I am writing this from Nashville, Tennessee, where British Airways was supposed to have flown me and a planeload of Boeing 787 customers on a direct service from Heathrow. However, the night before our intended departure I received a terse message from the airline saying that the flight had been cancelled. A later email informed me that I would be flying on their code-share partner American Airlines (AA) to Charlotte, North Carolina. Then after a layover I would eventually be deposited at my destination.
There is mounting frustration at what they say is BA’s ‘unreliability and general low standards’
Not surprisingly the American Airlines flight was rammed with passengers, many similarly bumped BA customers. You could tell who was who by the expressions of frustration and anger on their faces. The AA crew told me this had been happening a lot lately and that the previous day there had been three last-minute BA cancellations out of Heathrow, while more were anticipated on the day we were flying. The official line from BA was that the cancellation had been caused by an air traffic control problem brought on by inclement weather. This had the AA staff rolling in the aisles. ‘How come extreme weather only seems to affect BA flights?’ they smirked.
Meanwhile, here in Nashville tourism officials are equally annoyed by the problems that a sub-standard and unreliable BA is causing. I was asked to turn my tape recorder off before they would fully express their despair at what was once a leading force in the world of aviation. Since the inaugural flight in May 2018, BA’s daily direct flights have contributed greatly to this city’s tourism boom, so gratitude is immense – equally, there is mounting frustration at what they say is BA’s ‘unreliability and general low standards’.
Sadly, it is a complaint that follows our national airline across its global network. It is so bad on the popular London-Cape Town route that many of the frequent business travellers I know are abandoning BA, which operates tired old Boeing 777s on this service, and choosing instead to fly with one of the Gulf carriers – Emirates, Etihad or Qatar Airways. Although this adds many hours and often a stop-over to the journey, these grizzled travellers say that the comforts and competitive pricing of the Gulf airlines more than make up for the inconvenience. Their superiority is confirmed in the 2023 Skytrax World Airline Awards, in which airlines are graded according to passenger satisfaction; Qatar Airways came in second (after Singapore Airlines) and Emirates fourth, while BA managed only a lowly eighteenth. In 2006, BA topped the Skytrax charts.
Last year, I flew on all three of the Gulf airlines and agree wholeheartedly with the Skytrax ratings – their aircraft are newer, the inflight meals are better, the wine lists are more creative, and the in-flight crews are infinitely more welcoming and cheerful than the rather downbeat staff one finds on BA. A former Emirates flight attendant claimed that when she joined, it was easier to get into Harvard than to be chosen as an Emirates flight attendant – she was just one of ten selected out of 150 interviewed applicants.
So, what has happened to Britain’s flag carrier, the one formerly known as ‘the world’s favourite airline’? The decline can be dated back to 2008 when the then chief executive Willie Walsh, a notorious cost cutter who had come from Aer Lingus, announced swingeing budget cuts. Three years later, BA merged with the Spanish airline Iberia and became a wholly owned subsidiary of IAG, International Airlines Group, a multinational with its registered office in Madrid.
Walsh’s successor but one, the Spaniard Alex Cruz, who had come from the Spanish budget airline Vueling, was another celebrated cost cutter. It was during his four-year tenure, which ended in 2020, that BA endured a series of staff strikes, IT meltdowns, data breaches, more cost cutting and the Covid crisis; MPs took to calling BA a national disgrace. They were late to the game as the airline’s passengers had been saying this for more than a decade. It was during his reign that once loyal passengers began declaring: ‘I’m flying ABBA – anything but BA.’
Although there has been some stabilisation under the latest CEO – a very smart Irishman named Sean Doyle who gets it – it seems those years of budget cuts and chaotic mismanagement have left our once great national flag carrier a mere shadow of its former self. The journalist John Arlidge, who has written extensively on the airline over the past decade, says ‘BA has gone from a reliable 9/10 carrier to an unreliable 6/10 and while Sean Doyle is trying to reverse his predecessor’s mistakes I reckon he has another year or two at most to improve matters or BA will never recover.’
All of which is not particularly encouraging. As I sit stewing in Nashville with a sore back as a result of too many flying hours, my fevered brain wanders into unpatriotic territory. Is it time to lower the Union Jack on BA and replace it with a commercial flag of convenience?
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