Why retain on crippling salaries.
The unions will try to destroy rather than protect.
A sympathetic customer is not going to pay over the odds. Business travel is dead. It’s survival of the fittest, and a fat £200k pa flight deck is not then see now. No customer no jobs.

I am a shareholder in BA and I for one would vote that the idiotic and petty management who have destroyed the reputation of BA over the last 5 years would be out the door before any of the 12,000 mentioned above. Unfortunately reality isn't on my side. I suspect however that as with most of the airlines right now they are going to take as much advantage of this situation as they can get away with, but despite the sabre rattling, actual pilot redundancies will be much lower than the figures originally quoted. Not insignificant for those individuals involved obviously. My heart goes out to the legacy cabin crew, of which I have a personal friend affected, this has been a long time coming and BA will count getting rid of that contract alone as a victory, as petty as that is. The damage to company morale will far outweigh the failed strikes of the past and I believe it will be a much different company in the future. Good look all next week.

At the moment high quality aircraft are freely available, at very good rates. Pilots to fly them take a considerable time to train. Up to 2 years I would suggest. This seems to be about the time that the industry is suggesting the downturn will last. If I was a canny operator I would figure out how to keep this valuable and vital component of future growth on the books A short term gain could lead to long term pain

It depends on previous experience/type rating but a Boeing conversion course for someone with prior Boeing experience is well under a month followed by sectors with a training captain. A variable feast but certainly nowhere near two years.

Certainly there is a case to find a way to avoid altogether or drastically reduce the number of redundancies with some creative thinking.

It all comes down to if the pblic, those who pay your wages, are feeling safe enough to once again fly and of course if where they want to to to is friendly or if they will have to self isolate for 14days upon arrival (at destination or again at home).

Report that a deal is done which reduces redundancies. BALPA to recommend acceptance when details are released in the following days.

Will BAPLA members follow the recommendation?

Where does this leave other BA staff?

I'm going to sound unsympathetic but I have to say, somewhat wearily, after 30 plus years of witnessing the interaction between BALPA and the other Unions at BA that it needs to be made clear that what happens to other staff is in all honesty down to them, BA management and their Union(s).

TBH we've had years of apparently every work group at BA looking over the fence, seeing what other groups are getting, selecting a "nice item" off the other groups T&Cs (for example hotel room upgrades when on duty, staff travel priorities), and then shouting "what about us" or more recently "me too"..

I really really hope the other groups can avoid redundancies and/or erosion of T&Cs, but lets not start hearing "but BALPA got" or what "but the pilots got"...

Unfortunately Wiggy, that is precisely what will happen.

Wiggy, it cuts both ways. I'm sure the pilots saw the deal that was made withe Unite over the furlough scheme and thought the same.

Let's not get into another 'them and us' though. This is stil an aviation crisis. Best of luck to us all.

I thought Wiggy’s post was pretty accurate, fair and balanced. I didn’t detect any hint of “them and us” used maliciously - just a statement of fact and a sensible suggestion for how other unions should approach the current situation.

I do agree with your last two sentences though.

Tim Clark is in The Times today, and suggests that Aviation will be back to its 6 or 7 % per annum global growth rate in a couple of years.

I remember back, after 9/11, some Senior Economist (maybe from UK CAA?) pointing out that each time there is a crisis in Aviation, lots of people say, "This time it is/will be different".

And of course, the 6 or 7 % p.a. growth rate resumes. Where that growth takes place is currently unknown, but Asia will be above the norm, and Europe below the norm.

So, two years of getting back to whatever normal is, then we'll start seeing the posts about "where will we get the pilots from?"

Yes, sorry, I agree, I didn't take Wiggy's post as decisive either, I just didn't want to kick it off again.

No worries folks..

I'm probably just concerned that some may think that a BALPA vs. BA agreement ( TBF yet to be seen by the members, yet alone voted on) genuinely or significantly changes the balance when it comes to the other negotiations/consultations going on between other Unions and BA management..

Sad to say I agree with you, I cannot see that the IAG/BA top management have really Got It for how they are going to come out of this, positively.

Go and look at the ba.com front page, where so many booking flights might start. It looks just like it always did, put in destination, date, etc, yet we all know the old service is hugely disrupted. Not one positive statement of what they are restarting. I would have hoped that they would have prominently a timetable of what they are restarting, and when. But BA don't do timetables any more, so none of the downsized IT team know how to do one. Their treatment of (us) Exec Club members at various levels is widely shared on social media as the poorest of just about all that are around. At London City there have been multiple restart announcements, then cancellations, then changes, etc, as if nobody has a clue how to do it - or does know, but are in thrall to ever-changing budgets revised daily in Waterside or Madrid. And not a single advertisement I have seen for them anywhere. Whatever are the marketing team doing ?

In truth, the Walsh-Cruz axis are completely out of their comfort zone with all this. Can the shareholders see this, and the non-execs "have a word" ? Their life has been spent maximising revenue and minimising cost bit-by-bit on an established network. Now all bets are off and the whole thing needs a comprehensive restart, something they have no experience or understanding of. The arrogant way in which they have hacked off the UK government is extraordinary, and the associated press releases they do just ooze an aura of someone who has lost the plot. Of all the things to do at a time when you need friends.

Morale and trust is very easily lost but very difficult to regain, ought to be near the top of every manager's vital list.

To be honest I don’t blame Walsh or Cruz from arguing back with MPs. At the end of the day, it was government that told airlines that they MUST exhaust all cost saving measures before they would consider any bail outs; this was in response to the Branson VS debate. MPs have voiced their opinions based on their constituents concerns and not always based on fact. Government should have done more for aviation specifically from the outset but they haven’t. If I was Walsh I would be pretty hacked off as well especially when VS, EZY, Airports and even Jet2 and TUI have announced and exercised cuts with little to no criticism at all.

Any shareholder who doesn’t understand the cost to an airline that “legacy” (not a term I like but one that is common in industry) crew can have, really need to open their eyes. The business cannot move forward with such disparities in crew salaries.

However I do agree that changes to the t&cs are questionable although we don’t know fully what they are because they haven’t been fully released to my knowledge.

Unfortunately none of the other carriers use “British” in their name or brand. It is regrettable that foreigners at the top have criticised the British government and belittled the financial support, which in hindsight could have been directed to a more worthy cause. No one must forget that the majority of staff are first, British taxpayers and British subjects, before employees of a company using the British brand.

"Legacy" only seems to apply to the cost of staff T&Cs and never to the massive historical benefits that were gained by airlines, such as slots.

Slots are asset.

Staff costs legacy.

Interestingly I feel more and more the need to read Karl Marx.

BA Shareholding?
 

Not since 24th Jan 2011.