MAY you manage in interesting times. Rod Eddington, chief executive of British Airways and a man entitled to feel that he is on a very long, turbulent flight, rolls his grey-blue eyes in agreement.

It’s Friday morning, he’s just out of his first set of crisis meetings, and the implications of day two of war are beginning to sink in. He smiles wryly and then, holding out his left hand, counts out the events he’s faced in his near-three-year tenure at the top of BA: UK foot and mouth and its aftermath, the Air France Concorde crash, September 11, global stock-market collapse. And now this. Gulf war 2.

He could be forgiven for thinking that someone, somewhere, doesn’t like him much.

But, he adds, at least this time he had a fair idea it was coming and a chance to prepare. He’s just finished a briefing from his security and operations chiefs, part of a daily process he is now locked into, as the company gears itself up to face the possible consequences of war. He has cleared his diary, he is ready to respond to anything that could be thrown at the business. BA, £5 billion in debts, £200m in losses last year, will survive, he says. Just watch.

And he looks calm, which is exactly the message he wants to send out to staff, investors and passengers. Sitting in his shirtsleeves in a third-floor room at BA’s palatial Harmondsworth HQ, sandy hair brushed roughly back, his trademark 1950s moustache clipped tight, he talks through the situation with uncharacteristic stillness.

Eddington, 53, is normally a voluble livewire, but he has worked through enough crises now to know what’s important. Reassurance. He spent a lot of Thursday in BA’s operations centre, just showing a calm face and talking his people through the possibilities. And now, like the rest of us, he waits.

What could happen? Terrorist threat? Fuel prices through the ceiling, passenger numbers through the floor — everyone in the airline business remembers the last Gulf war. And this one couldn’t have come at a more delicate time for BA, halfway through Eddington’s restructuring programme, which was just beginning to bear fruit. The war has started late enough into March not to dent his profit hopes for BA’s fourth quarter, bringing the firm back into the black for the year. But nobody knows how the crucial summer bookings will be affected.

Australian-born Eddington, who is also a director of News Corp, publisher of The Sunday Times, looks on the bright side. “We’ve worked hard to make BA more robust, precisely so we can withstand these shocks that come our way,” he says. He has built up a £1.8 billion cash mountain in readiness — preferring to save rather than decrease BA’s large debt. That, says his chairman, Lord Marshall, BA boss in the first Gulf war, is a lesson learnt from last time, not least because any recovery will have to be pumped by a formidable marketing blitz.

But Eddington has also been cutting overheads and staff ferociously. About £1 billion — 15% of costs — has been saved; 10,000 staff have gone in the last year, another 3,000 will go before next March. The airline is still bigger than during the last Gulf war, with more to lose, but both Eddington and Marshall feel it is better prepared, with contingency plans in place for all possibilities.

First they have to see how long the war goes on and what it affects. BA has already stopped flights to Kuwait and Tel Aviv, on Foreign Office advice. But beyond the Scud zone, consumer confidence is key. “It’s the life and soul of our business,” says Eddington.

The last time confidence collapsed, after September 11, there were rumours that BA nearly went under. Eddington brushes that aside. It wouldn’t have happened, he says, even though at one point the company was losing £2m a day. But BA did take a bashing financially, dropping its dividend and slipping out of the FTSE 100. It still needs to convince some that it can map out a viable future for itself.

But it was in trouble even before the terrorists hit. Eddington, after a long stint at Cathay Pacific and a rather shorter one at the now-defunct Australian airline Ansett, joined BA when it was already having chunks kicked out of its short-haul services by the new no-frills carriers — one of which, Go, it had launched itself.

His reponse was to sell Go, cut back short-haul operations at Gatwick, overhaul routes and push more bookings online. He has agitated for a freer market in Europe, too, allowing airlines to consolidate, and pushed to give BA a presence as quickly as possible in Heathrow’s new Terminal 5, going up just a few minutes’ drive from its base.