British Aerospace in Crisis | Thames News

Video from the channel Thames News about British Aerospace, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 3:46. Language: English. Video type: Archive footage.

The report explains that British Aerospace has announced the elimination of 2,000 jobs at its Hatfield plant over the following fifteen months. Only 300 workers will be offered transfers to other sites, and a factory that once employed 10,000 people will be left with just a few hundred. Workers and union representatives speak, and the BAe 146 is shown taking off and landing at London City Airport.

It is a piece from the regional news programme Thames News, filmed in Hatfield.

The company blames the closure on the airline industry crisis and on competition from Boeing and Fokker. Only 200 units of the 146 had been sold in eleven years, and 47 were sitting unused in storage. A joint venture with Taiwan Aerospace Corporation would allow existing orders to be built and a successor to be developed, although there were fears that production would move out of the country.