Some of them went for a walk along the full 3+ miles of the main runway yesterday just for the fun / novelty of it!

Herein lies a consideration: when the time comes again to fly, it's going to take an age to unseal, re-boot and uncover the engines and get everything back up to speed, so at some point everyone will be waiting on the engineering at all the airports, and don't forget they only do a 2/3 (of 24hrs – there's no grave yard shift) shift and there aren't that many to go 'round, and not to all the smaller airports where their planes are parked up such as Prestwick which has no permanent BA maintenance dept.

Also, many airlines only lease their planes, even BA don't own their own engines, they're leased from RollsRoyce, so the daily bills still need paying!

A mate of mine's a BA engineer at Heathrow, has some interesting tales about how they effectively just "reboot" the aircraft when it reports a fault 😯 😆

Phone conference, or get a video conference setup? Some companies and hotels have Video conferencing rooms you can hire and i'm sure this will be the same for Germany, Spain etc… Seems a bit mental to travel that far just to have a meeting…

all set to go, and now senior management are looking like pulling the plug on the whole shebang, seeing as hardly anyone can get there.

It was already a seriously slimmed down meeting and we didn't have one last year so all comments on flying / cost saving while relevant have already been considered, and this was considered a valuable enough face to face meeting that we decided to go ahead.

As for MTFU / it'll be a great road trip, etc., I don't think I've ever said I wasn't prepared to do it, just was interested in whether others saw it as reasonable, and whether some of my colleagues opinions were at odds with general views.

Seems a bit mental to travel that far just to have a meeting…

It's once very two years and is called face to face time. It's extremely valuable, to talk to your colleagues every now and then. You can't fix everything over the web (says he using it to answer just about any query right now) 🙂

has some interesting tales about how they effectively just "reboot" the aircraft when it reports a fault

The other year we'd sat on the plane after getting on for a bit when the captain came on and said there was a fault and all the lights would be going out as they were just going to try switching it off and on again 🙂

I'm not a salesman

Sorry, I just jumped to that conclusion. I reckon my point still stands ie is a load of salesmen going to a group meeting really that big a deal? We're not really talking about people who contribute a lot to society now, are we? Apologies to any salesmen reading this, but it's true, isn't it?

Oh and before anyone says it, personally I work in IT, and to be honest I don't feel I add much to society either. And I'd post exactly the same comments about a load of IT folk going to a conference. In fact, I reckon about 80% of business travel by plane is utterly unnecessary.

I have a passing understanding of management speak so this is what your boss is really saying:

"the Big Boss wants us all to go to this meeting, I think its a daft idea but as neither I nor any of the other managers at my grade have the guts to speak out, we are going to go through the motions of this ridiculous plan. Eventually the staff will kick up so much that somebody above me will make the decision not to go. But it won't be me that went against the Big Boss and stopped singing the company song, oh no matey".

So just play along, in fact act dead enthusiastic, you might even get his job eventually.

Not enough people can make it. It's cancelled.