What a difference a couple of days make.
Earlier this week I was congratulating BA on the calm, understated pleasant flight I had.
Yesterday The Times reported that BA was considering selling the Concorde it has at Heathrow to a group of investors in Dubai where it will be grouped with the QE2 and marketed as a joint tourist attraction..
BA seems to have a blind sport about Concorde. This was a plane that was one of the handsomest planes ever designed; this was a plane that, thirty years on, was enough to cause people still to look skywards and marvel at it and this was a plane that was full for just about every day trip that was chartered on it.
So why doesn’t BA use it as a tourist attraction in its own right? It backed the London Eye with its name yet with Concorde, a name with which it was intimately linked, it does nothing.
As The Times points out, Air France has one of its Concordes outside its HQ at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. We used to have a model as you entered Heathrow but that went a few years ago. Usually at the end of an article in “The Times you get a handful of comments. By 5.30 this morning there were 61 and most were critical of the attitude of BA.
Concorde is a plane that stirs people.
British Airways , as a brand, has been tarnished by the oddities that management over the years has done, the silliest being the painted tailfins that meant little to people and which Mrs Thatcher ridiculed by tying a handkerchief over. The Terminal 5 debacle was badly handled. So why add to things by not turning its last remaining Concorde into a tourist attraction in this country.
Or does it want a hat-trick of errors.