Tolosy From Luxembourg, joined Oct 2003, 357 posts, RR: 0 Reply 3, posted (9 years 6 months 3 weeks 10 hours ago) and read 1021 times:
Would Concorde have been retired if it wasn't for Air France / Airbus?!
Today, everybody is cutting costs. Particularly airlines.
AF had not choice and I am sure BA approved this.
Explain employees at the end of the month that if they are paid less it is simply because his management is taking wrong decisions and keep flying a very expensive plane.
AF miss the Concorde but had no choice, everybody would like to see it flying today. Today, it is not a reasonnable decision anymore.
GDB From United Kingdom, joined exactly 12 years ago today! , 12713 posts, RR: 80 Reply 4, posted (9 years 6 months 3 weeks 10 hours ago) and read 1014 times:
Well Sept 11th certainly damaged the return to flight programme, only 5 aircraft modified, we lost a load of staff, internal BA politics really but those doing it could claim they were doing their bit to reduce costs in the very bad environment for business since Sept 11th, which they were not as the mods for all 7 had been paid for and staff were transferred elsewhere in engineering.
But it inhibited the ability for BA to provide more flights once the retirement was announced, so instead of making £5 million a week in the last few months, we could well have doubled that as demand was huge, easily have done double dailies as well as more charters.
However, dozens of Concorde customers were lost in the WTC, some of these would book other staff on Concorde as well as traveling on it themselves, and the general downturn would have been serious in itself, as it was until the retirement was announced.
AF had little choice but to retire, after things went very wrong for them both commercially and technically in Feb/March.
A bigger, more robust BA operation could well have been prepared to pay for extra support from Airbus, to April or maybe October 2004, even allowing for the work Airbus piled on us, to try to get us to stop at the same time as AF.
But with AF no longer operating Concorde, the end for BA was inevitable.
That's always been the case too, if one operator dropped out it would become unsustainable for the other eventually.
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