The choir spent Monday night giving impromptu concerts to cheer up the hundreds of other waiting passengers, and sleeping on the hard terminal floor. Its trip to sing in Stoke-on-Trent, Erlangen’s twin town, had been ruined. Gerda, 52, said: “We feel dirty — we have no toothbrush, no clothes, no way to clean up.”
She wasn’t alone. In the week before the August bank holiday, one of the busiest periods for air travel, BA cancelled about 100 flights from Heathrow, stranding hundreds of people overnight and causing delay and inconvenience to thousands of others. The hold-ups were bad enough, but this time there was an added, agonising twist. A week earlier, industrial action had threatened BA’s bank-holiday flights. Ground staff unions had planned strikes over pay.
At the eleventh hour, just when it seemed bank-holiday travel plans were certain to be turned into chaos, the dispute was resolved. Passengers heaved a sigh of relief — their break was safe after all.
Fat chance. BA did not need a strike to strand passengers. On Monday and Tuesday, 80 flights were canned, with a further 14 grounded on Wednesday. It was a public-relations disaster. Passengers, unions and the press rounded on BA.
Not enough staff had been on duty to deal with the rush, they said, and the airline had compounded the situation by failing to provide information to stranded passengers, and by constantly changing its story as to when the chaos would be sorted out.
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Inside BA, a more sinister explanation was doing the rounds. There were dark mutterings about industrial sabotage, an orchestrated but unofficial sick-out and work-to-rule by ground staff still eager to vent their anger with the company, despite the resolution of the pay talks. The charge was fiercely denied by the BA unions.
Rod Eddington, BA’s chief executive, kept a low profile for most of the dispute, allowing Mike Street, director of operations, to be the airline’s public face and to offer profuse apologies to customers. But in an interview with The Sunday Times Eddington accepted staff shortages were the problem. “We recognise we were under strength, and we have to take some responsibility for that.”
The situation had been aggravated by bad weather — a storm closed Heathrow’s runways for a short period on Monday, and “technical issues” had kept aircraft on the ground.
From the sickness rates there was no obvious evidence of concerted action by disgruntled staff, he said. Managers would investigate the causes of the debacle, but Eddington said he was more eager to move on and repair the airline’s operations. “We will definitely look at what happened on Monday, but I don’t see any point in raking over the coals. I want to look forward,” he said.
Senior sources at BA said the investigation, which would start this week, would also look at the role of senior management. Street is expected to be under the spotlight, as well as Mervyn Walker, UK airports director, and Peter Read, operations director at Heathrow.
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Thankfully, by Thursday, the busiest day of the bank-holiday rush, things were roughly back to normal.
The airline flew 120,000 people from London, 90,000 from Heathrow and 30,000 from Gatwick, and cancelled six out of 540 flights — a little under the average for a normal day of operations.
Eddington, who with other top managers will be working in the Heathrow terminals this weekend, said he was reasonably confident the airline’s operations were back on an even keel. “But I am conscious that this is a very busy time of year, and I don’t want to offer a hostage to fortune,” he said.
ACCORDING to insiders, last week’s problems have been building for some time. Ground staff feel they have unfairly borne the brunt of a cost-cutting drive aimed at restoring BA to profitability.
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Under the programme, euphemistically called Future Size and Shape, nearly 13,000 jobs have gone, almost one quarter of the workforce. In total, Eddington’s plan has saved more than £850m a year.
The cracks first began to show in July last year. Miffed by a card system that required them to swipe in and out of work, Heathrow check-in staff staged a wildcat walk-out. The stoppage brought chaos for three days, and cost BA £40m.
Ground staff were feeling fractious. This year, in a break with tradition, they went first in the annual pay talks, a role normally reserved for the pilots. After difficult negotiations punctuated by a strike ballot, the two sides agreed an 8.5% deal over three years — which is likely to be accepted by both pilots and engineers.
Eddington was unrepentant, saying that without cost-cutting BA’s future was in doubt.
“It was a sensible plan, and all the sensible commentators at the time had only one question, whether it went far enough. Older airlines like BA faced and continue to face enormous challenges. If we had not done it, I doubt we would be around to talk about it now,” he said.
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Staff representatives said the cuts had gone too far. Ed Blisset, national officer at the GMB, said unions warned managers three months ago that a problem was looming.
“We said that the cuts went through the fat and into the bone, and what happened last week showed we were right. BA has been running far below agreed staffing levels.”
Niggling difficulties had been experienced at Heathrow for the past month, Blisset said. Staff shortages and the airport’s extreme congestion had made working “extremely unpleasant”. Before the recent pay deal, junior check-in staff were paid a basic of £12,500 a year for a 37½-hour a week, a rate Blisset said was “iniquitous”.
