British Airways grounds all planes amid two-day pilots' strike

The strike started at midnight on Sunday with pilots asking for better pay and conditions in the wake of BA holding company IAG's bumper profits in recent years.

"British Airways needs to wake up and realise its pilots are determined to be heard," BALPA General Secretary Brian Strutton told BBC radio.

"They’ve previously taken big pay cuts to help the company through hard times. Now BA is making billions of pounds of profit, its pilots have made a fair, reasonable and affordable claim for pay and benefits.

"The company’s leaders, who themselves are paid huge salaries and have generous benefits packages, won’t listen, are refusing to negotiate and are putting profits before the needs of passengers and staff. It is time to get back to the negotiating table and put together a serious offer that will end this dispute.

"We hope we can find a way of resolving this dispute. We’ve been trying very hard to do so for the best part of nine months now but here we are now sadly having to take industrial action."

Both sides in the dispute, which had run over the course of the summer, were reportedly open to talks but a date for negotiations to resume had not yet been agreed.

However, failing an agreement, the date of the next strike action was already set in stone - 27 September.

"We understand the frustration and disruption BALPA’s strike action has caused our customers. After many months of trying to resolve the pay dispute, we are extremely sorry that it has come to this," BA said in a statement.

"Unfortunately, with no detail from BALPA on which pilots would strike, we had no way of predicting how many would come to work or which aircraft they are qualified to fly, so we had no option but to cancel nearly 100% of our flights."

It was estimated that as many as 145,000 customers could be affected by the industrial action.