Meals on short-haul flights are gone and now 1,000 cabin crew will take voluntary redundancy, some 3,000 more will move to part-time work and unions claim salaries for recruits may halve. All as British Airways stares down the barrel of its second annual loss in a row, this one perhaps £300m to £400m. Net assets of £1.6bn in March stood at about half that of a year before.

In spite of this, the 14,000-member BA cabin crew union has raised the spectre of strike action which, as the holiday season nears, will cause pre-booking nerves amongst BA’s potential customers. The union’s response to cost cuts is puzzling, particularly given the poor productivity of Heathrow-based cabin crew.