He rejected suggestions that staff might last week have taken part in an unofficial industrial action by calling in sick or working to rule. “That’s not true,” he said.
Eddington put last week’s staff shortage at about 120 across the airport. The airline has some 200 ground staff in training, the first of whom will start work in 10 days’ time.
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Other BA employees said they were frustrated by the ground staff’s actions. One senior 747 pilot, who asked not to be named, said he felt that while he and his colleagues were “going the extra mile” to keep the airline running, other groups of staff were not.
Pilots’ websites regularly feature complaints from BA staff accusing, for example, bus drivers of deliberately refusing to make direct trips across the airport to speed transfers of flight crew between aircraft, but insisting on always making a time-consuming journey to the Compass Centre, the airline’s operational headquarters.
Others point the finger at the management. “BA is a clear case of silo management — the check-in, baggage and engineering are all run in their little fiefdoms, and there is very little cross-over until you get up to Eddington,” said one manager.
BA’s TRAVAILS have so far not affected its share price. It closed the week at 228½p, and has in the past year been one of the best performers in the FTSE 100, rising from 165p last year to a high in January of 344p.
Professional investors say the company’s position at Heathrow insulates it from the worst effects of such a customer-relations disaster. “Obviously this isn’t helpful,” said UBS analyst Damien Horth, “but business travellers do not in many cases have a lot of choice, particularly on long-haul routes. BA has the biggest network and its product is very good.”
Passengers have also become inured to airline disruption. Easyjet, the low-cost airline, recently had to cancel flights after a mix-up left some planes without mandatory insurance documents on board.
Shareholders are for the moment focused on longer-term problems. Horth said: “The big question for all airlines is whether the recovery in revenue we have seen so far this year can be sustained. The second question is oil prices.”
A question mark remains over BA management’s ability to handle its workforce. Eddington has set a target of winning another £300m in savings in employee costs — a figure that looks daunting. ABN Amro analyst Andrew Lobbenberg said: “The prospect of BA negotiating its £300m cost savings from labour looks very unlikely.”
Other union leaders representing BA workers said their members were frustrated by the constant negative press. Jim McAuslan, general secretary of the British Airline Pilots’ Association, said: “Pilots are proud to fly for BA. They are tired of having to apologise for what stems from management’s inability to tackle serious issues.”
Insiders say that while last week was chaotic, there are underlying problems that make BA’s operations more precarious than those of its rivals.
Heathrow suffers from crippling congestion. Its four terminals (T1-4) were opened in 1969, 1955, 1961 and 1986 respectively, and were not intended to cope with the 60m-plus passengers that flow through them each year.
Eddington is circumspect in his criticism, conscious perhaps of needing to preserve a relationship with BAA, the London hub’s owner and operator. “All I would say is that Heathrow is our main base and we have to make it work better.”
Some of the investment that has been made has proved less than satisfactory. A huge underground baggage belt that connects Terminal 4, BA’s long-haul base, to Terminal 1, its centre for short-haul flying, has proved problematic, at times separating thousands of passengers transferring from intercontinental to European flights from their bags. The amount of space in the terminals devoted to retail is also a constant bone of contention between BAA and airline managers.
One senior executive in BA operations said: “Heathrow is what I would call a just-in-time airport. If passengers can’t be moved from kerbside to airborne in three hours, the whole thing just gums up.”
The two runways are constantly full. One telling statistic is the number of “go-arounds” recorded, instances of when an arriving aircraft has to abort its landing because there is an aircraft on the runway ahead of it.
A report to the Heathrow Airport consultative committee, a local-authority group that regularly meets airport management, said there were 37 go-arounds in March, and the same number in April — the equivalent of more than one a day. Three weeks ago a storm closed the runways for 40 minutes, and thousands were parted from their bags, with flights being cancelled and re-routed for several days after. Airlines at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, America’s busiest hub, have begun discussions on cutting flight numbers to end chronic flight delays. No such action is likely at Heathrow, where runway take-off and landing slots are in huge demand. One BA manager said: “There is no point in us giving any (slots) up, because they would immediately be filled.” Little relief is in prospect until BAA opens the controversial fifth terminal at Heathrow, currently under construction. It is the centrepiece of a £7 billion investment, including work to adapt existing terminals for the Airbus A380, the new 550-seat super-jumbo that will start flying to Heathrow in two years time. A new runway, the key to more capacity, is unlikely to be built before the end of the next decade, if environmental concerns can be overcome.
Meanwhile, BA managers have an unenviable task. They have to deal with a vulnerable, rickety operation while steering an aggressive cost-cutting plan through against newly empowered unions — and at some stage they will have to do it without the talismanic effect of Eddington. Last week’s cancellations are unlikely to be the last.