British Airways staff have been told the airline will be undertaking a restructure that will be “far- reaching, reshaping our company from top to bottom”.

The airline’s chief financial officer Keith Williams made the announcement in the latest issue of the airline's staff newspaper.

"Only through delivering fundamental change can we achieve the small profit we are targeting this year and emerge from the crisis as a strong global player," he said.

BA has already lost 480 managers after offering voluntary redundancies to 1,400 people.

The majority of these left at the end of December.

A BA spokesman said the airline was looking at further ways to reduce costs and duplication in order to increase efficiency and meet the economic challenges that will no doubt continue in 2009.

"The previous year has been tough and the year ahead could be even tougher," he said.

Meanwhile, at a briefing for London’s financial press yesterday, BA chief executive officer Willie Walsh said he was confident the proposed alliance with American Airlines will be approved.

He said the tie-up might even come in time for the next winter timetable.

“The environment is very different today to last time and there has been no great opposition from the industry in the US,” he told Bloomberg reporters.

Walsh said he was also confident about completing the planned merger with Iberia, with the Spanish airline now having a better understanding of BA’s pension deficit.

But even if both tie-ups fail, Walsh said this wasn’t a “big problem”, because in the current economic climate there were plenty of airlines for acquisition.

“I get phone calls from CEOs all the time saying, ‘Please buy us.’ We have to be picky,” he told Bloomberg.

Yesterday, BA’s share price rose 1.8 pence, or 1%, to 184.1 pence in London. Iberia’s advanced 4 cents, or 2%, to 2.05 euros in Madrid.

The rise in BA’s share price was despite its passenger traffic falling 3.4% in December 2008 compared to December 2007, the 10th consecutive fall.

Load factors in December fell 0.2 points to 76.7%, due to a 12.1 fall in premium traffic and a 1.7% fall in non-premium traffic.

The airline said trading conditions remain broadly unchanged “with long-haul premium traffic continuing the trend of recent months and non-premium traffic showing some resilience, helped by travel over the Christmas period”.

Despite the fall in premium traffic, BA is going ahead with the introduction of business-class only flights from London City airport to the US at the end of the summer.




By Bev Fearis