Tens of thousands of British Airways passengers face delays and possible cancellations after another major IT failure.
Passengers at London Heathrow Terminal 5, as well as airports abroad, say they have been told communications systems have failed.
In one example, flight BA365 from Lyon to Heathrow remained on the ground in France for two hours 40 minutes, rather than the expected hour. It is now in the air but is likely to land over an hour late.
The airline’s website, ba.com, and its app also appear to be down – after repeated attempts by The Independent to access the site, a message was displayed reading: “We are experiencing high demand on ba.com at the moment.”
Problems began shortly after GMT 1700. Some outbound British Airways flights from Heathrow have been delayed by up to two hours, including departures to Geneva, Larnaca, Vienna, Vancouver and Dusseldorf. The 6pm flight to New York JFK is expected to leave 90 minutes late.
Hmm…..@British_Airways IT systems down. Cannot push back as the pilots cannot generate a load sheet…even the internal phone system apparently not working. Stuck at the gate.
— Christopher Addy (@cjaddy) November 18, 2024
Domestic flights to and from Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle are running an hour or more late.
Arrivals from Continental airports are typically being delayed by an hour or more. Some flights are now expected to touch down from Europe close to midnight, including BA flights from Barcelona and Prague.
Hector McNeil wrote on X: “British Airways cmon let’s have some updates pls on the pc outage. Stuck in Vienna!!!!”
His BA Airbus A319 landed on schedule at the Austrian capital from Heathrow shortly before 6pm, but left nearly two hours late.
Between 5.45pm and 8.45pm only one of dozens of scheduled British Airways departures from Heathrow was on time: a flight to Rome.
With limits on the hours in which planes can depart and arrive at Heathrow, any disruption can swiftly lead to cancellations.
In addition, the complex air-traffic control operation at Heathrow requires a steady flow of departures and arrivals in order to function properly.
Any “bunching” of flights can swiftly lead to widespread disruption.
Many passengers flying into Heathrow in order to transfer to departing overnight flights are likely to miss their connections. For example the early evening flights from Edinburgh and Glasgow, due in shortly before 7pm, were over two hours behind schedule. Arrivals from Belfast and Dublin are about 90 minutes late.
We’re sitting on the tarmac in Hamburg… same thing, pilots are grounded until they can get clearance to leave, they need to know how heavy the plane is to calculate take off speed etc… so we’re waiting. @British_Airways
— dRisk (@d__risk) November 18, 2024
Long-haul flights are also affected, with the BA11 to Singapore an hour late leaving Heathrow. The inbound flight from Johannesburg, due to arrive at 4.45am, is running two hours behind schedule – with a consequent impact on connections on Tuesday morning.
A spokesperson for the airline said: “Our flights are currently operating, but are experiencing delays as our teams work to resolve a technical issue affecting some of our systems.”
At least six BA flights serving London Heathrow on Tuesday have been cancelled: to and from Geneva, Milan Malpensa and Nice.
British Airways has a long history of falling foul of IT failures. In May 2023 more than 200 BA flights were grounded, affecting over 30,000 passengers across a bank holiday weekend.
Even worse, over a bank holiday weekend in May 2017, during a routine systems upgrade, a switch was thrown that brought the entire BA Heathrow operation to a standstill. Hundreds of thousands of passengers had their travel plans torn up.
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