End of the runway for the ‘Queen of the Skies’

Picture: British Airways

I’ve blogged before about the majestic Boeing 747 and how, after five decades in the air, its future was limited. Today, the era of commercial aviation that the original “jumbo jet” defined will come to something of an end when the final 747 rolls of the Boeing production line in the US.

The plane, a cargo version built for Atlas Air, will be the 1,574th production model built by Boeing since the programme began in 1968, the result of Pan American founder Juan Trippe challenging then-Boeing president William Allen to build a plane even bigger than the company’s 707 model, the original game changer to long-distance air travel. The 747, however, evolved things even further, providing a platform for up to 400 seats and the ability to cover vast distances relatively quickly. Significantly, it enabled affordable intercontinental travel: I’m sure most Brits’ experience of places like Florida and New York were the result of flying there in a 747. I know all my first visits to America were via the beautiful flying ocean liner.

Three years ago, as Covid started to wreak havoc, British Airways announced the immediate retirement of its 31 747s. The airline had, then, by far the largest fleet of the type still flying. However, even before the pandemic grounded airlines, the aircraft that democratised air travel had started to become an anachronism as more fuel efficient planes like the Airbus A350 and Boeing 787 DreamLiner began replacing such an ageing gas-guzzler as the 747. BA’s decision to end use of the 747 was, romanticism aside, a rational one. It was planning to retire the 747 in 2024 in any case - 25 years after its first -400 models were introduced - and had remained remarkably loyal to the type. US carriers United Airlines and Delta ended their 747 operations in 2017, while Virgin Atlantic (with whom I took my first US trip, in 1992) retired their 747s in 2020. Lufthansa, one of the few airlines to buy the last 747 type, the -8, are planning the retirement of their fleet, as has KLM.

In those mad days of yore when I used to get on a plane as often as some board a bus, no journey would fill me with the same excitement as one in which I flew in a Boeing 747. When I left San Francisco to move back to Amsterdam in 2003, I got upgraded to a business class seat for the flight with the now defunct Northwest Airlines, who put a 747 on the route. That meant sitting in the upper deck cabin, with a window seat looking out on the Golden Gate Bridge as we soared out of SFO. I’m not too ashamed to admit that I shed a tear - but not because I was leaving California, just the shear romance of it all. I've been lucky enough to get seats on that upper deck on a number of occasions, and it never fails to enamour, not the least, the novelty of having side storage bins that follow the contours of the Jumbo’s haughty prow.

Picture: British Airways

Even ‘downstairs’, the 747 experience just seemed like no other. Despite its enormous size, the 747 was a very quick plane. While it could never compete with Concorde for speed across the Atlantic, seven hours in the air wasn't a particular hardship to get to New York (even less on the way back to London with a decent following wind). What let BA’s fleet down towards the end was the ageing interior of their 747s, which often lacked the basic connectivity that more modern planes offer as standard. But these were, ultimately, minor quibbles. On journeys to and from San Jose in a previous job, the sensible approach would have been to take BA’s direct flight from Heathrow in a comfy 787, but with the 747 still on the San Francisco route, I’d opt for the love of Boeing’s jumbo, even though there’d be an arduous hour’s drive down to Silicon Valley on landing.

The 747’s decline is sad but it had, to some extent, outlasted its relevance. It will, though, continue in a long-running build for the US Air Force of two specially adapted jets to be used for the President (as ‘Air Force One’), along with cargo versions like Atlas Air’s new addition, a popular option for freight carriers due to the plane’s vast interior. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is also using one of his airline’s old 747s, Cosmic Girl,  for its nascent satellite launch venture. 

Indeed, the idea of large jets is not entirely over, either. Although the double-deck Airbus A380 has now stopped production, it is likely to remain in use for the foreseeable future, despite being, like the 747, four-engined. Emirates bought 118 of the type to ship large numbers of passengers to and from its Dubai hub. British Airways has even brought its own A380s out mothballs, having put them into storage during the pandemic. While not as romantically appreciated as the 747, passengers love the A380 for its comfort and, for such a lumbering giant, efficiency in flying point-to-point. 

