BA plans to operate ‘vast majority’ of flights from Heathrow after raft of short-haul cancellations

British Airways was forced to cancel short-haul flights from Heathrow this morning following “technical issues”.

The airline said it was “planning to operate the vast majority of flights for the rest of the day”, having had to cancel all short-haul flights from Britain’s biggest airport until midday.

“We are extremely sorry that due to the continuing technical issues we are facing we have regrettably had to cancel a significant number of short-haul flights from Heathrow today,” said a statement.

Earlier, BA said that customers due to travel today needed to check their flight status on ba.com before coming to the airport, as “we anticipate further disruption during the day”.

It said its long-haul services at Heathrow and all flights at Gatwick and London City Airport were due to operate as planned, “but customers may experience some delays”.

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The airline said the problem was related to a hardware issue and was not because of a cyber attack.

The company added its website was working and customers could check in online and at the airport.

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“We are offering customers on cancelled services options including a full refund, and all customers booked to travel on short-haul services from Heathrow today can opt to rebook to a later date for free if they choose,” a statement added.

“We will be contacting customers proactively.”

On Friday evening, British Airways suffered a major outage, which caused flights to be cancelled.

The airline’s website and app were down for hours, leaving customers unable to check in online or book flights.

‘BA running on paper’

Ed Hall, 54, a television executive from Woodstock, Oxfordshire, was stranded on a plane for over an hour after touching down at Heathrow Terminal 5 on Friday because the crew could not access any IT systems to get a stand where passengers could disembark.

He said there were issues even before his BA 399 flight took off from Brussels.

Mr Hall said: “We couldn’t take off as the pilot’s system that calculates weight, loads and distribution went offline and we had to go back to the gate from the runway to get a (manual) copy sent from London.

“BA is running on paper tonight.”

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