I took two short-haul flights earlier this month with British Airways. One was from London City (LCY) to Amsterdam, and the other was from Amsterdam to Heathrow (LHR). And both were early!
Having experienced almost nothing but delays with BA for most of my last years of flights (including a sequence of 25 in a row), this was a huge surprise.
It’s almost like the airline I worked for many years ago, when punctuality was sacred.
I thought I was just lucky. But it seems that it’s down to a £100 million investment in improving operational resilience.
AI, forecasting, optimisation and machine learning have transformed the airline’s operational performance.
Every part of British Airways now uses this technology, which has significantly increased the number of flights departing on time or ahead of their scheduled take-off times.
The first quarter of 2025 saw 86 per cent of its flights on time from its London Heathrow base, the highest D-15 punctuality performance on record.
British Airways flights achieved 90+ per cent on-time departures throughout the quarter, on 38 of the 89 operational days.
And last month (April), two-thirds of all of the airline’s flights departing from Heathrow left ahead of their departure time. This is more than double the number that achieved this for the same period in 2023 and almost 20 per cent more than those that did in 2024.
What’s behind this improvement?
In 2023, British Airways announced a major £7bn investment programme designed to deliver a world-class passenger experience and better on-time performance.
£100m was invested in digital tools and apps to improve operations. The result is:
- Data Driven: Over 100 data scientists crunching numbers to enhance your journey.
- System Upgrade: Core IT systems being moved to the Cloud for more stability (90% done).
- Smarter Landings: Tech now directs Heathrow landings based on your onward travel, cutting missed connections (saving 160,000 delay minutes!).
- Weather Wise: Real-time weather program proactively reroutes flights, avoiding bad conditions (saving 243,000 delay minutes!).
- Predicting Delays: New tool flags at-risk routes, allowing proactive measures.
- Disruption Support: Tech helps teams make smarter decisions during disruptions.
- Runway Smarts: Tool models disruption scenarios (like bad weather) to minimize impact.
- More to Come: New apps for pilots, cabin crew, and dispatch teams to speed up departures.
This is all good news. But many passengers want BA to sort out their appalling website and eStore.
I dread using their website, it’s impossibly slow and tedious. And loads of my eStore transactions never appear in my Avios. I am certainly not alone with these issues. Let’s hope BA finally sort these out.
Both recent flights were good, but on my flight to Heathrow last week, I couldn’t use the power socket.
Power socket on BA A319 on 13 May 2025 [Image: PassengerExperience.com]
More on British Airways and tech
British Airways trials digital wayfinding to help passengers get around Heathrow
British Airways trials fully autonomous wheelchairs
British Airways to trial Bill the robot for passenger service
Sean Doyle, British Airways Chairman and Chief Executive,:
“Improving operational performance is a key part of our investment programme because we know the impact delays and disruption can have on our customers.
“Whilst disruption to our flights is often outside of our control, our focus has been on improving the factors we can directly influence and putting in place the best possible solutions for our customers when it does happen. That’s why we’ve invested £100m in our own operational resilience, putting funding into technology and tools, and devising a better way of working on the ground at Heathrow as well as creating an additional 600 operational roles into the airport.
“The tech colleagues have at their fingertips has been a real gamechanger for performance, giving them the confidence to make informed decisions for our customers based on a rapid assessment of vast amounts of data. It’s exciting that our industry is able to harness this capability, which will develop even further in the months years to come.”