It is, though, clear that despite the A380 enduring, twin-engined jets like the A350 and Boeing’s 777 and 787 models do the job, with less passengers, and more efficiently, from a carbon footprint point of view. The days of flying in a plane with an upper deck, and more than its sense of aviation decadence are, without doubt coming to an end.

Picture: British Airways

 

Falling out of love with the world's favourite airline

YouTube/British Airways

Last Friday, at the end of a week in which British Airways cancelled, without warning or explanation, my flight back to London from Silicon Valley, the airline breezily launched "a love letter to Britain", a glossy TV commercial featuring, amongst other famous British faces, Gary Oldman, Olivia Colman, Anthony Joshua, Ellie Simmonds, Nicola Adams, Paloma Faith and a posthumous cameo from David Bowie, all presenting a cosy, patriotic picture of an airline that is, now, owned by an Anglo-Spanish company based in Madrid.

It’s all part of BA's centenary which, according to an e-mail that landed the same day, marked “a hugely exciting time for us". The e-mail went on to trill that BA "wouldn't be celebrating without you. You have made us who we are today, and we're immensely proud of how far we've flown together”, followed by the revelation that "since you first travelled with us in 2003 you have flown 201,191 miles, which is the same as flying 8.1 times around the world." This, however, is not strictly true: I’ve been flying with BA a lot longer than that, it’s just that I only signed up to its Executive Club loyalty scheme in 2003. Here in lies part of what makes the modern-day British Airways - a lot of marketing masking an absence of the substance that built the so-called British “flag carrier” and its reputation in the first place. It’s been a long time since BA could call itself "the world's favourite airline". Because, frankly, there are many others that are simply better.

I say this partly out of love and loyalty. I took my first BA flight in 1989, and it was quite a way to start - First Class to and from Moscow as part of a Sky TV documentary team. I began flying regularly with BA in the mid-90s when my PR job with Philips frequently took me to Amsterdam, Berlin and elsewhere in Europe. And then, when I moved to Amsterdam itself in 1999, BA became, for the following 17 years living abroad, something of a bus service. So you could say that over the last 30 years I’ve invested considerable loyalty in the brand, even if it doesn’t show anywhere near enough reciprocal love these days as once it might.

BA has become a 'cost down' carrier, managed by accounting fanatics desperate to shave every last percentage point of profit from its revenues, regardless of the reputational damage it does. As a relatively minor case in point, BA's short-haul flights have stopped offering free snacks in economy class and have moved to the easyJet/Ryanair model of selling sandwiches and drinks at vastly inflated prices. Even if they are from Marks & Spencer (a gimmick in Britishness, even if M&S probably source their sarnies from the same supplier as easyJet), a Honey Roast & Farmhouse Cheddar Cheese Sandwich costs £3.90 in the air, whereas you'd pay £2.50 on the ground. Add £2.45 for a cup of tea and you’ve spent more than six quid on something other airlines give away for free. I’m sure most people could do without a snack for an hour or so, but what price a hot drink? Oh, and things get more interesting if you choose to conveniently use your Avios loyalty points instead of the cash you can’t easily get to in your cramped seat: on a two-hour evening flight back from Madrid the other week I bought that sandwich/tea combo, and dispensed with 900 Avios points for the privilege. To put this into perspective, I earned just 1000 Avios flying to and from Zurich with BA a few days later.

