“Kuala Lumpur’s head-turning skyline offers the best of both old and new, with skyscrapers, minarets and Mughal-style domes making up the architecture of the city.” So says British Airways in its publicity for a revived route between London Heathrow and the Malaysian capital – a link it first served in 1956.
But anyone hoping to fly on BA33 for a winter warmer is learning this weekend that their flight has been cancelled. They are among around 200,000 prospective passengers whose plans have been torn up due to “delays to the delivery of engines and parts from Rolls-Royce” to British Airways.
BA, and by extension its passengers, have endured a tough summer. Hundreds of flights have been cancelled at short notice. Routes served by the Airbus 380 have been particularly hard hit, with repeated cancellations or substitutions of smaller aircraft – the latter happened with Saturday’s round-trip to Boston.
British Airways also faces shortages in its Boeing 787 Dreamliner fleet. To try to improve the resilience of an operation that has been creaking under the strain of the summer, BA has made wholesale cuts to its route network this winter.
In a bid to reduce the number of short-notice cancellations, the airline is freeing up the equivalent of three long-haul, wide-bodied planes each day between November/December and March/April – by making long-notice cancellations.
The Heathrow-Kuala Lumpur link is one of the casualties, with the route resurrection deferred until April 2025. People who have already booked will be offered a choice of switching to Malaysia Airlines or a full refund. The same choice awaits passengers booked on BA’s daily London Gatwick-New York JFK, which over the past few decades has probably been the airline’s most “on/off” route in the timetable; between 12 December and the end of March 2025, it’s off. Instead, British Airways has eight flights a day from Heathrow to JFK on what is the airline’s prime intercontinental route.
Probably hardly anyone will notice the third winter cancellation: one of BA’s two daily London Heathrow-Doha links will be grounded. With Qatar Airways (part-owner of BA) offering eight departures on the route, on planes up to and including the Airbus A380, there should be plenty of space. But plane problems spell fewer choices and higher…
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