Dispute throws BA into turmoil at Heathrow
Financial Times: August 11 2005
By Kevin Done, Aerospace Correspondent
British Airways faces more turmoil on Friday after it was forced on Thursday to cancel all its flights from Heathrow in response to unofficial industrial action by about 1,000 of its ground services workers.
About 40,000 BA passengers were stranded around the world by cancellations on Thursday, and another 70,000 customers are due to be affected on Friday.
BA managers and volunteer staff tried to pacify thousands of passengers caught in the terminals at Heathrow, the world's busiest international airport, and to find emergency hotel accommodation or re-route and re-book passengers on to other airlines.
The unofficial industrial action has hit BA when it is most vulnerable, in the peak summer weeks, with its operations becoming gridlocked, leaving around 100 aircraft and 1,000 pilots and cabin crew wrongly placed around the world.
On Thursday night BA said that Friday it would be cancelling all 500 flights to and from Heathrow up until 6pm, and it advised customers due to travel before 6pm today not to go to the airport.
On Thursday 77 outbound short-haul and 44 outbound long-haul flights were cancelled, at least 17 incoming services were diverted to airports around the UK, including Luton, Stansted, Newcastle and Glasgow, and many inbound short-haul flights were held before take-off at airports around Europe.
The company said all its 70 inbound long-haul flights would be diverted to other UK airports.
The unofficial industrial action has led to a repeat of the disruption suffered by the airline in the summers of 2003 and 2004. In July 2003 a wildcat strike by Heathrow sales and check-in staff ended up costing the airline about £40m (?58m).
The secondary action by BA members of the Transport and General Workers Union mainly baggage handlers and loaders, cargo workers and air-crew bus drivers was staged in support of TGWU members at Gate Gourmet, the independent airline catering company.
A long-running industrial dispute over restructuring and pay and conditions at Gate Gourmet rapidly escalated on Wednesday and led to the dismissal by the company of more than 600 of its 2,000 catering workers at Heathrow.
Sir Rod Eddington, BA chief executive, called on Gate Gourmet management and the TGWU to ?sit down as a matter of urgency? to resolve their dispute, and he called on the union to get its BA members back to work.