As British Airways and Virgin Atlantic battle with Rolls-Royce, the real loser is the passenger

Airlines like to make a song and dance about new or restored routes. So it proved with British Airways’ planned return to Kuala Lumpur.

BA announced in March this year that flights would resume this month, promising: “The airline will operate daily flights between the Malaysian capital city and London Heathrow on a 787-9 aircraft.”

But last month British Airways said the flights had been cancelled for the winter due to “delays to the delivery of engines and parts from Rolls-Royce”. At a stroke, 200,000 seats were removed from the available capacity between the UK and Southeast Asia.

Malaysia Airlines will continue through the winter as the only carrier on the Heathrow-KL route. The Malaysian carrier is making the most of the shortage of capacity and absence of nonstop competition, pricing festive flights at £2,744 return – for example out from London on 16 December, returning three weeks later.

Virgin Atlantic, too, is cancelling flights wholesale. Planned resumptions of flights from Heathrow to Accra in Ghana and Tel Aviv in Israel have been deferred until next winter.

“Our Cape Town schedule will also pause one month earlier than planned, on 31 March 2025,” a spokesperson tells me.

“It’s been necessary to make these changes due to reduced availability of Rolls Royce Trent 1000 engines, which are fitted to our Boeing 787-9 aircraft.”

Critical shortages of spare parts are affecting many airlines, with Covid being blamed. Given that even the long-closed US reopened to British visitors three years ago this week, attributing inadequate inventories to the virus may sound absurd.

Yet industry insiders say that, at the height of the pandemic, many manufacturers scaled back their operations and made staff redundant as demand for their precision-engineered components evaporated.

Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines fitted to relatively long-in-the-tooth Boeing 787s are now at the point when many components need to be replaced according to the stringent rules designed to ensure planes are safe.

One of 15,000 passengers affected by the early termination of flights from Heathrow to Cape Town is Rob Burgess, founder of the Head for Points frequent-flyer website. We spoke an hour after he learnt his Easter 2025 trip on Virgin Atlantic to Cape Town had been cancelled.

Mr Burgess says that the axed flights…