Fly the foreign flag
Richard West
Afew weeks ago, the diarist in the new The Times reproached Denis That- cher, the Prime Minister's husband, because he had flown to Bahrein by Gulf Air rather than British Airways. Officials at Heathrow were put out, the diarist said, by what it described as Mr Thatcher's tactlessness. What struck The Times as a gaffe, if not want of patriotism, would strike most travellers as simply good sense. When it comes to choosing an airline, the prudent man will look for cheapness and ef- leiency, neither of which one expects from RA.
To get to most parts of the world these uaYs, one seldom needs to pay more than a third of the scheduled price. The excellent `bucket shop' agencies, generally, run by Asians, offer good service: see adver- tisements in the Spectator for The Travel News Ltd: 'Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, Far East & Europe. Most economical fares'. You get a scheduled 'light, and because you are taking a seat which the airline wants to fill at the last mo- ment, you usually get a place at short notice. For instance, the last time 1 went to Bangkok, I was offered a choice of three different flights in the next few days, rang- ing from f305 to £385 return, compared to the full fare return of £1400. And oddly enough the full fare flights were said to be fully booked. On routes such as the Far East and the Inited States of America, fare-cutting has brought competition and therefore a better service. British Airways to the United States has much Improved since the introduction L 'f Laker flights. I last went to Bangkok on ,,urnish Airways and found an immense im- provement since they have started to sell tickets through 'bucket shops'. They not °nIY now serve free drinks but hand them to You With smiles; as a result BA can compete with Thai, Singapore, Cathay Pacific and British Caledonian. They were also much more punctual than were the last airline With which 1 flew to the Far East. One can also now get first class and 'club class' flights through the bucket shops — at much less than the scheduled economy Price. The restrictions on length of stay are no longer onerous. Indeed, the only disad- vantage is that one cannot stop off on the way to some distant destination; though Lew people want to. So why should Mr I hatcher have flown to Bahrein by British Airways, which does not offer conces- sionary fares on that route? If The Times flies its journalists and executives round the World at the full scheduled fare, no wonder the paper is losing money. Moreover British Airways, when they are not facing cornpeti- ti011, are very far from being an efficient or pleasant airline. The excellent Business Traveller magazine has found from polling its readers that BA is always voted far and away the world's worst airline — although, to be fair, it also receives some votes as the best. • British Airways cannot be blamed for last week's Michael Foot incident. It was reveal- ed in the Sunday Telegraph that during the delayed BA flight from Oslo to London, this politician had answered some badinage from the passengers by seizing the public address system and making two speeches. After claiming that under a socialist govern- ment planes would run on time, Mr Foot made a flattering reference to the striking railwaymen's leader: 'Ray Buckton is at the controls of the plane so we will be back soon'. These outbursts provoked some pompous complaints from the Tory Party; but British Airways can hardly be blamed for politicians wanting to air their feeble jokes.
British Airways are at their worst on the routes where they hold a monopoly, or a monopoly shared with the opposite national carrier, such as Aer Lingus or South African Airways. Flights to Dublin and Johannesburg are therefore not only far more expensive but far less efficient and pleasant then flights to Bangkok or New York where BA has rivals.
The faults of BA are largely attributable to its swollen bureaucracy and its bloody- minded trade unions. The first of these ac- counts for incidents such as that described by John Hatt in his good new handbook The Tropical Traveller (Pan, £2.25), of which I hope to write more next week. He describes how BA, having taken him to Nairobi, failed to unload his suitcase and would not allow him to search the hold, although the plane was on the runway for 12 hours. The airport staff sent a telex to British Airways London to get the suitcase returned but the message was not acknowledged. Over the next few weeks, Mr Hatt got British Airways to send a telex every day to London, including a personal one to the head of Terminal Three at Heathrow. None of the messages was answered.
'Every day I went to Nairobi airport', Mr Hatt writes, 'where 1 met other miserable holiday-makers whose holidays had been ruined by British Airways !dosing their bag- gage. On my return to London, I visited the BA "lock-up" in Terminal Three in order to search for my case. The staff were obstructive and refused to let me look in- side the actual store; I was only allowed to look at the cases scattered outside the store; many of them were lying opened and look- ed as though They had recently been picked
through by thieves. I never got my case back.'
The institutional thieving at Heathrow is notorious; it has been the subject of many remarks by judges in passing judgment on criminals — only to see them getting their jobs back afterwards. In September 1978, Judge Gibbens said that an honest man at Heathrow must 'stand out like a sore thumb', while a detective inspector said during the same case that it was 'very, very difficult for an honest man to have a job as a loader with British Airways, because if he is an honest man when he goes there, he is quickly corrupted. Otherwise he cannot work — nobody will work with him.' In- cidentally, Mr Hatt offers a good tip for people leaving England from Heathrow air- port: do not write your home address on the suitcase label, as the Heathrow handlers may sell the information to burglars.
But the crime is not confined to the ground and the baggage handlers. The BA cabin staff once had a lucrative racket in selling the free first-class drink to the tourist-class passengers. When British Air- ways tried to bring in free drinks for the tourist class — in order to meet the challenge of rival carriers — BA cabin crews went on a go-slow and refused to serve drinks at all to the tourist class. (They still refuse to do so on flights to Dublin.) British Airways cabin crews also enjoyed a racket on flights to South Africa: all the surplus meals on trays were sold to the ground staff at Nairobi airport. When BA management tried to make them relate the number of meals to the number of passengers on the flight, BA staff did a go- slow. At least one African flight was delayed 12 hours 'because of a shortage of trays'. The Transport and General Workers Union, which organises the cabin crews as well as the baggage handlers, has always resisted any attempt to check malpractices such as this by accusing the management of `victimisation' or 'harassment'.
Why does the press not condemn such scandals in British Airways? Why does The Times blame Denis Thatcher for flying by Gulf Air? The fault of the press, as of BA, lies equally with the management and the unions. The managements need BA's gran- diose advertising whose cost, needless to say, must be met by the taxpayer. What are called in the trade 'prestige' advertisements, those that are meant to promote a favourable 'image' of BA rather than plug- ging its services, also condition the editorial matter. During those years when BA and the manufacturers tried to sell the disastrous Concorde, all the big newspapers
wrote of it favourably. Criticism came only from small weekly or fortnightly journals. Even now, British Airways are advertising a jaunt in Concorde around the Bay of Biscay for £398 a head. No newspaper which wanted to have this advertisement would say that the trip was a mad waste of money and fuel.
There are other reasons why newspapers do not attack British Airways. Those jour- nalists who are trade union activists would be reluctant to expose the crime and corrup- tion of other trade unionists. Other jour- nalists praise, or at any rate will not con- demn, those airlines that offer them free tickets and generous hospitality. All newspapers now depend for much of their revenue on the tourist industry . . . but that is something for next week's article.
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