Here’s something you’re not likely to hear an American executive do.
Colin Matthews, the man in charge of London’s Heathrow Airport (and all other British and Scottish airports) knows that all the snow craziness this fall/winter means he clearly didn’t do a bang up job for 2010.
BAA chief executive Colin Matthews today sanctioned a £10m investment in snow clearing equipment at Heathrow as he waived his annual bonus in the wake of the debacle that has crippled Britain’s largest airport in recent days.
Matthews, who received £944,000 in basic salary and bonus last year, said he would forego his 2010 payout following a storm of criticism from politicians, airlines and hundreds of thousands of stranded passengers.
Speaking as Heathrow prepared to operate close to a full schedule tomorrow after five days of snow-related chaos, he said: “I have decided to give up my bonus for the current year. My focus is on getting people moving and rebuilding confidence in Heathrow.” Mick Rix, the GMB union’s national officer for the aviation industry, said: “For once, a British senior director has done the right thing.”
It is understood that BAA’s board rubber-stamped a £10m snow investment programme on Tuesday after Matthews acknowledged that Heathrow’s lack of equipment had been exposed by five inches of snowfall on Saturday.
The airport was forced to operate a third of its schedule for several days – affecting nearly one million travellers – as it scrambled to remove thousands of tonnes of snow that had marooned jets at aircraft stands. A BAA source said: “Colin Matthews has made £10m available and has asked the operations team at Heathrow to spend that money, or whatever it takes, to build up the resilience of Heathrow during the winter and restore passenger confidence in the airport.”
That’s wassup. It probably would’ve been nicer of him to distribute that bread evenly between all the people who were left stranded at Heathrow for those few days.
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