British Airways

[tleeds]

Good to hear. I enjoy using BA from LBA - much more pleasant all around compared to MAN which I sometimes use. Hopefully this is helping attract passengers to the route to ensure it keeps growing.

As I read on a post on this forum, BA figures using LHR are steadily increasing month by month! Must be doing something right! Lets hope for a night stop very shortly (I can wish).

 

[Finger66]

A night stop at LBA would send the figures through the roof. However slot constraints at LHR dictate otherwise and tequire BA to free something up from elsewhere. Any night stop wouldnt have to leave at the crack of dawn. Even if it departed at 0730 which is two hours earlier than the current southbound that would be great. Equally the last northbound doesnt have to arr LBA at say 2200, but could do with being a couple of hours later than it currently is. I know of a few people who would have flown back to LBA from LHR if they could but that northbound was too early. The night stop will happen which was supposed to be part of the agreement to LBA supporting LHR third runway and expansion. So watch this space

 

[Tarn Spotter]

Even 6am not to early for a London depart. I always got the 6am train down to London to be in the office as soon after 9am as possible. Flying at 6am would allow less of a rush and more breakfast meeting at the airport and to be back in the Leeds office by the afternoon.
Would also for me open up far more outward connections from LHR getting in to LHR before 7am.

 

[Finger66]

In thinking about an 0730 southbound departure I was hinting that getting an arrival slot at LHR prior to 0800 was going to be a no no but something perhaps 0830 ish may be far more attainable. Totally agree though that the earlier the better for onward feed. I could see there then also being a need for 4 rotations each weekday, two Saturday and three Sunday. Really good to see pax figures on the rise though

 

[KARFA]

I totally agree that an early arrival would really help both for connections and day trip to but I think any arrival before 0730 is going to be really difficult to get due to the lack of slot. There are already a lot of early arrivals both long haul, short haul, and domestic arrivals squeezed in to the early hours ad I think it would be hard to persuade BA to swap one out for a flight from LBA. Perhaps the 0730 departure option would be possible though.

 

[oldendays]

Two BA aircraft on the deck at the same time this evening, both A319s but one of them unserviceable since this afternoon. It's still parked on stand 7.

 

[lbaspotter]

A319, G-EUOC went tech after arriving on this afternoon's SHT20B.
A319, G-EUPW arrived inbound on the SHT20C and has operated this evenings SHT21X.

Guessing MAEL based at LBA have been unable to fix the tech aircraft meaning British Airways might have flown one of the own engineers up on this evenings service. Once fix she'll most likely re-position empty back to LHR using a "Speedbird" callsign and BAW flight no instead of "Shuttle" & SHT flight code.

 

[oldendays]

EUOC has been towed to a remote stand. MAEL have attended again but I don't think they're with it just now.

 

[jason1-11]

Let's hope EUOC is fixed soon as it's rostered to operate the lunchtime service today. Current plan is to re-position the aircraft back to LHR this morning (10:25).

If delayed, I wonder if the BA will canx the 1342 and operate the 1343 with OC instead.

 

[KARFA]

Doesn't seem like EUOC has gone anywhere yet. At this rate it may be there still this evening - I am due to fly on BA1345 so may see it if so.

Just worth mentioning that the 5th year anniversary of this route is coming up this December, see the post about the 4th year anniversary - there was a tasty cake made for all to enjoy. I will be on the morning southbound flight on Saturday 9 December so hopefully another cake to enjoy. Hopefully it will come at the end of another year of record passengers on this route.

Also the Kids fly free (children aged 12 and under) is back from June to October covering this route as well as BA's routes to Newcastle (NCL), Inverness (INV), Edinburgh (EDI), Belfast (BHD), and Billund, Denmark (BLL).

https://www.britishairways.com/en-g...free?source=H05X&hpsource=H05AXKidsflyforfree

Flights must be booked between 10 May 2017 and 1 October 2017, and travel must be taken between 1 June 2017 and 31 October 2017. Covers flights in Euro Traveler only. Can be booked as one way or return. Not applicable where the routes above are booked as part of a connecting flight except for connecting flights to/from Billund (BLL) from/to Leeds Bradford (LBA), Newcastle (NCL), Inverness (INV), Edinburgh (EDI), and Belfast (BHD). However, it seems to work if doing a connection between any of the domestic routes listed, for example pricing BHD-LHR-LBA with one adult and one child gives a quote showing £0 for the child.

Hope it is of use to someone.

 

[jason1-11]

Let's hope EUOC is fixed soon as it's rostered to operate the lunchtime service today. Current plan is to re-position the aircraft back to LHR this morning (10:25).

If delayed, I wonder if the BA will canx the 1342 and operate the 1343 with OC instead.

BA1342 now operating on G-EUPD instead.

 

[twevsmiff]

G-EUOC(Speedbird 9273) just getting outbound clearance to Heathrow(1200)

 

[White Heather]

Due to an IT 'outage' BA have had long delays across Europe today. This impacted on todays BA flight, with the first southbound flight not leaving LBA until around 1130am. The delays affected LHR badly but also other airports - and LBA was mentioned specifically as one of them on the national BBC news just now.

 

[whoshotjimmi]

Pretty disastrous day for BA. It is going to cost them millions and millions of pounds in fare reimbursement, out of hours crew, hotels, repositioning aircraft, delay compensation - not to mention however much it will cost them regarding loss of reputation and the inevitable amount of fare payers that will simply go elsewhere next time. That's if they get things up and running again today. If it carries on any longer, boy howdy....

Expect heads to roll.

The only potential good news from an LBA point of view is that, I assume, Saturday afternoon probably has a lower load factor than the rest of the week.

 

[tleeds]

G-EUOC had an hydraulic oil leak which Monarch's engineers based here could not fix. We were told that a part was being sent up on the BA1345 but this never materialised!

The outage from BA's FLY system seems to have been resolved however the system is still having issues developing loadsheets and connecting to their CLC in LHR.

 

[KARFA]

G-EUOC had an hydraulic oil leak which Monarch's engineers based here could not fix. We were told that a part was being sent up on the BA1345 but this never materialised!

The outage from BA's FLY system seems to have been resolved however the system is still having issues developing loadsheets and connecting to their CLC in LHR.

Thanks for the information.

In terms of the systems failures over the last few days it was more than FLY that went down. Pretty much everything went down including intranet and engineering compliance systems - only thing that kept working was internal Yammer. It seems today was the first day of fewer than 50 cancellations (only 13 from LHR today, it was 90 odd yesterday). Seems like it is slowly getting back to normal operations.

 

[tleeds]

Yes you're right!

Evening smaller things were affected! As a result the catering which is ordered on a basis of pax/flight more or less automatically could not be verified and as a result over the weekend most flights in and out of LHR for BA had no catering on board! Just shows how much we do rely on software these days!

 

[jason1-11]

Just checked in for tomorrow's BA 1344.

Counted 27 spare seats so with some passengers still to check-in perhaps, we can expect a load in the region of 120+.

 

[Finger66]

BA have axed LHR to SVG and LHR to BGO from this winter. These are middle of the day slots so don't do anything to help us get a night stopper at LBA. But LBA - LHR looks like it is still performing well so we can continue to hope that BA stick to their intention of getting us a night stopper sooner rather than later. As has been said before, that would increase pax numbers still further

 

[cmj]

The downturn in the oil market is really hitting then. I know someone who used LBA/MAN-LHR-SVG service frequently. Wonder if they will now change to KLM?