As passengers fly through Terminal 5, cabin crew talk tactics at local football club

Bedfont FC has become the ad hoc headquarters for Unite bosses and BA's non-flying pickets. Simon Calder joins their latest meeting

(OLI SCARFF/ GETTY)

Going to an airport but not actually flying is guaranteed to frustrate. Few British Airways passengers were in that position yesterday, because the airline has informed and re-booked the travellers who had the misfortune to buy flights hit by the cabin-crew strike. So serene, indeed, was the scene at Heathrow Terminal 5 yesterday that at one point a journalist had to make do with clandestinely filming another journalist who was in the process of filming clandestinely.

The media had been excluded from BA's main home, which is good news for the Renaissance Hotel. This property has a grassy knoll that overlooks the northern runway at Heathrow. For the past four days it has been the home of the 24-hour news coverage of the dispute. While BA loses millions of pounds for each day that the strike goes on, the hotel is earning a smaller fortune in sales of coffee to the shivering broadcasters, from selling access to the Wi-Fi network, and by renting the hillock out as a "media garden".

Yesterday, though, a rival emerged for a slice of the journalists' expenses cake. Bedfont Football and Social Club, temporary HQ for the non-flying pickets, became the centre of attention for TV crews: its colourful backdrop of banners and cabin crew wearing masks depicting their chief executive, Willie Walsh, proved more interesting than the airport's Northern Perimeter Road.

The club interior was more charter flight than Club World: banal architecture, dreary furniture and a floor that appeared to have endured more than its share of spilt beer over the decades. But journalists arriving for the rally were welcomed by a smiling cabin services director and offered coffee with biscuits before they could get their notebooks out. In a distinctly unBritish development, cabin crew queued up to reveal how much (or how little) they earned, in the hope of shifting the propaganda pendulum a degree or two in their direction.

Possibly the biggest financial windfall in its 110-year history will cheer up Bedfont FC, who lost 4-2 in Saturday's crunch home match against Epsom & Ewell in the Cherry Red Records Combined Counties League. But if the club wants a serious future as an international broadcast centre, the technology will need to sharpen up. One journalist who needed a land-line for a BBC radio interview was shown to the phone behind the bar, and instructed to answer "Bedfont Football Club" when it rang, "in case it's not for you". Limited wireless internet was available, courtesy of an unsuspecting householder with a powerful Wi-Fi set-up in one of the neighbouring houses along Hatton Road.

A football ground is an appropriate venue for the strikers, given the current scoring draw between the two sides: Unite took the lead in December with an overwhelming vote in favour of industrial action; BA rapidly equalised with a High Court ruling that the ballot was offside; then the airline went ahead when another judge decided its roster changes were legitimate; earlier this month, Unite pulled level with another huge majority in the second ballot. Now the conflict has gone to penalties, made more critical with the looming spectre of sudden death (in the financial, rather than transportational, sense, I hasten to add).

The home fans flew the flag of Unite, augmented by a banner offering the support of the Ealing branch of the National Union of Teachers, and home-made posters that ranged from the spirited ("The World's Favourite Picket Line") to the surgical ("Time for the snip, Willie"). You could tell the aviation professionals from the amateurs such as me, because every time a plane came into land a few hundred yards away, we turned to look.

Shortly after midday, Tony Woodley, Unite's joint general secretary, addressed the assembled cabin crew and was given a rousing reception. But as he spoke a sequence of arriving aircraft provided a story in the sky that represented a different version of the airline's future: "We've got an employer who wants to beat you, and this union, into submission," as a Jet2 aircraft, masquerading as BA855, made its final approach – one of two dozen chartered planes filling the holes in the airline's schedule.

Later, a giant Airbus A380 from Dubai glided past in the colours of Emirates – one of several airlines intent on stealing BA's (and London's) place at the top of the aviation league. "This isn't about personalities or a Walsh or a Woodley or us versus anybody else," raged the Unite boss. "Nobody wins here."

With no sign of concessions on either side, this increasingly bitter tie looks destined for extra time.