Walsh: T5 ‘needs more time’; Heathrow ‘damaging Britain’
01.05.08
British Airways chief executive Willie Walsh apologised to business leaders for the mess at Terminal 5 and said that the state of London's Heathrow Airport was damaging the country's reputation and economy yesterday.
He said in a speech at the Institute of Directors annual conference: ‘The opening [of T5] was a bitterly disappointing day for BA. We got things wrong and we let people down and I apologise again. We did not deliver on what should have been a day of celebration.’ He said the terminal had vastly improved in recent weeks and voiced confidence that it would eventually work well.
On wider problems at the airport he said: ‘I believe it is in the interest of the country that the reputation of Heathrow is restored on a lasting basis as quickly as possible,' adding that Heathrow was lagging behind other top European airports like Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam, which boast more runways and greater capacity and that the airport was ‘full’ and flights were subjected to more delays than in other European capitals.
He added: ‘For the sake of the UK economy and London's place as a business capital, Heathrow has to catch up. If things continue to decline, UK businesses will lose competitiveness and might be forced to consider relocating abroad. Businesses will also find it difficult to attract inward investment.’
The BA boss said that a third runway at Heathrow would help to underpin punctuality and enable the airport to serve an additional 75 or 80 destinations, and that, had BAA not owned Stansted, Gatwick and Heathrow, all three airports would have been more quickly developed. He added that a third runway would have been built at Heathrow by now.
Mr Walsh said that BA had also learned to manage customers' expectations and made a joke at the expense of Michael O’Leary, his counterpart at Ryanair: ‘At Ryanair the expectation is that they will get nothing - and they generally get just what they expected!’
He also said that the aviation industry's drive was towards reducing environmental impact rather than increasing speed. ‘We can develop much faster aircraft but they're not as efficient from a fuel point of view,’ he said. He dismissed rival airline Virgin's explorations of space travel as ‘flights of fancy.’
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