subject2load

The (initially) temporary closure of both MH lounges (business and first), due to Covid-19, became permanent, and so they are, sadly, no longer a feature of T4. Personally I felt they were more than “quite nice” ……..IMO they were excellent, especially the F lounge. Good range of food & drink with great apron views. A disappointing loss.

BA850

A point neatly underlined by the return of Lufthansa�s A340-600s and A380s, which we were all assured would never come back. Fortunately, Lufthansa had the foresight to store them (mostly, if not all, in Teruel) instead of scrapping them in a panic.

KARFA

I respectfully disagree.

I think you are making that judgement with at least an element of hindsight knowing where were are now. In the face of an unprecedented challenge for aviation (9/11 was challenging but planes were flying soon after albeit numbers took a few months to pick back up), where no one was sure how long it would last or how severe it would be, where you had a fleet of aircraft that was already being retired and would have been gone anyway by 2025, where you were hemorrhaging cash with little if anything coming in and not knowing when that would change, where you were desperate to avoid having a government bailout with all the strings which come with that, I doubt any sane CEO and CFO would have made any other decision but to get rid of the 747.

I think you are underplaying the ongoing costs of the fleet. Maintaining engineering, infrastructure, and flight crew pool indefinitely is costly, and you would have had no idea when or if you might actually be able to fly the 747 fleet again. Keeping you options open, even just saving 12 747s, has a significant cost, and as you know those aircraft are far from efficient when compared to anything else. The goal is not to carry as many passengers as possible at any cost at the end of the day, but instead to maintain a good margin on the passengers you do carry.

Sure BA is now short of frames, but far better to come out of covid under capacity in a financially stronger position than over capacity and financially weaker. It will take some time to get more aircraft but that I am afraid is better than had it been a slower recovery and BA ended up spending huge amounts on a fleet that they didn't need. Better to have supply follow demand than the other way around. It was the lesser of two evils in a sense. MOL was right in the end that the recovery was a lot quicker than expected, but there was a good chance he may not have been and it did take as long as initially predicted. With the benefit of hindsight was it a mistake, yes sure you can argue that now. But I am sure if they had kept them and things had played out differently it could have been an even bigger mistake.

It is easy three years on to sit here now and say it was a mistake. However, I dare anyone to have sat in that chair at that time and to have made a different judgment, especially considering all the uncertainty about how covid would play out and how long recovery could take (remember that we had no idea at the time when we could get a vaccine, or even if one were possible). We have never had a pandemic like this before, the last one 100 years ago was in a world with barely any aviation industry.

bhbloke

On your point about the 747 flight crews, what happened to them? Would they have converted to be 777 flight crew or headed off to an airline that still operated the 747 (increasingly few now)

KARFA

At the time I understand they all went in a pool, this was part of the agreement with BALPA. Effectively all flight crew took a pay cut to help fund that pool, with the intention that those in the pool still got some wage and could potentially covert to other fleets if and when demand picked up. Some pilots in other fleets were laid off as well. I assume the pool is no more now considering BA have a shortage of pilots?

Btw that is an important lesson if you are a pilot - never bid for the oldest fleet as you will be first to be chopped when there is a crisis - and aviation always has a crisis of some nature every 10 years.

As I say, it isn't just about the minimal cost of storing the aircraft themselves. The problem is if you are actually going to keep 747s in storage for a return what do you do, keep a handful of 747 pilots twiddling their thumbs indefinitely? Hope to recruit in or convert others if and when they come back in to service? You also need to maintain the sims and the trainers as well. And you need to keep engineers with 747 ratings, otherwise who is going to bring the aircraft out of storage.

mikeyfly

From my experience, most 744 flight crew were certainly 'older' and presumably rather costly to BA on top whack packages - I imagine a few retired off happily ever after, and some converted. The cost to have had these sitting around waiting to fly again would not have been a small amount

FlyingNowhere

I'll be another one just to add that it's a shame that there is no BA to Bangkok, Seoul etc.
Granted there are other options which are better - but equally, more time consuming.

13901

Sure, hindsight is 20/20. And there was a LOT of groupthink, starting from IATA (and a few consultancies whose names I won't mention because, well, they have good lawyers and are very litigious).
However, I would like to push back on 'sane' CEO and CFOs.

