Travel misery as Heathrow enters its third day of chaos

As millions of families begin half-term week, and many others start bank holiday weekend getaways, British Airways will enter its third day of disruption and cancellations today

- SIMON CALDER

The carrier has axed at least 200 flights since its systems were crippled by an outage on Thursday, with several of today's services now affected.

Even allowing for the cancelled flights, yesterday was forecast to be the busiest day for flying from the UK since before the Covid pandemic. More than 3,000 flight departures were expected, carrying an estimated half-a-million passengers. BA must buy tickets on rival airlines for disrupted passengers to get them to their destinations on the same day as originally booked, if space is available. But at the start of the half-term week for many schools and the bank holiday weekend, few spare seats are available.

The BA disruption is not yet on the scale of the late May bank holiday 2017, when another IT failure led to all of the airline's operations at Heathrow and Gatwick being grounded. But the loss of revenue, hotel costs and passenger compensation will run into many millions of pounds.