LONDON BRIEFING:THE MAGICAL BA001 flight number was called over an airport Tannoy system once again yesterday for the first time in almost six years. The flight number, made famous by Concorde, now belongs to the bold new British Airways business class service from London City Airport to JFK in New York, a venture BA is pressing ahead with despite the worst slump in air travel in decades.
Paying customers on the inaugural flight were squeezed out by a posse of reporters, invited corporate customers and BA executives, including chief executive Willie Walsh. Delighted with the razzmatazz the new service has created, Walsh took advantage of BA001’s on-board internet access to e-mail BA Executive Club members from 37,000ft on the benefits of the new service.
With just 32 passengers instead of the usual 100, the luxury flat-bed service costs £1,900 to £5,000 (€2,080 to €5,470) return. Customers can e-mail, text and tweet all across the Atlantic, although they will have to break off barely an hour into the flight to take on more fuel at Shannon.
City Airport’s short runway precludes it from carrying enough fuel for the entire journey, but even this downside was presented by an ebullient Walsh as a plus – as the customised A318 Airbus takes more gas on board, passengers clear US customs and immigration at Shannon, enabling them to make a swift exit from JFK at the other end. Return flights are direct.
The omens for business-only travel are not good. Three premium airlines collapsed last year – Silverjet, Maxjet and Eos – but Walsh confidently predicted yesterday that BA’s new service will be profitable within the first year. It will need a 70 per cent load factor to make money; ie, 22 or 23 passengers for each flight, he said.
For BA, the Docklands location is all-important – bankers and lawyers working in Canary Wharf and the City just a few miles away will be able to reach the airport in a fraction of the time it takes to travel to Heathrow in west London. They need arrive only 15 minutes before departure, and they can work all the way across the Atlantic (although the maiden flight yesterday suffered from intermittent access to internet and mobile phone networks).
The failed Silverjet had flown out of the less than glamorous Luton, while Eos and Maxjet were based at Stansted, both airports being well outside the comfort zones of most City types.
There may be some cannibalisation of BA’s business class services from Heathrow, which are about 10 per cent cheaper, but the new service should also appeal to those forced to trade down from corporate jets. If successful, the New York service could be expanded to other cities on the east coast.
This is a bold move by BA, and comes as the group is under increasing pressure, both financially and from environmentalists. BA makes its profit on first and business class services, but is haemorrhaging cash on its short-haul services in the face of intense competition from carriers such as Ryanair and easyJet. BA racked up losses of almost £150 million in the three months to end-June this year and is facing a storm of negative publicity over its move to start charging passengers up to £60 for reserving seats in advance.
The new service also sits uneasily with BA’s pledge at the United Nations forum on climate change last week. In a move seen as an attempt to pre-empt tougher restrictions at the global warming summit in Copenhagen, the BA chief executive promised that the airline industry will slash emissions by 50 per cent between 2005 and 2050. According to the environmental lobby, however, passengers on BA001 will each be responsible for generating three times the emissions produced by ordinary flights.
Much has been made of the rapid rehabilitation of some of the bankers deemed most responsible for the meltdown of the financial system – bankers such as Andy Hornby, who quit HBOS in disgrace only to turn up as the well-paid head of high street chemist group Alliance Boots just a few months later.
Not all the guilty men are finding it so easy to return, however. Johnny Cameron, one of Sir Fred Goodwin’s lieutenants at Royal Bank of Scotland, has been forced to step down from his new role at City headhunters Odgers Berndtson after little over a week.
Cameron, former head of investment banking at RBS, had little choice but to depart after the firm lost one of its most lucrative contracts – the search for a new chief executive at UK Financial Investments. UKFI is the body set up to oversee the government’s stake in the bailed-out banks, including RBS. Not surprisingly, it baulked at hiring a firm which had one of the main architects of the banking crisis on its payroll.
Fiona Walsh writes for the Guardian newspaper in London
