Dear BA Staff,

Recently finished a sector to an Arabic-speaking destination.

An elderly lady was wheeled in to the seat in front of me on a wheelchair with her daughter, making use of the pre-boarding. The elderly lady was sitting in CW and the daughter was sitting in WT. For take-off, there was an adequate language barrier that other passengers had to help translate from English to Arabic basic take-off procedures (putting bags up in the hold, blankets underneath the seat belt, etc.)

As soon as the seatbelt sign went off, the daughter came up from WT and sat in the empty seat next to the mother in CW for the rest of the flight. Cabin crew were clearly uncomfortable with this and instructed her to return to her seat several times, but within minutes she would be back (usually after staff retreated to the galley). Daughter asked for (but was refused service) for the meal and drinks, and was politely told that the ET meal service was approaching her seat in ET and that she should go back to partake in it; the daughter was also told several times not to recline the seat or make use of any other CW comforts. Daughter remained in CW seat for landing. Doors open, and elderly mother canters (on her own two feet) out the door and onto the jet bridge (like most JFK-MIA flights!)

What's the normal procedure for such a language barrier on board, especially in a service-heavy cabin? Is it a safety issue (e.g., not being able to understand evacuation instructions in an emergency)? What's the official policy on visiting other cabins? I'm fully appreciative of the fact that BA staff were as professional as they could be with what was tantamount to a self-upgrader (she was in the CW seat about 70% of the time), so I'm not blaming anyone, but just curious to know if the staff could/should have done more.

Personally, I think this is less to do with language barrier and more to do with being a chancing git, This person knew what they were doing.

Or simply enforce the existing rules?

I've got a question about "the system": If Stobart Air is operating for BA CityFlyer and the pilots can't be given a loadsheet because "the system" isn't working, is that a Stobart system or a CityFlyer system?

I was wondering whether an AOC requires the holder to have their own system for these things, or if they're allowed to use their customer's.

I know that back when IB flights were operating out of T5 as BA flights, they used to use BA's system for load sheets and similar.

We once had a 2h+ delay because BA's system couldn't sort it out, so they had to get Barajas to create it for us.

Multiple PNRs for a single ticket
 

I'm hoping someone can shed a bit of light on why we sometimes end up with multiple PNRs for a single booking. Two examples to get the ball rolling, both of which were booked with AA:

1. LAS - DFW - LHR - NCL - LHR - LAS where I have one AA record locator, a BA PNR that lists DFW - LHR (operated by AA) and all the other sectors (all operated by BA), and another BA PNR that just lists NCL - LHR - LAS.

2. NCL - LHR - LAS - LAX - LHR NCL: where I originally had one AA record locator and a single BA PNR covering all flights, but since I upfared from PE to Business I now have two BA PNRs, a new one listing NCL - LHR - LAS, and the original still listing NCL - LHR - LAS - LAX - LHR - NCL but where I can't select seats for NCL - LHR and where the BA app shows no ticket number for this sector.

Clearly it's possible, in spite of the different systems used by AA and BA, to generate a single BA PNR to match what's on the AA record locator. Scenario 2 above illustrates that. However, when I upgraded and the ticket was exchanged / re-issued by AA we ended up with two PNRs. What caused the 2nd PNR to be generated? Equally, for scenario 1 why did we end up with two PNRs from the outset?

Is anyone sufficiently familiar with the IT behind these systems to explain from a technical perspective what drives the PNR generation and how it's determined which flights make it onto a single PNR and / or what causes flights to be split across multiple PNRs?

Thanks!

I'm not a staffer, but there is your answer, right there.

AA works on a different reservation system. If you book with AA, then AA's PNR is the one that contains your booking.

However, because part of your itinerary is flown on a different airline using a different system (BA), AA passes enough information to BA to allow BA to carry you. To do that, BA has to create a parallel or subsidiary record, also in the form of a PNR, because BA needs to know who you are and which flights you're booked on.

Typically, if the other airline only operates one of the booked flights, it'll get told about that flight, the flight before and the flight after. The flight before and the flight after may be marked as information only, disabling you from doing anything in relation to those flights even if you can use that operating PNR to do things like select seats on the single flight that's critical.

If the other airline is operating more than one flight in the booking, then it may possibly create two or more operating PNRs depending on how the information has come across. And if it creates one operating PNR for one of the flights, and another PNR for another of the flights, and there may be some overlap between them because of the information sectors. And this could explain why a flight may show up in more than one operating PNR, but you can actually only manage things like seating in one of the operating PNRs.

But all of this is fundamentally to do with the fact that it's an AA booking.

The double BA locators, having booked on AA.com, is likely because some sectors are BA coded entirely (generating one PNR), and some sectors are AA flight number operated by BA (generating another PNR).

Thanks to Globaliser and BA6501 for commenting, and to the latter for actually putting me on the right track. It turns out that when AA reissued the ticket I was booked onto the BA prime flight number whereas originally I was booked on the AA codeshare. That would seem to explain it nicely.

Thanks both :)

Please can I ask a question about BACF?

in ANZ and in the US there are regional airlines, in some cases wholly owned by the parent airline (eh sunstate or EAA) and in others sort of subcontracted (eg cobham/Nationaljet or network). Generally these function as a lower pay and conditions subsidiary, usually there are separate seniority lists and no direct pathway from regional to mainline, although candidates *may* be more likely to get accepted to mainline than an external candidate (or may be held back if the regional is short of staff)

does BACF fit in a similar way to BA or is it a completely different set up? Roughly how is the terms and conditions relative to mainline BA? For example some of the feeders here get full qantas staff travel which includes partners and OW, some get only qantas group staff travel. Is BACF more or less desirable as an employer than BA?

i have no real reason for knowing this so if it’s super secret squirrel stuff then i’m happy to accept SSS as an answer. Just was trying to get my head around it with the current IA and reading the background of BACF on Wikipedia has me more confused than before

BACF is a separate company with a separate seniority list. It runs in a similar way to Sunstate. There is some transfer to BA, mainly to stop all the BACF F/O's quitting and going elsewhere. BA pay scales are better.

Flight crew pay is better at BA but for cabin crew it’s the other way around when compared to LGW and Mixed Fleet, with a higher basic salary, better scheduling agreement and breakfast paid for on night stops.

Staff travel and other perks are identical to mainline, however cabin crew don’t get any discount on shorthaul BoB as the staff numbers are not loaded into the TourPOS device.

BACF has bases in Scotland which suits those who don’t want to commute, therefore while some want to go across it’s not everyone. Pay is lower though, as in the US. ISTR there’s also a BALPA agreement that CityFlyer is limited to 100 seats max without requiring a mainline pilot (ever wondered why there is so much legroom on the E90s?)