"Don't worry about this cost - R3 will never be built:

..I'm not doing :)

Unite, representing over 4,000 HAL staff, is planning a series of two-day strikes over busy July/August weekends.

Summer travel chaos looms after Heathrow workers announce strike dates in pay dispute

Sorry but just had to laugh....... Commenting Unite regional coordinating officer Wayne King ....Hmmmmm

With LHR being hit by a strike next week, 177 flights are reported as cancelled, and airlines are said to be rebooking pax. Is that likely to help if there's a shortage of firefighters, security staff and engineers?

If it means rebooking pax on consolidated flights, or services from/to LGW/STN/LTN/LCY, or even (for UK domestic pax) the train, then yes it probably helps a bit.

What is frustrating is LHR are not saying which flights are cancelled. I can't see the point in that. Yes I'm travelleing from Terminal 2 tomorrow so I'm still in limbo!

The Sun

It's the airlines, not the airport, that determine which of their flights are/aren't gooing to operate. I would expect that the parties involved are still working on a definitive list.

If previous winter snow cancellations are any guide, UK domestic services will be top of that list, then anywhere easily reached by Eurostar.

Presume uncertainty for pax now Mon strike suspended. People won't know if they're coming or going. At least the journey through security is likely to be better!

I wouldn't bet on it - they're the ones with the grievance, after all. :O

Good luck, anyway.

BBC reporting that the parties have reached a deal and tomorrow's strike is off: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49241306

Heathrow dreams up a new definition of the term "average"
 

Heathrow this week revealed the results from its Fly Quiet & Green programme for Q2 2019.

For Q2, as with previous quarters, league table scores have again been inflated, this time by 43% compared to the results that are produced when Heathrow's own published methodology and performance rankings are used. Once again that increase has not been applied uniformly across all of the 50 airlines considered (some of the poorer performing carriers have been awarded more than double the number of points that they merit), with the result that the relative league table positions are significantly distorted.

A more detailed look at the Q2 table shows:

a) Individual airline scores are inflated by between 11% and 177%, with the poorest performing carriers receiving the biggest unjustified increase in their score. For example, the 599 points score awarded by Heathrow to Saudia is 383 points more than the airline actually merits under Heathrow's own rules, based on its published performance metric rankings (it's in the bottom third of the table for every one of the seven metrics, including two 48th places).

b) All but one of the 50 airlines in Heathrow's table are awarded more than the correctly calculated overall average score (based on Heathrow's data and methodology) of 530 points (from a maximum possible 1,000 points).

c) American Airlines, Aegean and TAP are given an unexplained hike up the table, by 15, 14 and 14 places respectively, compared to the positions that their performance merits.

d) Among the airlines entitled to feel aggrieved with this quarter's published results include Air France, relegated 16 places from its rightful position, together with China Southern (as always) and Japan Airlines, each unjustifiably demoted by 15 places. Kuwait Airways, despite meriting 528 points by Heathrow's own methodology, putting it just above Air India, bizarrely ends up ranked 21 places and 186 points below the Indian carrier.

e) "RAG" (red/amber/green) classifications are again applied inconsistently; for example El Al and China Southern, ranked 46th and 50th, respectively, by Heathrow for early/late movements, get an "Amber" for that category while Swiss, ranked 32nd for that metric by Heathrow, gets a "Red".

f) Heathrow's results, which aim to compare the "top 50" airlines (defined by number of flights in Q2) inexplicably omit Korean Air, while Royal Air Maroc (with fewer flights) is included.

g) SAS and BA shorthaul have been propelled into joint first place (even though Qantas actually performed better than SAS and five airlines out-performed BA, based on Heathrow's data and methodology). We're asked to believe that BA scored only 52 points short of a "perfect" 1,000 despite coming close to bottom (44th out of 50) for engine emissions and two-thirds of the way down the rankings for Night Quota compliance. It turns out that Heathrow has only docked BA just under 0.7 of a Fly Quiet point for every place lost across the seven parameters measured (adjusted by the appropriate "weighting"). That would imply, were BA to be the worst-performing airline (i.e. in 50th place) for every parameter, that instead of the zero points that the rules stipulate, it would still be awarded a score of 809 out of 1,000 !

Clearly, Heathrow couldn't find anyone with GCSE Maths in this summer's batch of interns ... :O

I suspect that he's already don't that a few times but never received a satisfactory response.

Correct.

HAL are determined to brazen it out, having dug themselves into a hole that they can't now extricate themselves from. As I noted in a previous post, what started out purely as academic curiosity has morphed into a classic case study of corporate hubris. :O

Think about it - if HAL publish a points score for each airline, and claim that said score is an aggregate of the separate scores for seven different performance elements, why would they refuse point-blank to say how many points each element has contributed to the total score ?

Answer: Because to do so would make the whole thing fall apart like a trick cigar.

Can anyone point me in the right LHR (or even BA) related forum where I can offer my spare room for rent? Many thanks!

Not sure AirNZ will be back at Heathrow. It's an awfully long way to fly for an airline with limited resources and a large number of competitors with hubs between the 2 countries. The economies of Asia are much wealthier than they were 20 years ago, and I imagine former colonial ties will diminsh in relative importance for NZ compared to countries much nearer in geographical terms

Wonder who is buying the slots though...