by British airline passengers often fail to realize just how lucky they are. The UK is the main base of operations for easyJet and Ryanair: Europe’s largest budget airlines, offering wider horizons at lower fares than any other country in Europe. Jet2 and Virgin Atlantic have a well-deserved reputation for excellent service. And that leaves British Airways with a big challenge.
No other national carrier survives intense competition on its home turf. Air France and Lufthansa face challenges from low-cost airlines, but not with the same intensity; and they can fight back with their own budget brands, Transavia and Eurowings respectively. For a long time, all European airlines fight to retain passengers against competitors from the west and, in particular, the Gulf and East Asian carriers. But only BA has a native competitor of Virgin Atlantic’s scale and quality on the most profitable routes from London Heathrow.
British Airways, however, has a superpower: the most slots at the world’s most desirable international airport. BA’s portfolio of more than 50 per cent of its precious take-off and landing permits is the most valuable intangible asset in aviation.
Passengers are willing to pay a large premium to fly to or from a major UK hub. Airlines say many overseas travelers believe Heathrow is London’s only airport – even though the capital is served by more airports than any other city.
Add in the BA Avios frequent flyer scheme – “as addictive as crack cocaine” according to one rival – and British Airways has enough demand to chalk up £1.43bn in profits last year. Look at that as the airline making a profit at the rate of £50 per second.
Sometimes, however, that slot portfolio becomes a liability. When things go wrong at Heathrow, a British Airways operation can unravel with alarming speed.
So it was this weekend. On Friday 6th September there were storms in the south east of England for much of the day.
If there is a disruption at LHR, European airlines can easily cope: in the case of Austrian Airlines, KLM and Swiss, the Heathrow operations make up only a small part of their total operation.
But when bad weather hits BA’s main base, 100 per cent of its flights could be disrupted. 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, individual figures included cancellations involving other airlines.
EasyJet has a parallel vulnerability at Gatwick, where it has long been the largest carrier. A “crew absence” hit the control tower on Sunday night, causing the cancellation of around 80 flights.
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 quickly and automatically book passengers onto other BA flights – if seats are available. Finding space is a growing problem; on average, only one seat in six went empty last year on British Airways. So when wholesale cancellations start, there aren’t enough seats to go around.
Some travelers found themselves booked on later flights which were later canceled as the domino effect rippled through the Heathrow operation.
“When seriously disrupted, BA’s short-haul schedule has always fallen apart faster and later than its competitors,” says a senior aviation official.
“It’s all about the way he plans and organizes his team schedule. You might find an aircraft coming from Brussels, pilots coming from Amsterdam and cabin crew coming from Stockholm all needing to get together at Heathrow to operate a flight out to Barcelona.
“The permutation of things that can – and do – go wrong during periods of disruption quickly overwhelms any ability to cut this fragmented Humpty Dumpty-style mess back together again.”
Add in the complexities of limits on staff hours, and the knock-on effects can go on for days.
So why aren’t more crews and aircraft booked? Well, even if you can get them at 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 making money for the airline, is a significant opportunity cost.
One absurd decision by the European Court of Justice decided that airlines should keep the crew on standby, drinking coffee, at every airport they serve. If that were to succeed, almost all aviation would be unviable. Airlines wisely ignored the ruling.
BA, like other airlines, chooses the appropriate reserve level: balancing the costs of having planes crewed and ready to go to keep customers happy, against the financial and reputational damage caused by insufficient delays system.
“We are extremely short of pilots at Gatwick,” said an insider. BA’s riposte to easyJet at Gatwick, Euroflyer, is a short-haul subsidiary. But to deliver on the promised schedule, British Airways is buying the ability to keep the operation more or less on course.
Tony Wheeler, co-founder of travel guide Lonely Planet, was shocked to discover that his “BA” flight from Gatwick to Malaga was being operated by “a company called Danish Air Transport using a 16-year-old Airbus that was under previously owned by Sichuan Airlines”.
Chartering additional aircraft and crew is a normal part of airline operations. But not on a large scale cancellations. 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 took off 17 hours late.
Even in fairly normal times, British Airways finds it difficult to stick to schedule.
During 2023, its on-time performance – the percentage of flights less than 15 minutes late – was below 60 percent. Two out of every five passengers were delayed beyond that 15 minute margin. BA’s sister airline, Spain’s Iberia, scored 89 percent.
Partly due to British Airways’ timing, BA earlier this year extended its “minimum connecting time” at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 hub from one hour to 75 minutes. By lengthening connections, the airline hoped that fewer customers would be stranded or rebooked.
Continental rivals offer much healthier connections, with Vienna approximately 25 minutes long enough to transfer passengers and their luggage.
British Airways, which currently takes three times as long, says it has “invested significantly to improve its on-time performance in 2024, leading to cost savings through greater productivity and efficiency”.
Stevie Ferguson is one of many passengers so far unimpressed: “Just on a British Airways flight last week,” he writes. “Connected via Heathrow. Absolutely dreadful. Five hours late. Luggage went AWOL on the way home.”
The lesson of last year’s big financial results is one that passengers don’t want to hear: that BA could see service standards drop even further and still make handsome profits.
Safety standards, however, are not negotiable. One reason British Airways still commands good fares is the confidence of the traveling public that British Airways flies right. Keeping passengers and crew safe is an obsession. BA’s last fatal accident occurred before many of its crew and passengers were born: a runway fire in Manchester in August 1985, in which 55 people died.
Since the 1980s, expanding Heathrow by one or more runways has been on the agenda. But not all efforts were made. The longer this inertia lasts, the better for British Airways; the proportion of slots would be diluted if Heathrow grew.
Everything is in short supply: those slots are still a license to make a profit at a rate of £50 per second.
Happy days for British Airways shareholders, unlike all its passengers.
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