Lufthansa, for instance, didn't throw out their 747s, or even the 340s. They kept them on ice, figuratively speaking, and brought them in when time allowed. So did Swiss, and United. Ditto QF with the 380s, and even Qatar or Etihad. Michael O'Leary, a person for whom I wouldn't want to work but whose intelligence and knowledge of the business is second to none, kept on banging on the drum that this was an external shock and, as soon as politics allowed, demand would bounce back. He dismissed the prospective of a U-shaped recovery as nonsense (or more colourful words) and insisted that the recovery would've been V-shaped, and he was proven right.

I can think of two airlines that alienated whole fleets like BA did: DL with their 777s, and AA with the 76s. Delta's leadership did recognise the error, I seem to remember their CEO saying as much, and indeed have moved very quickly to source additional, used, A350s from LATAM. AA's 767s were beyond past their sell-by date, ask anyone who's maintained them, but nonetheless they had plenty of problems last summer with shortage of frames. And I think they're still suffering.

I have a rough idea of how much it costs to keep a fleet in the desert, and in all honesty we're talking about a fraction of the cost of cancelling flights, re-routing customers, paying compensation and so on. I'm exaggerating somewhat, but long-term storage of 12x for six months 747s would've costed like the short-term cancellation of about half a dozen longhaulers if you include EC261, reacomm and crewing. Keeping assets on the books would also have been cheaper than writing them off, selling them for not even pennies on the dollar.

The bit in bold isn't correct, unfortunately. The cost of having to cancel flights - remember all the trimming of schedules of last summer, or the 10x cancellations a day, on the day or almost, we're seeing at the moment? - is hugely more expensive than keeping a few planes in the desert for a year or two and then bringing them back in. And I don't even want to go into the other idiotic idea of trimming down pilots and engineers - to say nothing of crews - in the presence of furlough schemes while the cost of hiring them (and the cost of not having them) is 10x larger.


There have been a number (don't know the exact number) of redundancies, especially of junior pilots.

Duck1981

A few of the former 747 drivers who I follow on Twitter (ah sorry, on X) are now flying the 350.

Waterhorse

Initially when the crisis hit, BA wanted about 1200 pilot redundancies, out of c4200. These would have been, if BA got its way, all the Jumbo pilots and all the LGW SH pilots. BALPA negotiated to get a voluntary scheme and the CRS, or Community Retention scheme, which was the pilot funded job retention scheme, whereby a pay cut was taken by all to keep some jobs. In the end c300 went into the CRS, 250 were made compulsorily redundant and some took the voluntary package. Pilots who remained were retrained (mainly) according to the Postings and Promotions rules that BA have. Those whore were pushed out with no choice went into a Priority Return Pool, whereby they would be offered jobs before any other external recruitment, but they would come back in as newbies in terms of pay and seniority. They retained their staff travel years of service. ALL these measures were contentious and are still causing pain and anger within the pilot community. The �gentleman� who wanted the draconian and vindictive culling without taking into account service or seniority, and who most pilots would not cross the road to urinate on were he to be on fire, has since left BA. We had a party the day after he left.

subject2load

Why so �� ?

BKK is served daily by Thai from LHR non-stop ��and likewise ICN, by Asiana.

Philippine333

Plus, Asian carriers offer better services to these routes than BA does. BA honesty is struggling in Asia, and they need lots of frames for that, the market is extremely competitive, demand for BA service to Asia is still fairly low, and plus, routes to the East burn lots of fuel. For the foreseeable future, I expect these planes would be better used to open up another USA route where there's a better chance that the money can be made.

Philippine333

7) BA routes to and from the East burn lots of fuel

OpenSky

This as well - but I think fundamentallyl Malaysia is very much in developing economy stuck in a middle income trap, political instability, covid ( thankfully over). Things have only recently turn around.British interests tend to be in closer to Johore - I'm thinking the Dyson Factory, and Singapore

I could see this make sense as 787-8 route, with no F. MH has been free to charge a lot without any competition, I actually prefer going via Singapore, the QF flight on the A380 is nice ride and timing. Things could change if both the British and Malaysian economy improve, rather than this being a pet project of a countries sovereign wealth fund, i.e MH operated by Khazanah National.

Philippine333

One thing to note too in that case is that BA's KUL service unlike KL's (which relied on both point-to-point and connections) mostly relied on just almost purely point-to-point traffic between KUL and LHR because of LHR's too-far-west position resulting in a backtrack to almost every EU destination except Ireland.