British Airways has seen boosts to its operational performance thanks to investments made as part of its recent 7 billion GBP transformation programme.
Speaking at the Future Travel Experience World Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh, Chairman and CEO, Sean Doyle, stated that AI, forecasting, optimisation and machine learning have enabled the airline to improve performance across the board, with the new technology suite seeing implementation throughout every aspect of the business.
Flight punctuality from its London Heathrow base has increased to 86% within the first quarter of 2025, the highest D-15 punctuality performance on record and an increase from 46% in 2008.
The quarter also saw 90%+ of flights leave at their scheduled departure time on 38 of the 89 operational days, with last month (April) having seen two thirds of all of British Airways’ flights leaving Heathrow ahead of their departure time, doubling the number during the same period in 2023 and increasing numbers during the time frame in 2024 by nearly 20%.
Sean Doyle, British Airways Chairman and Chief Executive, said:Improving operational performance is a key part of our investment programme because we know the impact delays and disruption can have on our customers.
Whilst disruption to our flights is often outside of our control, our focus has been on improving the factors we can directly influence and putting in place the best possible solutions for our customers when it does happen. That’s why we’ve invested £100m in our own operational resilience, putting funding into technology and tools, and devising a better way of working on the ground at Heathrow as well as creating an additional 600 operational roles into the airport.
The tech colleagues have at their fingertips has been a real gamechanger for performance, giving them the confidence to make informed decisions for our customers based on a rapid assessment of vast amounts of data. It’s exciting that our industry is able to harness this capability, which will develop even further in the months years to come.
The 7 billion GBP investment programme was first announced in 2023 and aimed to deliver improved customer experience and better on-time performance.
The development and installation of the tools responsible for the airlines’ latest performance increase was made possible by a 100 million GBP investment, and has seen more than 100 data scientists take on roles at the company as a whole. To date, 830 change projects have been rolled out.
Work carried out as a result of the initiative include improving both performance and resilience of the airline’s systems, migrating data centres to the cloud in order to increase digital stability, with 90% of British Airway’s systems now working entirely from the Cloud.
Elsewhere, a new application developed by technical experts at the airline enable traffic controllers to allocate aircraft landing at London Heathrow to available stands based on a live analysis of any onward travel plans of passengers onboard, cutting missed connections and saving 160,000 minutes of delays.
A real-time weather program that reroutes aircraft to avoid areas of poor weather has also been deployed, which is capable of communicating directly with Air Traffic Control flow management centres across Europe in order to source and generate more efficient routings, itself preventing 243,000 minutes worth of delays.
Finally, British Airways is also using predictive technology to both collate and assess live, real-time operational data in order to concentrate on routes that might face delays, allowing for preventative measures to reduce the risk of disruption.
The airline has stated that it intends to implement additional tools and programmes over the coming months, including new apps for pilots, cabin crew teams and aircraft dispatch teams.
