British Airways claims to have found fix for flight delays

 British Airways claims to have found a solution to the delays that have dogged it for years after turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to manage flights.

A record proportion of flights departed Heathrow on time during the first three months of the year after BA used AI tools to minimise missed connections, avoid poor weather and deal more efficiently with disruption.

Two thirds of BA flights were even able to leave Heathrow ahead of their scheduled departure time in April, almost 20pc more than in 2024 and double the number for 2023.

The improvements follow £100m of spending on AI to help improve punctuality and operational resilience. The investment came after repeated delays made BA a target of criticism.

Archie Norman, the chairman of Marks & Spencer, said in May last year that BA had become a “deteriorating” brand after claiming that he had had a flight “cancelled then delayed” for the third time in a year.

Almost 3pc of BA flights were cancelled in 2023, compared with 1.5pc at EasyJet and 0.3pc at Ryanair. Delayed flights were held up for an average of 22.3 minutes

Sean Doyle, the BA chief executive, will detail how AI has boosted his company’s performance later on Tuesday in a speech in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on innovation in the travel industry.

Mr Doyle plans to tell the conference that machine learning has allowed BA staff to make better decisions based on a rapid assessment of vast amounts of data.

He will say: “Whilst disruption to our flights is often outside of our control, our focus has been on improving the factors we can directly influence.

“The tech [that] colleagues have at their fingertips has been a real game changer, giving them the confidence to make informed decisions based on a rapid assessment of vast amounts of data.”

Some 86pc of flights departed Heathrow on time in the first quarter of 2025, the best ever figure.

That ranked BA ahead of long-haul rivals Air France-KLM, Lufthansa and Virgin Atlantic, as well as discount operators Ryanair and EasyJet, according to figures from flight-data provider Cirium.

New apps for pilots, cabin crew and aircraft dispatch teams are also set to be introduced to speed-up aircraft departures.

BA’s bet on AI has seen it hire 100 data scientists and embrace a range of digital tools and apps. The most transformational has been one that looks at passengers’ connecting flights and allocates their plane a gate in the best possible location to minimise delays transferring.

That might mean European services delayed by bad weather are docked as close as possible to the next flight to New York, which connecting passengers might otherwise miss.

The step has slashed disruption to onward journeys, saving more than 2,600 hours of delays for passengers.

BA has also switched to a real-time weather programme that reroutes aircraft to avoid areas of disturbance in advance, saving 4,000 hours.

Other tools crunch live operational data to highlight routes that could face delays or calculate the most effective response to disruption from external events, such as air traffic control failures and the recent power outage at Heathrow.

BA is continuing to work through a £7bn programme that aims to transform customer service and boost punctuality through an overhaul of its IT systems, its website and booking app.

While around 600 individual projects were originally envisaged, more than 800 have now been rolled out following input from staff.