After months of back and forth, glimmers of hope and meetings walked out on, it appears British Airways and its pilots have hit gridlock, with strike action expected.
Per source directly familiar with the situation, and now confirmed by both parties, meetings between British Airways, mediators and the BALPA have officially failed, and strike dates are now officially announced. Here’s the confirmed BA pilot strike dates…
British Airways pilots are set to strike on September 9th, 10th and 27th of 2019, according to sources directly briefed and involved in the matters.
This has now also been made public by BALPA, and addressed by British Airways. Unless late hour mediation between the sides manages to do what no negotiation has up until this point has, we expect these strike actions to go forward.
GSTP has previously held back on covering proposed strike actions while resolution appeared near, but this is the first time that official dates have been called.
According to BALPA insiders, the dispute is less about money at this point as it is the relationship between pilots and senior flight operations management, amidst increasingly poor work conditions down field.
Direct accounts on the matter state that negotiations were at a stand still until August 10th, when strike dates were about to be announced. In the interim, British Airways came back to the negotiating table with a new offer, which extended the offer process, as both sides hoped a final deal would be reached; this delaying action in the meantime. Today, it appears that’s no longer the case. Strike dates being announced means that both sides are at loggerheads. Mediation failed.
British Airways Responds To The Strike Dates
British Airways has released a comment on the proposed strikes via their Media Centre, with the following information. In short: London City flights aren’t affected, and they’re working on proactive solutions for the likelihood of a strike…
“It is completely unacceptable that BALPA is destroying the travel plans of tens of thousands of our customers with this unjustifiable strike action. BALPA has given us notice that they will strike on September 9th, 10th and 27th. We are extremely sorry that after many months of negotiations, based on a very fair offer, BALPA has decided on this reckless course of action.
We are now making changes to our schedule. We will do everything we can to get as many people away on their journeys as possible. However, it is likely that many of our customers will not be able to travel and we will be offering refunds and re-bookings for passengers booked on cancelled flights.
Flights on BA CityFlyer (London City flights), SUN-AIR and Comair are not affected. We are exploring options to supplement our fleet by using aircraft and crew from other airlines (wet-leasing.)We are working with our partner airlines to schedule larger aircraft to take the maximum number of customers”
With any hope, the two sides will come back to the table and a resolution will be reached before any passengers are affected in September. No one wants to see passengers disrupted, since ultimately it’s bad for business, and if pilots want a larger slice of the business – they’ll want it to be successful too.
Since these dates all fall 14 days into the future or more, there’s no EC261 passenger compensation due in any of these instances, but the airline must refund you if they cancel your flight and you no longer wish to travel, or they must re-route you on an available flight in the same cabin that works for you.
Well UGH. I have a return flight from TXL on 9/27. Any idea at what point they’ll allow passengers to be re-routed on AA/alternates? Thanks for the heads up!
No problem. I know people have successfully moved 9th/10th flights already, so could be worth a call.
Anyone see the irony of the first sentence of the BA statement, given that cuts and incompetence in management decisions has destroyed the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of pax just on IT breakdowns in the past 18months?
Let’s not mention the misery of millions of journeys trashed through hollowing out the organisation and service standards. For example; ET seat pitch lower than RyanAir, new a350, longhaul with no recline by design for some passengers, totally inadequate catering provisioning, broken IFE, the list is endless…
£2BILIION profits
65% for the CEO in one year, 11% for pilots over 3 (which barely matches the single year cut taken when BA was doing less well financially).
#flyabba if you want ; comfort, the product sold, reliability, service or value