While we're on the topic of BA's stingy rewards, there is the Executive Club scheme itself. Progress through the different membership tiers is what drives the repeat business. As you go higher, you gain benefits like lounge access, free seat selection (avoiding the exorbitant charges to reserve a seat you were going to get, anyway) and priority rebooking in the event of flights being cancelled or overbooked. Here, BA has grown ever more light-fingered. That flight from Madrid was the third leg a trip from London to Milan, Milan to Madrid and then back to London. For my trouble I earned just five tier points from the flights from and to London, and ten from the middle flight, despite all three being of identical length and me sitting in economy throughout. The only difference was that the Milan-Madrid journey was with Iberia, BA's sister airline within the IAG group, and should therefore offer no difference to the BA rewards scheme. Another gripe is that occasionally I will take up the offer of a cabin upgrade for cash. Firstly, this doesn’t render any 'cabin bonus' tier points, which seems a little cheap. But there's worse: shortly before my trip to San Jose the other day I saw on the BA iPhone app that the magic 'Upgrade' button was highlighted, informing me that upgrades were possible. I discovered that I could upgrade both outbound and return flights to World Traveller Plus (premium economy) for the princely sum of just under £2,000 - £2,000! I could have booked two complete tickets in that class for that price when I’d made the original booking. So I declined, until the nice man at the check-in desk said that I could move up a cabin for just £270. Bit of a difference, that...

If BA's contemptuous attitude to economy passengers, manifested by a loyalty scheme that barely justifies the word loyalty, isn’t enough, then its planes - the very basis of its existence - are creaking. Not literally, thankfully, but the overwhelming feeling flying BA these days is that it’s not able to keep up with the modern fleets of many of its rivals, especially the Asian and Middle Eastern carriers. Remember my arbitrarily cancelled flight from San Jose? Well, it would have been made on a relatively new Boeing 787 Dreamliner, one of the new class of fuel-efficient, carbon fibre-constructed jets that feature all sorts of innovations to improve passenger comfort and wellbeing.

Picture: Nick Morrish/British Airways

My first experience of a BA Dreamliner wasn’t good - a flight to New Jersey in one of the most cramped economy class cabins I’ve ever experienced. Fair to say, my outbound journey to San Jose the other Sunday was more comfortable and in the larger and newer 787-9 Dreamliner model. Unfortunately, my journey back, rescheduled as a flight from San Francisco, an hour's drive away from San Jose on a Friday afternoon, was on an ageing Boeing 777, on which the crew couldn't switch off the cabin lights, less than ideal on a ten-hour overnight journey (ironically, the lights finally went off when the plane landed, as if all the system needed was a damn good whack). Its one nod to modernity was on-board WiFi, something in which BA has lagged behind many other major carriers for years (I first used it on an American Airlines flight ten years ago...). BA has promised to introduce wireless connectivity on 118 of its long-haul aircraft by this year, but based on my experience (i.e. just two of the ten long-haul flights I’ve made with the airline over the last 12 months), that rollout is taking a while. Getting WiFi into its planes should even be an opportunity for BA, given the premium it can charge for high-bandwidth streaming. The BYOD model could even replace traditional inflight entertainment, as passengers use their iPads and phones, often with better screens than seatback systems, to stream content from Netflix or catch-up players, or watch pre-downloaded programming.

A large part of BA's long-haul fleet is shockingly old, and staying that way. On another trip to Silicon Valley before Christmas I flew on a 20-year-old Boeing 747. Now, there's no doubting the romance of the “Queen of the skies", as aviation buffs call it. There is still a sense of grandeur to clambering aboard the original Jumbo Jet, with that massive, haughty-looking prow, its cockpit windows looking like the eyes of a slightly snooty headmistress, and its massive interior which, before ruthless airline economics took hold, used to feel luxuriously spacious. When it first flew in 1969, the 747 was a technological marvel: a giant ocean liner of the air that could seat well over 400 passengers comfortably in an age when 'jet set' not only evoked who was on board but also a degree of comfort to which even the most lowly economy passenger could enjoy. On top of that it was quick, too, averaging around 500 miles per hour in cruise. Today, though, it’s an anachronism - a four-engined gas-guzzler in an age of twin jet efficiency. BA still stands by the old lady, and although it has slowly started to drawdown its fleet of 747s, it will be at least another five years by the time they've all disappeared, some after more than 25 years' service.

