Nobody should underestimate each others tasks or feel they are more important.

We all have to change with changing times and that means ALL. VS management need to share the pain and gain equally to survive the next 25 years.

Rant over

MF

The count asks why should a BA 744 pilot earn more than a VS 744 pilot? Thats life. There is a vast difference from top to bottom pay scales throughout the world airline industry.

However, The VS crew force obviously have missed out since 2008 but at the end of the day a strike benefits nobody, neither the employees or the company. Who wants to be left with just BA long haul for christ sake.

I hope Beardie and BALPA sit down and work out a compromise real soon before things go tits up and the damage can't be reversed

Well said MF.... and I agree, good airline Managers ARE worth their weight in Gold and its most definitely is a two way process. Ths historic 'us and them' scenario has to go between crews and management, which requires full open-ness and mutual trust and respect, which I think is the main cause of this dispute.

I think most of the crews AND the Union in this case are trying to get the balance that is needed, but they have been made promises by management, some of which have not been kept. It looks very much to me (from the outside) like a serious failure at HR level, otherwise things would never have got this far.

When are strike dates being announced?

Fruitbat, it was supposed to be yesterday I heard on the grapevine, so I suspect from the press silence there's some very heavy private negotiations going on, which could be a good sign.. fingers crossed