BA cancels 900 flights

British Airways is to cancel up to 900 flights to and from Heathrow over the next three months, it emerged today.

They include services to New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Brussels, Manchester and Glasgow.

The airline also raised the threat of more cancellations during the build-up to the Christmas break.

Up to 70 flights face being called off each week. BA described it as a "prudent precautionary measure". The unprecedented warning of cancellations up to 1 December follows the chaos at Heathrow last month, when BA did not have enough staff to operate all its long- and short-haul schedules.

The airline - the UK's largest - says the forthcoming cancellations are not because of staff shortages. It says it wants to build some "slack" into a flight programme already jammed to capacity at Heathrow, where more than 500 BA flights take off and land every day. It says the revised timetable will mean that should anything go wrong, such as mechanical failures, there will be spare aircraft available.

Union leaders say this is "rubbish" and claim BA is still shortstaffed, particularly in Terminal 1. Ed Blissett of the GMB said: "BA is still short of about 50 or 60 check-in staff at Terminal One. The company is recruiting new staff but it takes a long time."

Another senior union official said: "You don't cancel this number of flights just to make spare aircraft available. There is something seriously wrong here with the whole staff and flightplanning schedule."

BA is now certain to lose millions more pounds as passengers switch to other airlines to be certain their plans are not ruined at the last moment.

A bitter and wide-ranging internal investigation was ordered by chief executive Rod Eddington into last month's chaos, which caused long delays and lost the company millions in revenue. It will come to a head at a BA board meeting on Friday.

The jobs of three of the most senior men - Mike Street, director of customer services and operations, Mervyn Walker, director of UK airports and Peter Read, operations director - are said to be most at risk. The forthcoming cancellations will add to pressure from shareholders for heads to roll.

A BA spokesman said: "To improve operational performance we have amended our schedules. There will be some reductionson a small number of routes which have a large number of daily flights from London."

He added: "Amending our schedule now is a prudent precautionary measure which relieves pressure on our flying programme and allows us to provide our customers with a more robust flight schedule."

The airline apologised to passengers and tried to play down the cancellations, saying they represented "only 0.5 per cent of our Heathrow flying operation this year". But the total annual number of flights to and from Heathrow is thought to be about 180,000.