Progressively BA has been refreshing its long-haul fleet, introducing 12 Airbus A380s and 30-odd Dreamliners over the last decade, with a promise of the first of an order of Airbus A350s to come by July this year. This fleet evolution is, however, tectonically slow. Even if the Dreamliner I flew to San Jose on was just three years old, it too lacked WiFi. To me that’s like buying a new car in 2019 without electric windows. Waiting to depart at Heathrow's Terminal 5 is an opportunity to see just how old BA's long-haul fleet is. If you’re lucky you might see one of its A380s (IAG chief executive Willie Walsh has recently said they’d consider buying more of these wonderful, comfortable super jumbos, but Airbus needs to slash its prices first). Emirates, the much admired Middle East carrier has built its fleet strategy around the A380, with more than 100 on its roster with some 142 planned to be in service when deliveries end. Other airlines, like Lufthansa and Qantas, have hedged on their A380 needs like BA. From a passenger point of view it’s a popular type - especially for its comfort, despite the huge size, but its cost always needs balancing, which is why some airlines have been negotiating with Airbus for the smaller A350. Either way, at least they’ve got relatively new fleets overall.

Picture:  British Airways

As BA retires its 747s it will still be left with more than 50 Boeing 777s, by then averaging a lifespan of 22 years. Today, many of these long-haul workhorses show their relative old age, with loose fittings (on my flight back from Dubai in October), or entertainment systems that don’t work and if they do are wedded to screens the size of first-generation TomTom satnavs. Amenities like in-flight entertainment are what relegates BA and the American carriers. The Asian and Middle Eastern airlines are, once again, streets ahead. Even Virgin Atlantic has long been ahead of its great rival BA in this department, offering seatback TVs when BA was still using communal bulkhead screens in its 747 cabins. Virgin’s Upper Class and Premium Economy seats are still on par with the Asian and Gulf airlines, and even in a standard economy seat on Virgin you don’t feel as commoditised as you do with BA.

This begs the question of why I stick with BA. To be honest, I don’t know. Lounge access can be bought or built up through loyalty to other, better airlines. But it’s somewhat shabby that BA should have benefited from my slavish loyalty (and for much longer than the 16 years I’ve been an Executive Club member) and yet the list of woes gets longer with every flight. I’m not alone, either, in feeling this way. In a recent survey for the consumer association Which?, BA came third from bottom, a long way behind carriers such as Singapore, Emirates and even Virgin. BA will point to the improvements it is making to cabin quality as a sign that it is taking the customer experience seriously. But frequent BA passengers beg to differ. Yes, the First and Club World cabins are plush, but step back into World Traveller Plus (premium economy) and World Traveller on long-haul flights, and the experience diminishes somewhat, especially on aircraft where ten economy class seats are now crammed across a row, with those rows appearing significantly tighter for legroom.

Picture: British Airways

Here lies the most vexing aspect of British Airways. An airline seemingly stuck in a vortex of its own making. It still wants to be see as a premium 'flag carrier', and yet its business ethos is stuck somewhere between premium and budget. But BA - which is as margin-minded as any business of course - at least once operated with pricing that you felt was being matched by service quality. At best you'd say it was average today. Yes, its planes get you from A to B with a reasonable degree of punctuality (unless weather events force the airline to just shut down...). and unlike Ryanair or the American carriers, there is still a feeling that you are being somewhat looked after while on board. But there is an overall feeling of decay, of doing more for profit and shareholder dividends than for the paying customer (unless you're paying first or business class prices). Ageing planes and increasingly flimsy rewards for long-term loyalty don't help, either. More importantly, there are simply better airlines out there offering better value for money. No amount of slick marketing, or the claim of making its 100th year "very special" via an "ongoing £6.5bn investment programme to deliver new aircraft, cabins, service and destinations" make a dent in BA's diminishing reputation unless it makes these deliveries sooner, rather than later. The clock is ticking.

