IF Steve Ridgway, the chief executive of Virgin Atlantic, avoids taking a series of frantic calls about Heathrow this Bank Holiday it may warm slightly the frosty relationship between BAA, the airports operator, and its major airline customers.

After 18-hour days, Mr Ridgway finally escaped on his yacht Josephine last weekend, but he is in no mood to forgive the airport operator. His worst fear was that chaos would overtake Britan’s main airports again. After all, he argues, BAA had no contingency plan for the recent security tightening and was barely coping even before the new regime came in.

When you have been in charge, as Mr Ridgway has, of transatlantic crossing challenges you know about contingency. Being exposed in a power boat in the middle of the Atlantic is an unusual induction for running an airline but has proved a sound one for Mr Ridgway, the project manager on Virgin Atlantic Challenger and Challenger II. The first attempt in 1985 failed when the 32-tonne vessel capsized off the South West of England. Undaunted, Sir Richard Branson, tried again the following year and succeeded in crossing the Atlantic in record time.

Mr Ridgway says of BAA: “Last time [the first weekend after new security rules were introduced] it was a joke. When something like this happens they don’t seem to have adequate flexibility or contingency to do anything.”

Along with other airlines, Virgin is considering claiming compensation — either from the airports group or the Government — but it also wants some long-term changes. “There needs to be a separate agency responsible for security and the Government has to step up to its obligations,” he says, adding that airport security technology is “clunky” and that the group has been slow to invest in new equipment. “Passengers are incredibly tolerant and will live with many of the restrictions, but we have to find a way to make it less cumbersome,” he says.

Mr Ridgway says that Virgin is all about avoiding such clunkiness through innovation and flair. “We always have loads of ideas. It’s nice when you’re pushing the frontiers,” he says.

Mr Ridgway thinks of himself as a marketing man. Yet his approach shuns the marketing textbook. “We are quite irreverent about things like research,” he says. Sir Richard Branson’s continuing close interest in the airline almost guarantees it special treatment among the Virgin brands. “Virgin Atlantic is still very much the heartbeat of the group. It is the thing that he is very engaged with and stays engaged with. He’s incredibly good at keeping in touch with the things that matter. Politically he has a lot of clout and this is a very political industry,” Mr Ridgway says.

Sir Richard now has a 51 per cent share in the airline, with Singapore Airlines holding the balance. But there are no plans to reduce that stake or even to take more of a back seat.

“I think he will be around for another 100 years — he has scary genetics in his family. He is work, work is him,” Mr Ridgway jokes.

Virgin, with its 36 aircraft and 9,000 employees, is the underdog to the major European flag carriers and US airlines, and particularly to British Airways. But the boot was firmly on the other foot at the end of June, when it emerged that Virgin had shopped BA to the Office of Fair Trading and the US Department of Justice, triggering an investigation into alleged price collusion in long-haul passenger fares. The inquiry is still going on and has led to the suspension of two key BA staff.

Mr Ridgway declines to talk about why the Virgin team went to the authorities, except to say that his company was continuing to help them and that he suspected their investigations would take many more months. Passengers, he says, don’t seem to care that the company has turned supergrass.

Perhaps more worrying for the whole sector is the possibility of a significant downturn. Last year was a record for sales of new aircraft and historically this has always been a precursor to a slowdown.

“We are not and have never been immune to the cycles but we always tend to act early,” Mr Ridgway says. Virgin Atlantic is putting plans in place. Potential strategies could be coming off a route for a while, delaying a new service or using smaller aircraft on a route.

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