BA’s May punctuality sets new record

British Airways has recorded its best ever May global punctuality performance with 87 per cent of flights departing on time. The strong performance built on a good April and busy Easter period when the airline saw more than 85 per cent of flights departing on time.

British Airways' operations out of London Gatwick were the best on record for any major carrier with 94 per cent of all flights departing on time in May and 92 per cent in April.

The latest record performance builds on a greatly improved operation throughout the winter as Heathrow's Terminal 5 continues to deliver the very highest levels of customer service.

Terminal 5 looked after more than four million customers in April and May and around 30,000 flights with more than 75 per cent of customers now rating the airline's service as either very or highly satisfactory.

By having more than 90 per cent of its Heathrow operations in one terminal, British Airways has also been able to improve its baggage performance.

The overall number of bags delayed per 1000 customers in May was reduced to 10. This is down from a peak of 38 delayed bags per 1000 customers in summer 2007.

The big majority of delayed bags continue to be transfer bags, which are not delivered on time by other carriers from other terminals at Heathrow in time to meet their onward flights.

British Airways direct baggage performance was down to less than 3 delayed bags per 1000 customers in May.

Andy Lord, British Airways' director of operations, said: "We have never had such consistently high feedback scores from our customers and our operation continues to break records on an almost weekly basis.

"On many days we now have more than 90 per cent of our 720 daily flights around the world departing on time.

"We are achieving these figures despite the fact that our two main UK homes are at the world's busiest dual runway airport and the world's busiest single runway airport. This puts our operations under more pressure than all of our main European rivals and means that runway and air traffic capacity issues are still the biggest cause of delayed flights."