BA in profit but stalls on pay rise

BRITISH AIRWAYS has defended cuts to pilots’ pay despite the airline’s owner returning to profitability.

IAG reported a €73m pretax profit for the three months to June after avoiding the kind of large charges suffered by low-cost rival easyjet by cancelling flights early. The budget carrier said that one-off costs relating to disruption were £133m.

IAG paid just £15m in compensation, finance chief Nicholas Cadbury said.

But bosses gave no signal of a change of heart on pilots’ pay. The Balpa union is demanding British Airways reverses a Covid pay deal.

The agreement mitigated job losses in return for pilots sacrificing a portion of their salary – but the open-ended accord means that while their colleagues are now receiving pay increases, pilots will continue to suffer pay deductions.

Balpa is understood to be under pressure from its members to launch strikes to force bosses to back down – a strategy that was recently successfully deployed by BA check-in staff at Heathrow.

But Sean Doyle, BA chief executive, said: “We did reach an agreement two years ago and that was about protecting as many jobs as we could in the pilot commu- nity. And that meant a longerterm deal that funded that level of protection and that level of income support.

“Now we have returned to profitability. But if you look back in historic[al] terms, we still have a long way to go to get to the level of profit that we had in 2019. We still have a road to recovery ahead.”