BA boosts punctuality with advanced tech

 
Above: A BA Airbus A350.
Courtesy BA

The airline’s Chairman and CEO, Sean Doyle, told the Future Travel Experience World Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh that AI, forecasting, optimisation and machine learning have transformed the airline’s operational performance and become an integral part of getting customers to where they need to be with minimal delay to their travel plans.

Every part of British Airways now uses this latest technology, which has significantly increased the number of flights departing on time or ahead of their scheduled take-off times.

The airline has invested £100 million in improving operational resilience and the first quarter of 2025 saw 86% of its flights on time from its London Heathrow base, the highest D-15 punctuality performance on record. This is compared to 46% in 2008.

Throughout the quarter, BA flights achieved over 90% on-time departures on 38 of the 89 operational days. Also, last month, two thirds of all the airline’s flights departing from Heathrow left ahead of their departure time. This is more than double the number that achieved this for the same period in 2023 and almost 20% more than those that did in 2024.  

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 £100 million 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.”

In 2023, British Airways announced a major £7 billion investment programme designed to deliver a world-class customer experience and better on-time performance.

A fundamental part of the strategy has been a £100 million investment that has seen the development of a range of digital tools and apps designed to boost operational performance. More than 100 data scientists are now employed by the airline, working on projects across the business. In total, around 830 change projects have been rolled out.

The foundation of this work has been improving the performance and resilience of the airline’s systems, including the migration of data centres to the Cloud to bring increased digital stability. This work is now 90% complete.  

Across the operation, technical experts have developed an application that means the airline can now allocate aircraft landing at Heathrow to stands based on a live analysis of the onward travel plans of customers on any given flight, cutting missed connections and disruption to onward journeys. This has saved 160,000 minutes of delays.

A real-time weather program that proactively reroutes aircraft to avoid areas of poor weather has also been deployed. It is capable of communicating directly with Air Traffic Control flow management centres across Europe to find and generate more efficient routings and has prevented a total of 243,000 minutes of delays.

The airline is also using a new tool that uses predictive technology to bring together and assess vast amounts of live real-time operational data to highlight routes that could face delays, allowing teams to put in place additional measures to reduce that risk.

Tech-based programmes to help operational colleagues make the best possible decisions during periods of disruption have also been shown to have had a significantly positive impact.

For example, BA’s Runway support tool that calculates the most appropriate schedule intervention when disruption occurs. It uses data from the planned schedule, passengers and crew to determine the most appropriate response to disruption such as cancellations, arrival delays or aircraft changes. It has been used to model 163 disruption event scenarios across 2024 and 2025 to minimise the impact of air traffic control rates and bad weather for customers.

Over the coming months, additional tools and programmes are also being deployed to further improve operational performance. These include new apps for pilots, cabin crew teams and aircraft dispatch teams to help speed-up aircraft departures.