by Airlines like to sing and dance about new or revamped routes. So it was clear that British Airways planned to return to Kuala Lumpur.
BA announced in March this year that flights will resume this month, promising: “The airline will operate daily flights between the Malaysian capital and London Heathrow on a 787-9 aircraft.”
But last month British Airways said the flights had been canceled for the winter due to “delays in the delivery of engines and parts from Rolls-Royce”. At a stroke, 200,000 seats were removed from the available capacity between the UK and South East Asia.
Malaysia Airlines will continue through the winter as the sole carrier on the Heathrow-KL route. The Malaysian carrier is making the most of the lack of capacity and lack of non-stop competition, pricing Festival flights at £2,744 return – for example out of London on December 16, returning three weeks later.
Virgin Atlantic is also canceling wholesale flights. The planned resumption of flights from Heathrow to Accra in Ghana and Tel Aviv in Israel has been postponed until next winter.
“Our Cape Town schedule will also break a month earlier than planned, on March 31, 2025,” a spokesperson tells me.
“These changes were made necessary due to the reduced availability of the Rolls Royce Trent 1000 engines, which are fitted to our Boeing 787-9 aircraft.”
Many airlines are facing critical spare parts shortages, with Covid being blamed. Given that even the long-closed US reopened to British visitors three years ago this week, it may be absurd to attribute insufficient inventories to the virus.
But industry insiders say that at the height of the pandemic, many manufacturers scaled back operations and made staff redundant as demand for their precision-engineered components evaporated.
The Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines fitted to Boeing 787s are now quite long in the tooth when many components need to be replaced in accordance with the strict rules designed to ensure that planes are safe.
One of 15,000 passengers affected by the early end of flights from Heathrow to Cape Town is Rob Burgess, founder of the website Head for Points. We spoke an hour after he learned that his Easter 2025 Virgin Atlantic trip to Cape Town had been cancelled.
Mr Burgess says the parent flights to South Africa will cause significant problems, “falling during school holidays and over a period of two bank holidays”.
British Airways is continuing the Heathrow-Cape Town route – and it’s making plenty of money over Easter. On April 11 for two weeks, for example, the “hand luggage only” charge on BA is £2,922 return. That’s almost three times the price on British Airways for the same dates to and from Johannesburg, where the competition prevails.
Airlines are frustrated and “struggling to get aircraft on the ground”, says Robert Boyle, former director of strategy at BA parent company IAG. But he points out: “Aviation profitability is very much driven by supply/demand balances and the shortages will help support overall pricing.”
During normal times, UK travelers benefit from fierce competition between British Airways and Virgin Atlantic on key intercontinental routes; French, German and Italian passengers have no choice of such quality carriers from their home turf. But while both long-haul UK airlines complain loudly about their expensive aircraft sitting idle on the ground at Heathrow, they are benefiting from reduced supply and strong demand: the increased price is being paid by the passenger.
As BA and Virgin ground their fleets, they can turn to their US partners, American Airlines and Delta respectively, for help – with those giant carriers filling gaps in UK airlines’ schedules. Next month I will fly from Atlanta to Heathrow not on a shiny Airbus A350 belonging to Virgin Atlantic, but on a venerable Boeing 767 in Delta colors.
“BA and Virgin are quite strategic in the way they are handling this,” says Rob Burgess. “For BA, two US routes – Dallas and Miami – have been transferred to American Airlines and there will be no reduction in capacity.”
“The Virgin Accra route was new so its potential was never there anyway, and Tel Aviv’s claim will remain under pressure for a while.”
With fees going well above pre-pandemic levels, the big question is: how long will this unhappy state of affairs continue? Insiders believe that 2025 will see the “landing peaks” of aircraft. Among Boeing’s many woes is the ever-extending delay in deliveries of the first 777X aircraft, which were supposed to serve as the workhorses for the leading airlines.
The type is expected to enter service in 2026, which could coincide with happier times for the Trent 1000 engine and its unhappy owners.
A spokesman for Rolls-Royce says: “We continue to work with all our customers to minimize the impact of limited availability of spare parts. All of the companies in our industry are suffering because of this.
“We are taking decisive action and moving quickly to prioritize the resources needed to reduce the impact of current supply chain constraints across the industry, which is the highest priority of our Civil Aerospace division.
“Over the past 12 months we have introduced a number of initiatives to reduce the impact on our customers. Our Trent 1000 Task Force is working quickly to deliver these improvements, drawing on our world-class engineering and technology capabilities.
“These changes are already having a positive impact. So far this year, we have increased Trent 1000 supply chain output by a third, providing more components and reducing the amount of time engines spend in our Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) centers.
“We are confident that these bold changes combined with our long-term investment plans will deliver continued improvement for our customers.”
In the coming year, however, British travelers may have to get used to paying two or three times as much for the privilege of flying non-stop on quality airlines.
