British Airways has told its workforce of nearly 20,000 cabin crew that they are free to sleep in any spare passenger seat, including those in First Class, on certain long-haul flights operated by planes that the airline never bothered installing proper crew bunk facilities on.
While it is commonly thought that all long-haul, widebody planes are equipped with secret crew bunks, this isn’t the case at all. In fact, bunk facilities are an optional extra offered by aircraft manufacturers Airbus and Boeing on many airplane types, which airlines are required to pay extra for.
For decades, British Airways has operated a sub-fleet of Boeing 777-200 widebody jets without crew bunk facilities. Controversially, the airline also decided to buy dozens of multi-million-dollar Boeing 787-10 Dreamliners without crew bunk facilities, either.
On these aircraft, cabin crew are expected to use so-called ‘high-comfort attendant seats’ during their rest periods, which are essentially just fold-down jumpseats by the main cabin doors.
It’s important to note that crew bunk facilities aren’t required on all long-haul flights. Under European aviation regulations (which were adopted as written by the British government after Brexit), bunk facilities are only required on longer-range flights where cabin crew must legally be given the opportunity for lie-flat rest in a private space in order to combat the risk of fatigue.
In the case of BA’s subfleet of Boeing 777-200s and Boeing 787-10 Dreamliners, the planes can only be used on shorter-range flights where bunk rest is not legally required.
The decision not to install bunks of the Boeing 787-10 fleet has, however, long been considered a big misstep. British Airways only ever intended to use these planes on shorter-range long-haul flights, although the plane does have the ability to fly much further distances – as a result, BA is now limited as to where it flies these jets.
Going forward, new Boeing 787-10 Dreamliners, expected to be delivered to British Airways from later this year, will have crew bunk facilities installed. Existing planes cannot, however, be retrofitted with the crew bunk facilities.
Following discussions between British Airways and the BASSA cabin crew union, the airline has now reportedly confirmed that cabin crew working on planes without crew bunk facilities are free to use any vacant passenger seat for their rest.
If the flight is fully booked, then crew will still have to use the ‘high comfort’ jumpseats. If, however, there’s a spare seat in any cabin, including First or Business Class (known as Club World), they’ll be able to use these seats to sleep in and use the bedding provided for that cabin.
British Airways also intends to ‘soft block’ certain rows of Economy Class seats (known as World Traveller) at the back of the cabin of these ‘non-bunked’ planes for cabin crew rest. The term ‘soft block’ means that the seats are only reserved if the flight isn’t fully booked.
This appears to be an interesting workaround for an issue that British Airways certainly isn’t alone in dealing with. For example, in the U.S., United Airlines ‘hard blocks’ certain Economy Class rows on its non-bunked long-haul aircraft for flight attendant rest. As the same suggests, these rows are blocked for flight attendant rest at the booking stage, meaning they are never made available for passengers to purchase.
On the new generation of narrowbody aircraft that are now being used to operate longer-than-ever flights, there’s simply no space for a rest bunk facility, and instead, airlines are required to ‘hard block’ Economy Class rows.
These rest facilities are normally easy to spot as they will have a curtain wrapped around the entire row of seats to hide cabin crew away from passengers. In the case of the latest British Airways policy, however, no such curtains will exist.
“Crew rest is obviously important. But, in my view, allowing crew to rest in passenger space is a really bad look, and it definitely cheapens the passenger experience and devalues the brand,” one person on the popular FlyerTalk forum wrote of the policy. “BA needs to really look at itself – and realise that filling every possible space with seats was a bad move.”
Another person added: “Terrible idea that will reduce the value of F [First] and J [Business Class] to me. And I am often a paying F passenger.”
Many others, however, supported the initiative, with one saying that the “bigger issue at play is that BA cheap out by not adding crew bunks.”
Sleeping British Airways flight crews in first-class and business-class seats are not inconspicuous even after removing visible uniform items, since their loud and frequent snoring sounds like a herd of jet engines practicing takeoff.
What a stupid comment.