Balpa is incredibly well organised, with union officials able to contact all their members, even in far flung corners of the world, at any time from the headquarters in Hayes, Middlesex Pickets are to be placed at every airport A central command structure has been created. A lawyer by trade, he was company secretary during much of the time of the "dirty tricks" war with Virgin and admits that some of those events were "regrettable".While BA with Ayling at the helm is digging in, so are the pilots. Mr Ayling - salary just over pounds 500,000 per year - only took over the job at the beginning of this year and this is his biggest test. Indeed, some pilots blame the dispute on the macho cost-cutting culture he is trying to instil Ayling is unabashed.

He has said repeatedly that he wants BA to be the best managed company in Britain by the year 2000 He is no softie. This pattern is repeated from Shetland to Southampton, Oakland to Auckland.BA's proposed marketing tie-up with American Airlines takes this trend towards its ultimate conclusion. Subject to approval in Whitehall, Brussels and Washington, it will more than double the airline's existing network without a single new aircraft or well-paid pilot. This is the ultimate vision which BA's pilots fear and which is fuelling their anxiety and their militancy.The pilots hear Robert Ayling, the chief executive, saying, at the AGM in March, things like "we are going to take a billion pounds off costs", without any explanation as to how he is going to do it, and it frightens them. Is he, they wonder, going to start massive franchising operations? He could look to the railways where individual routes are being sold and the strength of the national unions is being undermined as a result: perhaps, they muse, the same thing will happen to BA?On the management side, "the resolve is strong", as one insider put it. Anyone who is booked on BA flights from Leeds to Rome next week will not be affected by the pilots' strike, because at no stage will he or she travel on BA The Leeds to Gatwick leg is operated by CityFlyer Express.

Then you transfer to TAT, the French affiliate of BA, for the next two stretches, to Lyon and on to Rome. It has other airlines, such as GB Airways to do its flying, in return for use of a British Airways logo. Not only are their cost bases lower, they also keep flying when BA pilots go on strike.These days it is quite possible to buy a British Airways ticket with BA flight numbers yet not ever travel on BA. These are the sort of investments that accountants have nightmares about, so many of the aircraft filling the skies are owned by finance corporations rather than the airlines themselves.When you are renting your plane, you can get a crew to go with it - turning a "dry lease" (the aircraft alone) into a "wet lease" (with pilots and cabin crew). When EasyJet began operations between Luton and Scotland last year, it used crews hired from Gatwick-based GB Airways.Quite apart from the separate issue of EuroGatwick, BA is into this low- cost end of the business in a big way already with its franchise operations. Pilots wonder if they will eventually be out of a job altogether, if aircraft and crew will be needed in the long run.

The trend is for an international airline to consist of three things: a logo, a reservations computer and some prime-time slots at the world's busiest airport. The other bits and pieces - the bothersome business of actually flying people and products around the globe - can be hived off to other people.Aircraft are the biggest capital cost to airlines, with a decent secondhand Boeing 737 - a kind of Ford Escort of the skies - costing around pounds 12m, and a brand-new Boeing 777 10 times as much. You can't do that in a seat." Pilots don't have the option of a double whisky as a nightcap and they argue that they need to be fresh for the return leg.The substance of the dispute, though, is much more intangible than these seemingly trivial concerns. It is the new world in which we are all being asked to work, where jobs are not for life, where wages go down as well as up, where long-established rights are taken away and where conditions become worse rather than better.Underlying the dispute, too, is a palpable worry about the future. As one pilot said: "We are professional men being treated like children. We want the management to treat us with trust, respect and fairness."Asked to define their concerns, they do sometimes sound rather petty.

One issue, for example, is their traditional right to use bunk beds to sleep in on very long haul flights where there are two crews to fly the plane. BA is removing the bunks and offering the pilots first class seats to doze in, but they say this is not good enough One said: "I want to be able to sleep properly. This type of argument is the base matter of which strikes are made.Other European airlines, such as Alitalia, Air France and Lufthansa are all setting up similar low cost airlines. With the liberalisation of the European air market due to start in April 1997 and competition from these rivals imminent, pressure on air fares is going to be downwards. Therefore BA is anxious to be in a position to compete and EuroGatwick is its chief weapon against the expectations of their pilots that wages should go up and up.But it is not these specific issues on pay or Gatwick which are the real cause of the dispute. As one exasperated BA manager put it: "If only we knew what they are worried about, we would try to deal with it." Indeed, while the Gatwick issue hangs over the dispute, the pilots' concerns are the same as the less tangible ones felt across industry by millions of white collar workers. After weeks of dithering, Balpa caved into BA - "a mistake they have been regretting ever since.