Delayed Flight Plague British Airways

According to recent reports released by the Association of European Airlines (AEA) nearly half of all British Airways flights are delayed making the airlines less reliable than other airlines. The statistics show that BA passengers have experienced a major increase in delays this year - with 43 percent of all short- and medium-haul flights arriving at destinations more than fifteen minutes late between January and March of 2008. British Airways now trails Europe’s other major airlines for punctuality and increasing number of lost bags, reports Charles Starmer-Smith.

BA’s delay percentage has increased sharply from their 29 percent for the same period last year. This makes them the worst performing airline of the 29 European carriers that submitted results to the AEA. Their bad rating occurred despite the fact that BA operated 12,000 fewer short- and medium-haul flights this year.

Their long-haul flights performed no better and ended up slightly higher than last year, with 44 percent of all flights arriving late.

While only about half of BA flights arrived on time, passengers on Air France, Alitalia, Iberia and Lufthansa enjoyed punctuality levels of more than 80 percent. BMI had about 75 percent of short- and medium-haul flights on schedule and 67 percent of long-haul flights arrived on time.

A BA spokesman said it had experienced a wide range of operational issues at Heathrow in the first three months of 2008, which had contributed to its low levels of performance, but they expect their schedules to improve and for more flights to arrive on time. “In addition, staffing levels were lower than usual in Terminals 1, 3 and 4 because we were running test and training operations in Terminal 5. We believe that once our operations at Terminal 5 settle in during the next few months our performance will begin to improve.”

www.britishairways.com