BA flights return to normal after strike

British Airways flights were returning to normal today following the end of a three day strike by cabin crew which cost the airline around £21m (€23.3m) with further disruption planned.

Despite the end of the action by thousands of Unite members there will be a knock-on effect on services, especially at Heathrow, which was worst affected by the walk-out.

BA said the vast majority of flights this week will operate as normal and customers will be able to travel as planned, with all flights operating at Gatwick and London City.

A spokesman said: “The knock-on impact at Heathrow is far less than anticipated due to the numbers of cabin crew who came to work as normal over the past weekend.

“We have a complex global operation which has to co-ordinate the rosters of over 13,000 cabin crew, 3,000 pilots and 230 aircraft which all need to be in the right place at the right time across 140 destinations in more than 70 countries.

“We are sorry for any cancellations, as we get our aircraft, pilots and cabin crew back into the correct positions around the world. We are contacting customers and offering them a full refund, a rebook or a re-route so that they can get to their destinations.”

The airline faces a £7m (€7.7m) a day bill under its “current best estimate” of the impact of the industrial action.

BA added that contingency plans to cope with the strike had been “very successful”, and results for the year to March 31 would be “broadly unchanged”.

Based on the estimates, BA would be left with a total bill of almost £50m (€55m) if the four-day strike due to start on Saturday goes ahead, although the airline said the cost of any action could only be assessed after the event.

Over the first two days of the action, BA said it operated 273, or 78%, of long-haul flights, and 442, or 50%, of its short-haul flights.

The airline also ran 70 positioning flights – which in most cases carried cargo - to return passengers home with minimum disruption.

The company said it began the weekend with 82,573 bookings for the two days after reservation teams worked with customers to reduce bookings, although it actually carried 86,262 passengers after late bookings.

“This strong operational performance made possible by dedicated BA staff has significantly reduced the financial impact of the disruption,” the company said.

Unite disputed the cost of the dispute, claiming that before the strike started, BA had spent £40 million leasing planes as part of its contingency plans.

A union source said he believed that over the three strike days, BA hired 20 aircraft, at a cost of £1m (€1.1m) for three craft per day.

The BA figures did not include loss of revenue or the expense of re-booking passengers, the union claimed.

Cabin crew returned to work today with little sign of an early breakthrough to the bitter dispute over cost cutting and jobs.

Unite’s joint leader Tony Woodley is believed to have contacted TUC general secretary Brendan Barber about the prospect of fresh talks with the airline in a bid to avert the next strikes, and more industrial action threatened from mid-April if the deadlock is not broken by then.

Mr Woodley has urged BA chief executive to “come out of his bunker” and meet him, saying he had not received any positive response from the company to his plea for fresh talks and adding that Mr Walsh’s silence was “deafening”.

Although BA said the outlook for the year was unchanged, it remains on course for record losses this year after racking up pre-tax loss of £342m (€379) in the nine months to December 31.

The latest slide into the red follows losses of £401m (€445m) in the 12 months to last March as the firm was hit by recession and soaring oil prices.