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British airline passengers often fail to appreciate just how lucky they are. The UK is the main base of operations for easyJet and Ryanair: Europe’s biggest budget airlines, offering wider horizons at lower fares than any other country in Europe. Jet2 and Virgin Atlantic have well-earned reputations for excellent service. And that leaves British Airways with a formidable challenge.
No other national carrier endures such intense competition on its home turf. Air France and Lufthansa face challenges from low-cost airlines, but not to the same intensity; and they can fight back with their own budget brands, Transavia and Eurowings respectively. Long haul, all European airlines fight to retain passengers against rivals from the west and, more particularly, Gulf and Asian carriers to the east. But only BA has a home-grown competitor of the scale and quality of Virgin Atlantic on all the most lucrative routes from London Heathrow.
British Airways, though, has a superpower: the majority of slots at the world’s most desirable international airport. BA’s portfolio of more than 50 per cent of the precious permissions to take off and land comprises the most valuable intangible property in aviation.
Passengers are prepared to pay a big premium to fly to or from the UK’s main hub. Airlines say many overseas travellers believe Heathrow is the only London airport – even though the capital is served by more airports than any other city.
Add BA’s Avios frequent flyer scheme – “as addictive as crack cocaine” according to one rival – and there is enough demand for British Airways to chalk up £1.43bn in profit in last year. Visualise that as the airline profiting at a rate of £50 per second.
Sometimes, though, that slot portfolio becomes a liability. When things go wrong at Heathrow, the British Airways operation can unravel with terrifying speed.
So it proved this weekend. On Friday 6 September storms pummelled south east England for much of the day.
If there is disruption at LHR, European airlines can cope easily: for Austrian Airlines, KLM and Swiss, Heathrow operations represent only a small part of their total operation.
But when bad weather strikes BA’s main base, 100 per cent of its flights are potentially affected. The carrier is far more susceptible to disruption at Heathrow than anyone else – as it proved on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and into Monday. While British Airways grounded 265 flights, cancellations involving other airlines were in single figures.
EasyJet has a parallel vulnerability at Gatwick, where it is by far the largest carrier. “Staff absence” in the control tower struck on Sunday night, triggering about 80 flight cancellations.
Across at Heathrow, many British Airways passengers on Friday had already started making their way to the airport when the first wave of cancellations came through at around 7am. The airline has smart systems that rebook passengers speedily and automatically on other BA flights – if seats are available. Finding space is an increasing problem; on average, only one seat in six departed empty last year on British Airways. So when wholesale cancellations begin, there are not enough seats to go round.
Some travellers found themselves rebooked on to later flights that were in turn cancelled as the domino effect clattered through the Heathrow operation.
“When faced with major disruption, BA’s short-haul schedule has always fallen apart more rapidly and terminally than that of its rivals,” says a senior aviation figure.
“That’s all to do with the way it plans and organises its crew schedule. You might find an aircraft arriving from Brussels, pilots arriving from Amsterdam and cabin crew arriving from Stockholm all needing to join up at Heathrow to operate an outbound flight to Barcelona.
“The permutations of things that can – and consequently do – go wrong during spells of disruption rapidly multiply beyond any capability for this Humpty Dumpty-style fragmented mess to be pieced back together again.”
Add in the complexities of limits on crew hours, and the knock-on impacts can continue for days.
So why not just have more staff and aircraft in reserve? Well, even if you can find them at a a time when planes and pilots are at a premium, resilience is expensive. Keeping aircraft on the ground just in case, when they could be earning money for the airline, is a significant opportunity cost.
One absurd European Court of Justice decision held that airlines should keep crew on standby, drinking coffee, at every airport they serve. Were that to become, almost all aviation would become unviable. Airlines wisely ignored the ruling.
BA, like other airlines, chooses the appropriate level of back-up: balancing the costs of having planes crewed and ready to go to keep customers satisfied, against the financial and reputational damage caused when there is simply not enough slack in the system.
“We’re dreadfully short of pilots at Gatwick,” one insider said. BA’s riposte to easyJet is a short-haul subsidiary at Gatwick, Euroflyer. But in order to deliver the promsed schedule, British Airways has been buying in capacity to keep the operation more or less on course.
Tony Wheeler, co-founder of Lonely Planet travel guides, was surprised to find his “BA” flight from Gatwick to Malaga was operated by “a company called Danish Air Transport using a 16-year-old Airbus formerly owned by Sichuan Airlines”.
Chartering in extra planes and crew is a normal part of an airline’s operation. But large-scale cancellations are not. Monday morning’s departure screens do not make happy reading for British Airways passengers: 7.35am to Amsterdam, 7.45am to Verona, 7.45am to Alicante and 7.55am to Nice, all cancelled. At least some of the Alicante passengers may have found seats on the previous day’s departure, which finally got off the ground 17 hours late.
Even in relatively normal times, British Airways finds it tricky to keep to schedule.
During 2023, its on-time performance – the proportion of flights less than 15 minutes late – was below 60 per cent. Two out of five passengers were delayed beyond that 15-minute margin. BA’s sister airline, Iberia of Spain, scored 89 per cent.
Partly because of the dismal timekeeping at British Airways, earlier this year BA extended its “minimum connecting time” at its Heathrow Terminal 5 hub from an hour to 75 minutes. By lengthening connections, the airline hoped fewer customers will end up being stranded or rebooked.
Continental rivals offer much slicker connections, with Vienna regarding 25 minutes as quite sufficient to transfer passengers and their baggage.
British Airways, currently taking three times as long, says it “has invested significantly to improve its on-time performance in 2024, which will lead to cost savings through greater productivity and efficiency”.
Stevie Ferguson is just one of many passengers who are so far unimpressed: “Just flown with British Airways this last week,” he writes. “Connected through Heathrow. Absolutely dreadful. Five hours late. Luggage went AWOL on the way home.”
The lesson of last year’s stellar financial results is one that passengers do not want to hear: that BA could see service standards slip still further and still make handsome profits.
Safety standards, though, are non-negotiable. One reason British Airways still commands good fares is the confidence among the travelling public that British Airways flies right. Keeping passengers and crew safe is an obsession. The last fatal accident involving BA was before many of its staff and passengers were born: a fire on the runway at Manchester in August 1985, in which 55 people died.
Ever since the 1980s, expanding Heathrow by adding one or more runways has been on the agenda. But all efforts have come to nought. The longer this inertia persists, the better for British Airways; its proportion of slots would be diluted were Heathrow to grow.
Scarcity is everything: those slots remain a licence to profit at a rate of £50 per second.
Happy days for British Airways’ shareholders, if not for all its passengers.
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