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PASSENGERS booked with strike-hit British Airways face grounded Scottish flights for a further week, with no end in sight to the bitter cabin crew dispute.

Despite the end of the first three-day strike last night, cancellations now stretch into Friday as a knock-on effect of the stoppage. BA is expected to announce today or tomorrow further cancellations during the second, four-day strike, due to start Saturday.

The airline admitted yesterday it was losing £7 million a day during the strikes – with the damage expected to total at least £50m.

Leaders of the Unite union, which represents cabin crew caught up in the cost-cutting dispute, urged BA chief executive Willie Walsh to "come out of his bunker" and hold fresh talks.

Tony Woodley, Unite's joint leader, said he had not received any positive response to his plea for fresh talks and added that Mr Walsh's silence was "deafening".

Mr Woodley is understood to have contacted the TUC about restarting talks that collapsed last Friday after BA tabled an offer Unite complained was worse than a previous one.

The two sides continued to clash over the impact of the strike, with BA accusing the union of publishing information which had "no basis in fact".

BA said 78 per cent of its long-haul flights and half of its short-haul ones had operated on Saturday and Sunday. It has added extra flights at Heathrow and Gatwick because more staff than expected had turned up for work.

However, BA has now cancelled 28 flights on its Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen to Heathrow routes on Thursday and Friday.

These are on top of more than 40 axed on the routes today and tomorrow because of the strike disruption, as The Scotsman reported yesterday