British Airways to cancel further 10,000 flights up to end of October
Hundreds of thousands of British Airways passengers are set to see their travel plans upended again after the airline announced it would cancel more than 10,000 flights until the end of October.
At the same time there have been more votes by rail unions to strike at operators including LNER, potentially adding to summer transport disruption.
BA said its move was designed to “protect holiday flights” after the chaos witnessed over the Easter and half-term breaks due to a lack of staff at airlines and airports.
It will scrap an average of about 100 flights a day as it continues to struggle to deliver its schedule amid labour shortages and threatened strikes at its main Heathrow hub.
BA said all of the affected flights in the latest round of cancellations would be short-haul, where there are more multiple daily departures on major city routes.
It follows a similar number of pre-emptive cancellations made in early May for the entire summer season, and comes on top of a relatively small number – about 650 – axed from the July schedules last week.
The airline said the whole aviation industry “continues to face significant challenges, and we’re completely focused on building resilience into our operation to give customers the certainty they deserve.”
The latest trimming of the schedules, which has taken out almost one in seven of BA flights originally on sale, has been enabled by the government’s “slot amnesty”, announced last month.
That has allowed BA and others to reduce their operations this year without forfeiting the right to valuable landing slots at Heathrow and other busy airports, which normally have a “use it or lose it” rule.
BA said: “The government recently decided to give the whole industry slot alleviation to minimise
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