Last week, British Airways chief executive Willie Walsh said the airline’s immediate crisis was past and that it was no longer in a “fight for survival”.

This week, the carrier announced that up to 1 700 cabin crew could lose their jobs. Bosses are also mulling the possibility of a two-year pay freeze for staff who survive the cuts.

The result may be industrial action which would seriously threaten the airline’s so far fragile recovery.

According to The Telegraph newspaper, BA announced the cuts without agreement from Unite, the union which representsing 14 000 cabin staff, even though talks had been in progress for some months.

This kind of trouble sends tremors through the airline business which is embroiled in its worst crisis ever. BA lost £401m in the last financial year, a sizeable chunk of the £7bn lost by the industry as a whole.

The solution, as always, is to fillet the beast, paring away the costs that make this such an expensive business to be in. There’s not much the airlines can dp about fuel burn or the cost of airxcraft, so the obvious targets are the staff and, if you’re budget, airline, to extract more revenue from your passengers.

BA’s earlier plans were quite dramatic: 1 000 cabin crew members will take voluntary redundancy while another 3 000 will switch to part time which will have a knock-on effect on working practices. Layovers will be shorter amd cabin crews will be smaller.

In the end, though, you can carve away just so much of excess before the business really starts to suffer. The smell of strike action hangs heavy in the air.

Related posts:

1. Airline crisis: British Airways asks cabin crew to work for free
2. The looming British Airways strike is a scary numbers game
3. White knuckles as another strike looms for British Airways
4. UK High Court blocks British Airways strike
5. British Airways cuts London fares this Christmas