One night recently, a group of passengers on an Iberia flight from Madrid to Valencia staged a mutiny on board after being kept waiting on the tarmac, without explanation from the captain, for over three hours.
Eventually their patience snapped and that scourge of the modern traveller, the mobile phone, had its use. Calls were made to the airline, their families and finally to the Civil Guard to complain that they had been kidnapped and were being held on the plane against their will. It took the intervention of the forces of law and order to persuade the pilot - who had locked himself on the flight deck throughout - that he should take off immediately.
On another occasion irate passengers, already more than two hours behind schedule, refused to disembark even when told that their flight would not be leaving that night because the airport at La Coruna closes at 9 p.m. Passengers chose to sleep on board, accompanied by two sympathetic stewardesses, to ensure that their aircraft was at the front of the queue for the next morning's dawn take-off.
Since the beginning of this year such episodes are daily occurrences in the skies of Spain. Newspapers run daily bulletins on colourful anecdotes, flight cancellations and delays which can run from half an hour to several hours: 90 per cent of all flights from Madrid delayed on one day, 85 per cent were late on another and on a good day it is only as low as 70 per cent. Madrid has been the worst hit by the trouble, but last month Barcelona had 1,300 cancelled flights and numerous delays, and other airports have suffered a knock-on effect.
Passengers are finding it increasingly difficult to arrange appointments or connecting flights because there is no guarantee they will get there on time. No one is prepared to take responsibility for the chaos. The flagship carrier, Iberia, blames the pilots, they in turn blame the overcrowded airports, others say it is a shortage of air traffic controllers, while others again say the increased military traffic over Europe due to the Kosovo crisis is to blame. The opposition blames the government, and ministers blame each other.
There have been sporadic pilots' strikes over the past five years. One strike hit particularly hard at Easter when the airline was forced to cancel 800 flights, and 170,000 reservations were cancelled over an eight-day period. In an attempt to ease congestion the airline announced it would be cutting 16,000 flights, mainly international, between June and December of this year. An ultramodern control tower, inaugurated at Madrid's Barajas airport last year, which was supposed to have taken over from the obsolete one by now, is still under-used. The controllers complain that their visibility from the new one is restricted.
SEPLA, the Spanish Airline Pilots' Association, has been staging a long-running battle with Iberia. Pilots are fighting to defend their rights and privileges which they fear they could lose when the company is privatised later this year. British Airways purchased 9 per cent of Iberia in February, American Airlines 1 per cent and Spanish corporate bidders were allocated another 30 per cent of the stock last month. A market launching of the remainder of the stock planned for next month has been postponed until October.
The company has offered the pilots a 10 per cent discount in the purchase of these shares. After the Swiss, Spanish pilots are already the second highest paid in Europe. Their average salary after tax and discounts, is £74,000, rising to more than £120,000 for senior staff, with free uniforms, top class hotels while away from home and spending vouchers for major department stores, plus generous additional perks. Not only do their families have the right to travel free, but so too do the family maids or children's nannies.
Nepotism and "jobs for the boys" are widespread within the company. One in every 10 pilots is the son of another one, and one captain has four brothers and two cousins flying for the airline.
Last Thursday the airline made its "final and definitive" offer in the form of an ultimatum to SEPLA to solve the crisis. Either accept the generous offer, the pilots were warned, or accept the consequences. This weekend they rejected it, but left the door ajar by demanding the mediation of the Minister of Industry, Mr Pique, who in his turn, refused to intervene. Speaking from Moscow where he is on an official visit, Mr Pique told the pilots that he would personally guarantee the Iberia offer, but the time for negotiation was over.
The plane is now firmly back on the pilots' runway.