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SUMMER holidays to far-flung destinations are in jeopardy as British Airways is considering suspending long-haul flights, it was reported last night.

The airline may be forced to pause the sale of flights to destinations such as New York , threatening to worsen disruption to Brits’ holidays.

BA announced on Tuesday it had stop selling short-haul flights for an extra week due to the current cap on flights at Heathrow Airport .

The UK flag carrier originally suspended the journeys until last weekend, before extending this to August 8, then again to August 15.

But last night a spokesman told The Telegraph that cancelling longer flights was not off the cards.

The devastating decision could throw back Brits’ travelling plans to dream destinations after years without holidays due to Covid .

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The harsh suspensions of flights so far have been imposed as a result of Heathrow Airport’s holiday hell in recent weeks.

More than half of the flights out of Heathrow are operated by BA.

Britain’s busiest airport rationed the number of flights out of its terminals and ordered airlines to cancel at least 1,000 more flights last month.

The airport capped the number of planes able to fly each day until September telling airlines to stop selling tickets, in a similar move to Gatwick Airport earlier in the summer.

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And now flights to far-away could face the axe as well after the short-haul suspension failed to stem the airport disasters.

Since the start of the summer, airports around the UK have crumbled beneath the sheer number of Brits travelling again.

Holidaymakers have been hit with last-minute cancellations which stranded them in foreign terminals or left them thousands out of pocket just to get themselves home.

Hellish queues lasting hours have forced airport staff to issue warnings about arrival times and bags have been lost or delayed in mountains of luggage .

Heathrow has said its terminals were desperate for an intervention to minimise pressure on “critical functions in the airport which are still significantly under resourced”.

There is a shortage of check-in staff, bag handlers and other logistics personnel following the pandemic when so many could not work.

The latest announcement from BA that long-haul flights could be affected as well might push other airline prices higher and make holiday-planning even more difficult for Brits desperate to get away.

Alex Macheras, an independent aviation analyst, told the Telegraph that it was “realistic” to expect that BA to cut back sales of long-haul flights amid ongoing disruption.

He said: “With the current restrictions, caps and pressures that are being put on airlines, there is no way they could guarantee that not a single long-haul flight will be affected.

“BA’s global route network is incredibly vast and while short-haul flights with multiple frequencies will always take the hit first, they also operate long-haul flights with multiple frequencies. So there is room there as well to trim down the schedule.

“The stand-out example would be the route to New York, but also other flights to North America and South East Asia.”

Yet the BA spokesman said the airline was dealing with ticket sale suspensions on a case-by-case basis with no blanket restrictions.

This means a traveller on a cancelled morning flight should be able to reach their destination at a different time that day.

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Despite admitting that the decision would be a “responsible” course of action, BA also confessed it could lose a small fortune during the the suspension of ticket sales.

One aviation data firm, OAG, estimated the passenger number restrictions could cost airlines as much as half a billion pounds.

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HUNDREDS of thousands of Brits have had their holidays blighted by flight cancellations from UK airports this summer.

But some airlines have managed better than others.

Jet2 has been named as the only UK airline not to cancel a flight in July.

Flight data published by travel intelligence company OAG shows that Jet2.com operated every flight – without making any cancellations.

The Yorkshire-based airline fared better than its UK competitors such as easyJet, which had a 1.3 per cent cancellation rate last month, while British Airways saw 3.6 per cent of flights cancelled and Virgin Atlantic had a cancellation rate of 2.3 per cent.

Steve Heapy, CEO of Jet2.com and Jet2holidays said: “This summer is proving to be incredibly busy and because we prepared well in advance, it means we are flying millions of happy holidaymakers to and from their destinations without having to cancel their plans.

“There has been a lot of focus on the disruption affecting our industry, but this data shows that it is not all bad news.”

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Research carried out for Dispatches by air travel data provider OAG estimates that, since January, 1.7million people flying into or out of the UK have been affected by cancellations within 48 hours of their flight.

Most UK airports have been hit by the travel chaos, with queues for security seen sneaking outside terminals and into car parks, and passengers pictured sleeping on floors overnight.

The problems have been blamed on a number of issues, the main one being staffing problems at both airlines and airports, as travel recovers to normal levels following the Covid pandemic.

In an effort to curb the number of cancellations at Heathrow, they’ve imposed a 100,000 daily cap on departing passengers.

The airport has even ordered airlines to consider booting holidaymakers off flights to bring an end to the travel mayhem plaguing Britain this summer.

While this was initially to last until September, it has now been extended to October , with fears that flight caps could be brought in again next year.

Heathrow boss John Holland-Kaye said: “It’s absolutely possible that we could have another summer with a cap still in place.

“It’s going to take 12 to 18 months, and not just at Heathrow. This is not going to be a quick fix.”

As a result of the cap, British Airways has suspended the sale of the short-haul tickets from the airport until August 15.

Flights from Gatwick are more likely to have been cancelled so far this year than at any other major UK airport.

The rate is 10 times worse than Stansted , the best-performing British hub.

More than 3% of planned flights from Gatwick didn’t take place, compared with 0.3% of those from Stansted, according to figures from air travel intelligence company OAG provided exclusively to Sky News.

June was Gatwick’s worst month this year – one in every 14 flights from the airport was cancelled.

The data is supplied to OAG from airlines, government agencies and other sources, and a cancellation is defined as any flight that an airline published to operate and was not cancelled at least 48 hours before departure.

