British Airways has cancelled more than 175 flights as the fallout from an IT failure entered its second day, fuelling predictions of widespread travel disruption at the start of a bank holiday weekend forecast to be the busiest since before the pandemic.
As motorists hit the roads, encouraged by forecasts of sunny and warm weather at the start of the school half-term holidays, reports of clogged motorways were already emerging on Friday afternoon.
At Heathrow, thousands of British Airways passengers faced disappointment and disruption, as an IT problem that began on Thursday evening led to their flights being grounded.
The number of BA flights from Heathrow to be cancelled had risen from 50 on Friday morning to more than 170 by the afternoon, amid reports of long queues at Britain’s largest airport.
The majority of those affected were on short-haul routes popular for city breaks, including destinations such as Paris, Athens, Nice and Rome.
In a response to a customer on Friday afternoon, the British Airways Twitter account said the company’s IT problems had been resolved. However, its website was still advising passengers to check their flight status before heading to the airport, as the knock-on effect of the outage caused further disruption.
A spokesperson for the airline said: “While the vast majority of our flights continue to operate today, we have cancelled some of our short-haul flights from Heathrow due to the knock-on effect of a technical issue that we experienced yesterday.
“We’ve apologised to customers whose flights have been affected and offered them the option to rebook to an alternative flight with us or another carrier, or request a refund.”
The airline has tried to prioritise routes where there are few alternatives by opting to focus cancellations on destinations that are served my multiple flights a day.
The breakdown comes at the worst possible time, with 3,000 flights scheduled to depart from the UK on Friday, the largest daily total since before the Covid pandemic.
Motoring organisations have also predicted “hectic” conditions on the roads, with more than 19 million people forecast to travel by car between Friday afternoon and Monday morning.
According to the analysts Inrix, there will be severe delays on the M25, the M5 in Somerset and the M6 in Cheshire.
As leisure trippers and commuters took to the roads at the same time, there were reports of tailbacks on the M4 and M5 routes between London and the West Country.
The RAC spokesperson Rod Dennis said the number of people getting away by car could reach levels not seen since before the pandemic, with the sunny weather proving a catalyst.
“With the Met Office currently predicting largely settled weather with above-average temperatures, we’re expecting this to be a hectic period on major roads,” he said.
Unusually, rail passengers have a bank holiday weekend free of planned stoppages. There are very few major engineering works, meaning most British rail services will run normally.
However, there will be a series of rail strikes in the second half of the school holiday week, with drivers from Aslef out on 31 May and 3 June, and train crews in the RMT union on strike on 2 June. Most services across England are likely to be halted when drivers go on strike, with severe disruption during the RMT action.
