BA strikes: Easter and Royal wedding chaos?

If you are flying away on exciting breaks for Easter and the Royal Wedding holidays, then your plans could be thrown into chaos by British Airways staff's plans to strike.

Cabin crew in the Unite union voted yesterday (Tuesday) to strike.

They stopped short of naming dates, but the union must strike once within 28 days of the vote and has to give at least seven days notice of any walkout.

This puts the Easter break on Friday 22nd April to Monday 25th April and the Royal Wedding weekend of Friday 29th April to Monday 2nd May right in the firing line from action that could potentially run until mid-July.

It means anyone flying with BA could potentially have their flights delayed or even cancelled.

However, BA insist the strikes will not significantly affect their service.

They said: "If Unite decide to go ahead with a strike, we will explore all options so that we can provide the best possible flying programme under the circumstances. We will be supporting crew who decide to work as normal. We will also be looking into leasing third party aircraft with their own crew and training volunteers from among our other staff as crew."

They also say flights to and from London Gatwick and London City airports will not be affected by strikes.

They added: "We aim to fly 100 per cent of our longhaul operation into and out of London Heathrow and we aim to fly a substantial proportion of our shorthaul operation into and out of London Heathrow.

"Shorthaul flights include our UK domestic services and flights within Europe, Israel, Russia and North Africa. All other routes are considered longhaul."

Unite said its 10,000 BA flight attendant members backed industrial action by 83 per cent of those who cast a vote - on a turnout of 72 per cent.

The 5,811 who voted 'yes' represent fewer than half of BA's total 13,500 cabin crew, and six out of ten union members. (from CTV)