A Gatwick Airport spokesperson said it regrets any cancellations and disruption to passengers – and explained it is going to carefully increase capacity over the coming months “so that airlines fly more reliable flight programmes and passengers experience a better standard of service”.

It said this would help both airlines and ground handling companies, which are employed by airlines, in reducing the number of flights they need to manage.

Which airlines have cancelled most flights?

Ryanair was the best-performing major airline worldwide – it has cancelled just 0.3% of flights so far this year.

Michael O’Leary, CEO of the budget carrier, has said that his company saw the recovery coming and got staff back early, and pointed out that as they were based in Ireland they were still able to benefit from frictionless European labour where this became more difficult for UK-based airlines following Brexit.

British Airways is the worst-performing UK airline. At 3.5%, you are over 12 times more likely to have had a BA flight cancelled than a Ryanair one if you were expecting to fly in the first six months of 2022.

This data covers flights up to 10 July and doesn’t include the further 10,300 cancellations announced by the company , affecting flights due to take off before the end of October.

Globally, China Eastern, based out of Shanghai, has been by far the worst affected, a product of the severe lockdown in the city from March onwards.

A BA spokesperson attributed some of the problems to major storms in February, when one in seven of its flights was cancelled in a week-long period, the peak for the year. It also suffered an IT fault at the end of March, which coincided with one-tenth of flights being cancelled at short notice.

The airline also highlighted increased exposure to global factors such as the Russian war in Ukraine and continuing COVID restrictions in Asia, compared with the likes of easyJet and Ryanair who only fly within Europe.

The figures show that, during the peak of the pandemic in 2020, easyJet was the worst-affected global airline.

It cancelled more than 50% of its 200,000 scheduled flights that year, and more than 99% of all flights that were meant to take off in April 2020.

A spokesperson from the company said “the UK government had the most onerous and long running travel restrictions in Europe and, as the UK’s largest airline, we were disproportionately affected.” When there were fewer restrictions they said they were able to matched capacity very accurately to demand.

Read more: Heathrow tells airlines to stop selling summer tickets and imposes passenger cap until September British Airways cancels 11% of flights during summer holiday peak to avoid airport disruption

OAG says consumers may have been blocked by airlines from booking many of these flights during the first frantic period of the pandemic, although they were not formally called off until less than 48 hours before the scheduled take-off time.

These flights are included within the data set, but the disruption was unlikely to have affected as many people as more recent cancellations.

Why are there still flights being cancelled with no COVID restrictions?

The low overall percentages mean that you are still unlikely to have had your flight cancelled if you were set to travel this year, although it has been worse at different points, peaking in February when more than 1 in 20 flights from the UK was scrapped.

One of the key reasons for the ongoing disruption is staffing.

Kully Sandhu, managing director of Aviation Recruitment Network Ltd, said that the number of vacancies it is trying to fill for positions such as baggage handlers, cabin crew and cleaners had doubled since 2019, while the number of applicants had halved.

Gatwick Airport told us its plans to manage the coming months were put in place because “an airport review found that a number of companies based at Gatwick are operating with a severe lack of staff resources over the summer holiday period”.

One of the things putting people off relates to the security requirements to work at airports. Applicants must provide a detailed five-year employment history, which is particularly rare for entry-level positions.

Mr Sandhu said job adverts at certain airports are also more popular than others, depending on the demographics of the area.

John Grant, chief analyst at OAG, said: “When we entered COVID, airlines made a lot of people redundant. During that two-year furlough period, those people found jobs elsewhere and have not returned to the industry.

“Of those that have returned, their security policies will have expired. They need to be vetted again and go through the same process as they did two years ago.

“We didn’t come out of lockdowns until the end of March as far as the air transport industry in Europe is concerned, so there’s a huge amount of people who need to go through the process.”

In the current strong jobs market, it is just easier and quicker to get other work – often with better hours – elsewhere, explained Mr Sandhu.

He also said that Brexit had meant that workers from Europe, particularly those who only came to provide temporary labour in the busier seasons, were no longer applying in the same numbers.

How does it compare with before the pandemic?

The latest figures mean that a flight in 2022 is 2.5 times more likely to be cancelled than one booked during the same period in 2019, but there have been huge improvements compared with the peak of the pandemic.

In April and May 2020, more than three-quarters of flights from the UK were cancelled and the number of scheduled flights has still not recovered to a “normal” level.

How does the UK compare with other countries?

The UK has performed worse than other major European countries that have had more than 200,000 flights scheduled this year so far.

But the likes of the US, Canada, Indonesia and Turkey have performed even more badly. Mr Grant said that the US and Canada have only lifted COVID travel requirements in recent weeks, and pointed out that Indonesia was a very closed market as Asian countries applied their own rules to travel, “creating almost total lockdowns”.

The harsh lockdown means that of the biggest global airports, the worst-performing 20 are all from China.

More than four in five flights from Shanghai’s two airports were cancelled between April and May, the same proportion as have been cancelled in Ukraine since the Russian invasion.

How can you avoid being affected?

Mr Grant recommends booking away from the peak times and the busiest airports.

He said: “One of the interesting patterns is that if you choose to depart from 10am to 2pm, airports tend to be less congested. There’s more space between planned departures and we’re seeing lower rates of cancellation.

“Certainly don’t try to get on the first flight to your destination because that’s when every airline in Europe is sending hundreds of aircraft in the sky, between 6am and 8am in the morning.

“Another thing to consider is to fly from an airport that is smaller where there are fewer flights and fewer airlines operating, so there is more scope to accommodate those delays.”

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

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