The new AI tools BA is using to cut delays and cancellations

Times

a day ago

It's a hot June lunchtime at remote stand 572 at Heathrow Terminal 5, and I'm waiting on the tarmac for British Airways flight 343 to arrive from Nice. I'm here to see a 'turn', as it's known in aviation jargon; in layman's terms it's a turnaround, the process that deals with an arriving aircraft, unloading it and getting it ready to go back out again.
It's 1.30pm, and the Airbus A320neo is late. It was due to arrive at 1.10pm, but despite the flight information having flashed up on a digital information board, it has disappeared again. After a quick look at Flightradar24, a plane tracking site, I realise the aircraft has performed a go-around — an aborted landing, perfectly normal — to avoid coming too close to another plane on the runway. At 1.48pm, it inches onto the stand and turns off its engines.
So far, so ordinary. BA343 is just one of about 650 planes that land at Europe's busiest airport each day. But the cool thing here is that it's the first time a BA turnaround has been performed using only zero-emission equipment: buses that run on vegetable oil; baggage tugs, which look like little golf buggies, running on lithium batteries; and electric-powered steps to get passengers off. It might not sound like much, and if you're disembarking chances are you won't even notice. But the goal of this new hardware is to make the whole process more efficient and reduce delays for passengers. It's part of a wider multibillion-pound transformation of the airline.
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This summer is predicted to be exceptionally busy, according to figures from the aviation data agency Cirium, with a record number of passengers forecast to go on holiday. Almost 52 million of us will travel between June 1 and August 31, up from 51 million last summer. There is also some nervousness about air-traffic control delays due to hot weather or strikes. Eurocontrol, which runs European air traffic control, said in April that in the first four months of the year European air traffic was up by 5 per cent compared with the same period in 2024, with delays also up by the same amount. Add to that a pile-on over British Airways' revamped loyalty scheme, the Club, and you can see why the flag carrier might be nervous.
Last year BA announced a £7 billion transformation programme, with money funnelled into new cabins in state-of-the-art aircraft such as the Airbus A320neo and sustainable initiatives, such as the carbon-neutral hardware out on the airfield. The airline has also invested £100m in 'gamechanging' and 'integral' AI forecasting tools — essentially what the BA boss Sean Doyle calls 'devising a better way of working on the ground at Heathrow' — which, when put into practice, will ultimately mean fewer delays and cancellations for passengers. The results so far are promising: in the first three months of 2025, 86 per cent of BA flights left on time from London Heathrow, the highest on record; in 2008 it was 46 per cent.
I went to Heathrow to find out more and see how BA is using machine learning to improve the passenger experience. I'm getting an exclusive look at the airport's revamped Air Operations Control Centre (AOCC), the eyes and ears of BA's operation at Heathrow; as well BA's Integrated Operations Control (IOC) at its Waterside headquarters, to the northwest of the airport.
One of the new tools at the AOCC is Mission Control, a giant interface beamed onto a giant screen in the control centre. It shows real-time tracking of each BA plane on the ground at Heathrow (blue shows arriving aircraft, flashing yellow shows planes about to depart) and how many connecting passengers are on board. I can see flight BA453 arrive from Ibiza and BA115 depart to New York. A screen tracking New York JFK has been configured too. London-New York is the busiest international route in the world; after the British capital it's BA's largest international destination.
Mission Control is also a big part of BA's IOC at its Waterside headquarters, where staff monitor up to 900 daily BA flights across the network. The real-time data from the interface ensures that staff can track the aircraft and make on-the-go decisions about where aircraft need to go.
I sit down with Ben Lang, who looks after BA's schedule, planning where to use its more than 280 jets. He showed me the Pathfinder planning tool, which uses thousands of pieces of historical data to make the flight plans, pulling in information about delays, air-traffic control restrictions and aircraft capacity. For example, Lang explains, if flights from Paris are always delayed by ten minutes, Pathfinder will allocate an extra ten minutes to the turnaround process; and if there's a big sporting event happening, bigger jets will be deployed to cope with demand.
I also get a look at Runway, another AI forecasting tool that kicks in when disruptive events such as storms, strikes and — particularly relevant at the moment — blocked airspaces threaten to throw passengers off course. Using masses of data, it can allocate the most efficient aircraft for a particular flight, making what it calls a 'swap'. For example, during Storm Eowyn in January, Runway swapped out smaller aircraft that would typically fly to Glasgow and Edinburgh for larger planes to stop passengers getting stranded in Scotland. At the top of Lang's screen, it says the tool has improved the number of on-time flights by 1.1 per cent over the past five days by making 233 of these swaps.
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Elsewhere in the IOC there's AI-powered Flight Watch, which shows flight routes, closed sections of airspace and particularly nasty bouts of turbulence as well as other weather events; it can also communicate directly with air-traffic control towers, which helps teams to reroute flights through less-delayed airspace. More than 3,500 minutes of flight time were recently saved in one day, Richard Treeves, head of the IOC, told me. A new AI crew app launched earlier this month, automating the manual task of rostering the right staff onto the right aircraft. Everything is designed to make the operation run more smoothly and crucially reduce delays and cancellations for passengers.
'We're now entering one of our busiest periods of the year and will be flying millions of customers around the world throughout July and August,' René de Groot, BA's chief operating officer, says. 'The new technology we've introduced has been a real gamechanger, allowing us to make more informed decisions based on vast amounts of data. We have even more in the pipeline — including new apps for our operational colleagues — and we're in a much better place to deliver a smooth travel experience this summer and beyond.'
Back on the tarmac, I can see for myself how Mission Control has alerted flight teams, showing them that it was better to change the aircraft to quash the potential delay. The late arrival of BA343 means it's too late to be turned around for its planned 2pm departure to Milan. It's instead bound for Amsterdam, now departing at 2.30pm — not even 45 minutes after it arrived. I watch as bags are loaded and passengers arrive to board. No one will notice the work that went on behind the scenes — but that's the point; the important thing is that everyone gets from A to B on time.
Do you think the changes will make a difference this summer? Let us know in the comments below