14,000 staff banned from flying BA because they threatened to bump the CEO’s daughter from a flight

Let me ask you a question? What would you do if, as CEO of a very large and influential company and your teenage daughter and her friend were intially bumped from an over-full international flight but placed back on the flight when you protest?

Complain? Sounds kinda reasonable.

Seek compensation? Perhaps, if you want to make a point. But maybe you’re still not satisfied…

Decree that none of your 14,000 employees will fly on the airline for business? Well naturally. Acorrding to The Times that’s exactly what an angry Chris Bell, chief cigar-chewer at UK bookmakers Ladbrokes, has done. British Airways, the airline at the center of the storm, claim to have offered the two girls, who were returning from a holiday in the Bahamas with Bell, £250 each in compensation. Mr Bell, however, is quite rationally having none if it. The Times claims ‘the private dispute, which has ratcheted up into a corporate row, could cost BA up to £2 million in business and has forced Willie Walsh, BA’s chief executive, to intervene personally in an effort to defuse the situation.’

For their part, Ladbrokes claim ‘the way Mr Bell had been dealt with was only one of a number of issues the bookmaker had with the airline’.

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[Image by zen]

BA Jet Lag Calculator

BA’s website has a useful little jet-lag calculator which recommends when to seek or avoid light at your destination to minimise jet-lag. Simply enter the time you usually wake, the local time and the time at your destination.

Apparently, if holing yourself up in a pitch black room isn’t an option just wearing dark glasses will help.

If you are desperate to know more they also offer Dr Sleep Podcasts ‘a series of sleep advice podcasts from our resident sleep expert, Dr Chris Idzikowski’. So, that’s the insomnia cured.

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[Image via Kim Pierro]

You may have missed… (7th of April)

Apparently the operators of Melbourne’s gloriously public-transport inaccessible Tullarmaine Airport have been gouging Johnny Public for parking, with almost $1 in every $5 earned by Tulla’s private operator comes from parking. The Herald Sun screeching this morning that ‘It costs more to park at Melbourne airport than at Heathrow in London or JFK in New York’. Now, even disregarding events of recent weeks, I have long believed that the less Tullamarine has in common with those two airports in particular, the better. The Federal Government is planning to send some burley ACCC officers through all five major domestic airports to do something about it for tea and cakes.

The Federal Government will ban the importing of high-powered lasers that have been used to try to blind pilots of passenger planes landing at Sydney Airport.”

Heathrow has been denied the opportunity to send the luggage of thousands more passengers halfway across Europe with 62 flights cancelled because of unseasonally cold weather. These could be the first passengers ever to be relieved their flights were cancelled. Ahh well, at least it distracted from the management’s on-going goof-ups which revealed a ‘software problem’ in the baggage system. ”We know what the problem is. We have a potential solution and we are having to carefully consider how and when we apply this to avoid further problems,’ said a spokeswoman cryptically (presumably with a roll of masking tape and a screwdriver in his hand).

“If we see the problems [at Heathrow’s T5] resolved in the coming weeks I think we’ll forget about it fairly quickly. But if it drags on for months and into the summer, then I think it’s going to become a much more challenging issue for him personally.” A bit like saying that if the Titantic had only kept a low profile everyone would have forgotten. Thus concludes a glowing profile of BA’s Chief Executive Bill Walsh in the International Herald Tribune

More and more aircraft makers are moving down Tijuana way, according to USA Today

The International Herald Tribune has a great story on Rome’s Appian Way

The Airline Blog muses on the reasons for Skybus’ collapse beyond it’s shocking orange livery.

NPR has a report from the on-going Stonehenge excavation.

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