On Monday British Airways launched a new exclusively fat-cat service from one money Mecca to another. The route from London City to JFK airport is designed for high fliers to go 'City to Wall Street'. It's an attempt to win back business passengers (the backbone of BA's market share) to save them from losing £40 million a month.
The new flight comes as we hear about the impacts of BA's plans to pusht their loss onto - no, not the shareholders, silly - their staff. The airline said about 4,000 staff had volunteered for unpaid leave, 1,400 will switch to part-time work and 800 put their names forward for unpaid work, while 740 overseas staff also volunteered for the cost-saving drive. Suggestions that they should just fire the management and run the airline as a workers' co-operative aren't being taken seriously.
It should be obvious that jobs in aviation are unsustainable and insecure. We should using this recession to create and promote jobs in sustainable transport, but instead we could be moments from bailing out a company whose sole efforts to stay afloat involve pandering to the richest while asking their staff to work for free or face the boot.
Luxury, first-class air travel is the most polluting sector of the aviation industry (with the possible exception of jet packs). With a whole 32 passengers per plane, the City-JFK route reaches new heights of the super rich burning money, ignorant of any environmental consequences. Then again climate change won’t affect the rich nearly as much as the poor so why should they worry?
The flight costs up to £5000 per seat for passengers and about 61,127.9 kg of CO2, 24,462.27 kg of H20, 482.6 kg of NOx, and 194.1 kg of CO to the planet. As BA clamour to save themselves it is telling of the industry that they do so in the most damaging way possible. The aviation industry look hard set on destroying the economy and the environment.
Hooray for the climate-credit-crunch-crash!
