Pilots at Spanair had threatened to go on strike only an hour before yesterday’s crash.

Threatened with job cuts, they had accused the carrier – which has run up large losses for its parent, the Scandinavian airline SAS – of “organised chaos” and failing to have a proper business plan.

The airline, which has a fleet of 63 aircraft and employs more than 3,500 staff, is leaking money, labouring under the huge cost of jet fuel. The burden of owning Spanair cost SAS a loss of £43 million in the first half of the year.

SAS put Spanair up for sale last year, but drew only tentative interest from Iberia, the Spanish national carrier. In June the Scandinavian owners scrapped the sale plan and a week ago announced plans to make more than 1,000 workers redundant and cut Spanair’s capacity by 24 per cent. The recovery plan involved cancelling nine Spanair routes and reducing its opera-tional bases from seven Spanish air-ports to two: Barcelona and Madrid.

Unsurprisingly, the Spanish pilots union Sepla was deeply opposed to Spanair’s retrenchment and, before yesterday’s accident, condemned the management plans. “This union believes that the organised chaos in which the company exists cannot continue,” it said, adding that it would take steps to initiate a call for a strike.

The union said that the restructuring was “merely a cost-cutting plan that in no way addresses the future of the company”. It added that, as a result of the restructuring, management was forcing cabin crews and maintenance staff to work extra hours and on days when they should have been off.

Spanair’s fleet of 65 aircraft includes 36 McDonnell Douglas MD82/83 planes of the type that crashed in Madrid yesterday. The MD80 series is an older generation of aircraft, which ended production in the late 1990s.

Regulators are concerned that weak airlines could be tempted to take short-cuts, particularly those that fly old and expensive aircraft, such as the MD82. High oil prices mean that airlines are struggling and looking to cut costs.

The Federal Aviation Administration in the US has already stepped up checks on airlines to ensure that weak balance sheets do not translate into poor safety. In Europe, larger airlines have expressed concern that regulators are not being as proactive as their counterparts in the US in monitoring weaker carriers.

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