The Hot Line
THE PRESS • By DAVID FROST IT has been a week of poetic justice, not just in the case of Dr Emil Savundra, who single- handed seems to have drawn more Sunday news- paper reporters to Zurich than the World Cup has drawn visitors to London, but also in the equally long-running saga of BEA and its long- suffering public.
Press-wise, BEA has been the more interesting, mainly because of the curious gaps in the story. Right at the beginning, one waited for an investi- gation into the nature and exact whereabouts of the Great Petition, and into the number of pilots from BEA's rivals who were instrumental in furthering the campaign at the British Airline Pilots' Association. These were red herrings irrelevant to the basic issue, but they were cer- tainly herrings worthy of attention. As late as Saturday, Mr Henry Marking of BEA was allowed to get away with the blatantly dis- ingenuous statement that Captain Trehame of the BALPA had turned down a meeting with BEA because 'BALPA did not know the points causing concern to the signatories of the petition and were trying to find out what they were,' when Captain Treharne had made it quite clear that the reason was that the loss of confidence had gone too far and they wished to meet the minister first.
If some of the news points had taken a long time to come out, the rights and wrongs of the case seemed to have taken even longer. On Sunday, the Sunday Times was still trying to excuse BEA with the deliciously lame explana- tion that it was all the result of 'the unusual stresses of a pilot's life' and his loneliness'—all `of which might have some credibility if the pilots leaving BEA were joining the Sunday Times to get away from it all. In fact, of course, they are going to other airlines and the loneliness 30,000 feet up in the air in a Lufthansa cabin is probably not markedly different from the loneliness 30,000 feet up in the air in a BEA cabin. It's not the flying that is the problem, it is BEA.
Which leads us to the biggest mystery of all. Until Sunday, the press had scarcely put BEA into the dock at all. Derek Wood, in the Sunday Telegraph, led the way when he pointed out that management decisions going back six and seven years have put BEA where they are today: 'They ordered too small a version of the Trident, so-that the American Boeing 727 mopped up most of the world market.' Thus Lufthansa's 727s can now out-perform and out-profit BEA's Tridents on all the routes where they compete. What's more, Mr Wood added : 'With the Van- guard they decided on propellers when everyone else was turning to jets.' And by turning down the BAC ills they now find themselves out- paced by airlines like BUA.
Of course, management of the quality BEA has had in the past few years has taken its toll. Despite the fact that BEA's staff is potentially as good as any in the world, the service is the reverse. I travel a good deal by air, and BEA • .is undoubtedly the worst airline I have ever experienced anywhere in the world. A regular traveller like Mr Cyril Lord has a series of hair-raising stories about his experience with BEA, culminating with the BEA driver who, while driving him three-quarters of a mile from his plane at London Airport to the Terminal, lost his way.
I will content myself with one other example —my most recent flight with BEA to Palma two weeks ago. (The times of the far superior BUA service were, unfortunately, not convenient.) My secretary telephoned a total of five times to check on possible times. She was given five different sets of totally conflicting information. Eventu- ally a flight was agreed—leaving soon after 11 a.m. as the 1.5 flight was full and I had only been wait-listed on that. On picking up the ticket, my secretary discovered that it was for the wrong flight, at the wrong time, to the wrong destination, at the wrong price. On the morning of the flight, BEA failed to telephone, as they had promised, to say if there was any room on the later flight, so at 10.30 my secretary phoned them. She was told there had just been a can- cellation, so that I could go on the flight. I walked down to the departure gates just before the announcement of a final call for passengers. When I got to the gate, I was told I was too late, the coach had gone, and they had run out of other vehicles to take passengers out tci the plane. Luckily, however, BEA came up trumps again, and the plane was late leaving, so I got on board. When I did so, I was amazed to see the 130-seater plane half-empty. There were forty-nine passengers on board. Why, I wondered, had I only been wait-listed? Had eighty-one pas- sengers cancelled in the two and a half hours since 10.30? No, I discovered that overnight the reservations had been only sixty-one.
That is one person's experience time and again:
with BEA. There are many things which are everybody's experience with BEA. Why do pas- sengers on internal flights in this country have to demand stewardess service? Haven't they paid for it? Why has not BEA with its tremendous advantages abolished once and for all the ridicu- lous business of check-in times twenty or thirty minutes before an internal flight for passengers with no luggage? Why has not BEA in the last ten years introduced the sort of shuttle service between London, Manchester, Glasgow, Edin- burgh and Belfast that is available between New York, Boston and Washington, where planes leave every hour on the hour and passengers can arrive right up until the last minute, gather, a ticket from a machine, walk on to the plane and pay on board during the flight? If more passengers arrive than there is room for on one plane—whether one more or seventy-one more —a relief plane is immediately ready to take off within ten minutes' Maximum.
Improvements of this sort could and should have been made years ago by BEA's management. How satisfactory it is now to see its pilots act- ing on behalf of the company's customers. That is real loyalty. It was the Sunday Express which expressed the issues most clearly in a rousing editorial when, after a Beaverbrookian para- graph of pardonably purple post-Battle of Britain prose about the pilots, it concluded: Let Sir Anthony stop complaining about
'personal criticism' and realise that one stark, inescapable fact emerges from the crisis inside BEA.
The fact is that his pilots no longer put trust in him. And that it is now utterly beyond his capacity to restore that trust.
In these circumstances there is only one course that he can honourably take.
• Resign.
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