British Airways Flying Empty Planes Across the Atlantic

Published by AirlineFanatic | Filed under airline strategy

According to NBC Nightly News, British Airways is flying a good number of their transatlantic flights without any passengers whatsoever! You can see the original report, which aired a while ago here:

British Airways flying on empty

With oil prices hovering around $100 a barrel I found this new to be shocking. The TV report focuses on the environmental waste these flights produce. Since the planes were operating normally scheduled routes however BA is correct in pointing out no extra CO2 is produced because the planes fly empty.

What is surprising though is that BA would not just cancel the flights outright instead of hemorrhaging money on empty 747s. Its hard enough as it is right now to make a profit on a sold out flight, so I can’t imagine how much money is being lost every single time these planes leave empty. Why would BA do this if its so expensive you ask? Put simply, because of other political factors.

London Heathrow is one of the busiest airports in the world, and because of it is regulated by a certain number of arrival and departure slots available for the airlines to use. These slots come with a use it or lose it policy, meaning if BA doesn’t use all their allotted slots then other airlines can file for permission to use them instead. BA, famous for its anti-competitive behavior, would prefer to lose millions of dollars flying empty planes than it would see those slots going to Virgin Atlantic (or any other number of carriers now that Open Skies is in effect).

British Airways claims the reason the flights go empty is because there aren’t enough staff to comply with safety regulations, and so passengers aren’t allowed on board. The obvious question to me here is, why doesn’t BA just hire or promote enough flight crews so they can allow passengers on these planes. I’m sure there are literally tons of British Airways flight crews that would be eager to take up long-haul international routes vs. shorter domestic or EU flights. And it would work out better for BA too since long international flights across the Atlantic are so lucrative.

Overall this seems like a poor scheme from BA, and I doubt they will be able to support it much longer either due to cost or government intervention. Either they get there act in gear and start letting people on flight for which they are booked, or they should forfeit the slots to airlines than can use them.

Technorati Tags: british airways, LHR, transatlantic, virgin atlantic

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