Originally Posted by
KARFA
Ba seem to need about three staff on the ground to guide passengers between back door stairs and the bottom of the stairs at the jetbridge - so I don't think they can do it as a matter of routine.
Sometimes BA are victims of their own safety obsession to be honest with you. I remember once bringing a (very) safety conscious colleague to Madrid to see Iberia's Line Maintenance hangars. The poor guy almost passed out when he saw that the coffee machine was in the hangars, that you accessed the hangars without safety goggles (mind you, there were a few dozen meters from the machine to the closest plane) and, worst of all, the hangar doors gave way to an active taxiway leading to T1!
Originally Posted by
Waterhorse
Absolutely, so it’s it’s just a staffing, or lack of staffing issue, which means it’s a management failure: they have failed to provide enough staff for a resilient service. It has been planned for a just in time service, which assumes everything runs on schedule and there are no off-plan events, this is clearly not an industry where that is a sensible concept, yet BA seem wedded to it.
The inability to attract sufficiently qualified staff is a function of being market rate, the holy grail of management, which is fine provided the job is attractive. When the T&Cs are not market rate then you have to do something to retain staff, which is what BA used to do, and that has its problems too as it becomes a sinecure, and no one ever leaves no matter how much they dislike the job. So again good management, or rather leadership is required, yet seems lacking.
I think this is a bit reductive,
Waterhorse. I mean, I know that flogging 'management' is often accurate, but the root cause of all the woes affecting the airline industry - not just BA, not just HAL, the industry - are deeper and are to do with the desire - no, the expectation - of high returns from shareholders. I've had plenty of business cases for good ideas rejected as the ROIC wasn't high enough, or the budget wasn't available, or because we had to cut costs... and why did we? To maintain a good enough ROIC for shareholders. End of.
You mention Ryanair as somebody who seemingly isn't affected by the problems that afflict HAL or BA. Well, this is because of how the offload the problem on their contractors, often companies (and airports) that are totally and utterly dependent on FR for their survival. I was recently doing some work at an airport in Europe where FR is by far the main customer. They had two loaders working the plane, one dragging the Wessex cart with the bags by hand and then putting the bags in, again by hand, to his mate inside the hold (and you know how small the 737 hold is). No belt conveyors, no nothing. And when I asked how's that possible, I was told that the contract was up for renewal and to save money on the bid the handler reduced hardware spend, which meant that when the old conveyors went bust... they weren't changed. So not all departures have them.
How to change this? I don't know. Somewhere, somehow, the markets, the "City" need to understand that a steady 12, 13% return on invested capital is better than squeezing the airlines so hard that they can extract a 15-16% but then bleed themselves and their suppliers dry. If that were the case then airlines would be able to invest in getting more equipment on the ground, paying staff more, paying
more staff... But that wouldn't be modern day capitalism, wouldn't it?