Yes, I know it's like asking about the length of a piece of string, but I was hoping for some actual experiences.

You can try asking on Flyertalk BA Executive Club which has threads about this.

Six BA flights booked; three cancelled by BA. One lot cancelled at two days’ notice, the other at ten weeks’.
I suppose that I should be grateful that the cancellation rate was ONLY 50% !
I have family loyalty to BA ; but it is being seriously threatened !
It is not just a matter of the flights; there are other things going on in relation to the travel including arrangements made with other peoples’ travel. The whole issue makes it nigh on impossible to co-ordinate our holidays.
Not good enough !

It is about time that the CAA got stuck into the cancellation issue, starting with comparisons between various operators of their cancellation rates. We can all understand the Lockdown issues from the last two years, were it not for the fact that other carriers, home and overseas, seem to be back to running full schedules. Hopefully the CAA still have enough nouse to identify the real reason for the differences, rather than accepting a one paragraph excuse from Sean Doyle's whitewash department. There also seems to be some hiding in the statistics of measuring cancellation rates against schedule at point of departure, so those dropped in advance are not measured. The CAA used to be very tough on airlines "having insufficient resources to operate their published schedule", to the extent that it could be necessary to charter in very expensively to cover a flight AOG or crewless which had few people booked on it anyway, so there must be procedures for this.

There's residual loyalty to BA in his household as well but was severely tested in the run up to Easter when one family members flights were "rejigged" :rolleyes: so comprehensively that their travel proposed plan became completely unworkable...

Plenty of carriers are not cancelling 50+ flights a day as BA are doing. Plus this BA line that it’s airport issues are frankly rubbish. The biggest problem for BA has been a shortage of crew and a shortage of ground staff both in their control not Heathrow’s.

Which Magazine also reported that it had complained to the CAA about BA’s cancellations and their belief that BA was not following the correct rules regarding duty of care etc to passengers. https://www.which.co.uk/policy/trave...routing-policy

Just wrong. Even BA Cityflyer at London City are making a much better job of it.

Do you think that carriers like TUI or Jet2 are just dumping people's holidays, with cancellations at a few days' notice, leaving those in the resorts stuck there ?

Ouch. I like BA as you do but they've utterly dropped the ball in planning and operational resilience. 20+ A320 series parked because they can't crew them and money flying out the door to Finnair and Iberia Express to cover BA's own routes. Does any other UK airline have that many of their own aircraft unusable?
Then add creating a new low cost subsidiary at LGW as it was the "only way to turn a profit" but is clearly a stick to put pressure on mainline and you can see why the wheels are coming off.

Well certainly at least one carrier ;) has for some months now certainly been advertising and selling tickets for flights on what looks remarkably like their pre-Covid schedule on a couple of routes I'm very very familiar with..

The reality of what's operated on the day has however been consistently different from the plan, and the cancellations/consolidations have nothing to do with the airport(s).

757
 

Anyone know if the Titan 757’s are being used on specific routes this summer?

I have 4 flights booked with BA and 2 out of the 4 have been cancelled, both around 4/5 weeks before. As it stands I was able to select alternative flights which will not cause too much disruption but if there are further cancellations it may well cause problems.

This may give an indication of why there are delays and cancellations. I am told that this is for BA at LHR. 😳
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....553a1bce42.jpg

Thanks for confirmation on Finnair assisting BA, a colleague said he was booked to travel as such shortly. Similar to boarding ANZ DC10 to the east of USA in the past.

Not at all, those were crewed wholly by BA, who set up a DC-10 pilot pool at Heathrow to run them, for quite some years in the late 1970s. The crew used to go to KLM in Amsterdam for their periodic Sim sessions. There were aircraft utilisation reasons why they came to this arrangement with ANZ, which I was a regular on LHR-LAX in those years. There's a periodic poster on here who was one of the BA FOs on this at the time.

So, BA are leasing in capacity from Iberia Express, Finnair and Titan (at least, maybe others I'm not aware of), but have a whole fleet of 321ceo's (the G-EUXx aircraft, at least) that sit idle, apparently as they haven't the crews to operate them...brilliant!

This from my post before the recent news

Taking permanent staff at the moment is not such a good deal for employers or shareholder value , more rather managing the situation is the goal even it that impacts some revenues ( over yield) with cancellation some compensation payment risk, and a little customer disappointment in the process.

Pretty much as BA are doing through this summer. They really really don’t want to take on permanent contracted staff right now with training costs etc….. if come winter they need to be let them go again.

It a pure case of managing and sweating resources and as it happens Finnair been so damaged by the Ukraine military campaign and closure of neighbouring Russian airspace having availability immediately and at no doubt competitive rates !

These leases are clearly simply part of that management process.

Finnair are also operating the Helsinki - Barcelona route on behalf of Iberia ( have been doing so for some time)

Whilst equally hit by the current conflict Air Baltic are operating for both SAS and Lufthansa ( Eurowings) for similar reasons.

The industry is in crisis and the current economic trajectories aren’t exactly rosey right now!

Slightly OT, but BA used to do the engineering as well on those ANZ DC-10s at LHR. I remember an urgent search through the maintenance records as soon as the news came through about the Erebus crash, before it became clear that it was unlikely to have been a technical issue.

Considering the fact they cut numbers substantially throughout the pandemic and operated a skeleton service I very much doubt this is the case. They actually need permanent staff/crew on the books if you've cut the numbers of crews as drastic as they have and plan to operate the flights they do. You make it sound that come October BA will go back to how they were operating throughout the pandemic, very few flights, mostly cargo runs and that's all. This is wrong - they didn't during the last economic downturn. People still want to travel and will travel.

Plus as we've learnt it's worth having them ready for the up turn which happens inevitably.

OK then, but don't schedule beyond your available resources. Which is what has been got wrong. If you don't want to take on and train permanent staff ... don't announce what you can't manage.

The point is that BA, as is well known, got rid of too many staff (or tried to fire and re-hire them on inferior contracts) to begin with. Looks like they underestimated the impact/reaction that strategy would have and are now struggling to recover.

As we have seen over many years at BA, the mantra to cut cost as the expense of almost everything else (except perhaps safety) has driven them to the point where they are taking the kind of measures that we are discussing, and although as you say these things are done with the aim that they enhance "shareholder value", those same shareholders surely can't like that assets are sat on the ground costing money rather then being "sweated" as you claim.