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Jim McAuslan, general secretary of BALPA, said in an open letter to city institutions and the Government that the company’s reputation was on the line following the Terminal 5 debacle, as well as the futures of BA’s pilots.

“BA management has taken its eye off the ball and it is time UK plc held them to account,” he added.

BALPA said that failings on the opening days of T5 were symptomatic of BA’s loss of focus in delivering a sound operation.

“This airline can and should make Britain proud but a fundamental change of attitude is required from the very highest levels of BA management,” according to the open letter.

The association said it had for several years pressed BA to focus on operational integrity – punctuality, baggage delivery and product quality.

“Get that right and the customers will keep coming back in today’s highly competitive aviation market and we can look to growth and exporting the brand,” BALPA explained.

The letter described the opening week of the new Heathrow terminal as an “unhappy, distressing shambles” and hinted that it could not have come at a worst moment.

This month sees a massive increase in direct competition on BA’s most lucrative routes from the home base at Heathrow, including the end of a monopoly by BA and three other airlines on routes to and from the USA.

BALPA pointed out that there was also consolidation in the industry on an unprecedented scale; consolidation in the likes of Air France and KLM that has yielded benefits from synergies of a level way beyond simple direct cost reduction.

“Banks, institutional investors and analysts need to wake up to the fact that there is something very wrong right at the heart of this company that is making our once great brand a laughing stock,” the pilot association said.

It warned investors that BA’s margins may look relatively good but that the financial establishment’s pre-occupation with the bottom line had glossed over the warning signs.

"These warning signs have been there for some time for those with eyes to see and ears to hear: holding up the punctuality table; reports from many influential opinion formers of quality standards nose-diving; a return to the 70s on lost baggage long before the T5 debacle; the growing reluctance to answering questions; the clear irritability with differing points of view; fronting up, in full public gaze, to the Prime Minister on the issue of a religious cross; taking court cases to appeal, and still losing; threatening its own pilot workforce’s association with bankruptcy when it should have been focussed on exploiting the gift-wrapped ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity of a move to T5 (as we warned in January). We want confidence in our leadership, not arrogance,” McAuslan wrote.

BALPA members have been angered by British Airway’s decision to launch a new European offshoot ‘OpenSkies’, which will use BA money and BA aircraft but not BA pilots because BA say they may ‘contaminate’ this start-up operation.

“No wonder team spirit and respect are in short supply; and ironically the ‘feather in the cap’ of sorting out BA’s pension crisis was actually a team effort with a huge injection of pilot ingenuity, common sense and pragmatism rather than the new CEO on his white charger,” BALPA added.

It said that the ramifications of what was going on in BA would be felt far more widely, through harm in the UK’s reputation as a country, declining support for a third runway and questions at the International Olympic Committee.

“When you are running a national icon you have responsibility for far more stakeholders than shareholders,” BALPA warned.

“So my question to the UK’s financial establishment and Government of BA is this: when are you going to listen with all your senses as to what is happening inside our business and when are you going to act on how it is ‘led’?” McAuslan concluded.

Problems at Terminal 5 continued on Monday, with BA blaming BAA for continuing chaos in the baggage handling.

The failure affects the baggage reconciliation system which ensures that for security reasons, the airline does not load bags onto the aircraft where the passenger is not travelling.

“This means we have to manually reconcile bags for each flight which takes considerably more time than using the automated system. As a result this leads to flight delays and we therefore expect to make a number of short-haul cancellations,” BA said in a statement.

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Related links

• British Airways
• British Airline Pilots’ Association