Computer says no. Again.

Picture: British Airways

When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive” he probably wasn’t considering flying any distance in economy class. Airlines today are so cost-conscious (i.e. profit-minded) that those utopian days of the proletariat joining the jet-set are now a distant memory as we cram into 10-abreast seats too narrow, and in rows so tight we resemble the enmeshed and entangled bodies of Picasso’s Guernica.

Now, I know what an elitist (and faintly pretentious) thing that is to say, but as my new job will involve frequent international travel, which means flying economy in accordance with responsible company rules (unless upgrades can be scored by a combination of personal cash and general obsequiousness at the gate...), I have a vested interest. And because the majority of my airline loyalty points are with dear old British Airways, I will probably be defaulting to the creaking flag carrier, just to maintain my lounge status. Yes, that’s just how shallow frequent flyers are. Except that BA, once the “world’s favourite airline”, no longer is. In fact, events - largely, it would appear, of their own making - have contrived to make BA anything but.

BA's CEO Alex Cruz will probably be glad to see the back of September: earlier this month he had apologise before the media after it transpired that BA’s website had been hacked - possibly over the course of several days - during which data including customers’ e-mail addresses and credit card information (including critical three-digit CVV codes) was lifted, affecting some 380,000 transactions. Just this last weekend the airline suffered yet another “technical issue with some of our internal systems” (or ‘IT failure’ in clearer parlance) at its hub, Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5. Once again, this led to horrendous check-in queues and delays of up to two hours (“slight”, according to BA) to flights all over the world as computers managing the entire bag drop-to-boarding process fell over.

Twitter, as ever, bore the brunt of passengers’ frustrations: journalist Andrew Neil vented: “Yet another computer failure at Terminal 5 Heathrow for British Airways. Now regular occurrence. Flights delayed. Usual shambles, not yet on huge scale.” I’d hardly call it “regular”, but BA’s recent history of IT disasters certainly warrants the “shambles” part. “I think somebody at your organisation should press Ctrl+Alt+Delete and just start again,” another tweeted. BA strenuously denied that computer failure was at fault, calling it a “temporary glitch with some of our internal systems”. In other words, an IT failure.

IT problems have been at the core of BA’s worsening reputation in recent years. Having rolled out its new “cost-effective” ‘BA FLY’ IT system in 2015, it has been beset with problems. Employees reported it breaking within only a few weeks of coming onstream, leading to heavy delays at Heathrow and Gatwick. Almost a year later, on 7 July, 2016, the system suffered another failure, causing enormous queues for check-in at Heathrow. The system was to break down twice more that month, and again the following September, causing problems for the airline throughout the world. And then, in May this year, BA suffered its most reputation-damaging outage to date, when an employee error brought down the BA network leaving 75,000 passengers, their luggage and their planes stranded around the world, leading to 670 cancelled flights and a heavy dent in BA’s profits to boot. It’s easy to blame IT failures, but then again, they shouldn’t be happening so often to all the ‘mission-critical’ parts of an airline’s day-to-day operations, like check-in, baggage and boarding. And a multi-million pound retail activity like a national flag carrier's website, shouldn't be getting so comprehensively compromised by hackers. The suspicion is that penny-pinching, as BA obsessively tries to compete with budget airlines like easyJet and Ryanair, is undoing the reputation of an airline that once justifiably claimed to be one of the world’s best.

It’s no accident that most of my frequent flyer miles are with BA, built up mainly over the 17 years I lived abroad and made frequent trips back to the UK. However, over those years, the quality of BA’s service has noticeably eroded, and not just when ‘turning right’ into the supposedly cheap seats. Eager to cram in as many people has possible, even BA’s business class cabin has shrunk, squeezing rows tighter. Business class is where any airline makes its money, but without the high volume of economy passengers, a global carrier like BA would struggle. On short-haul flights, economy passengers now have to pay for snacks. This might be expected on budget airlines, but even when those sandwiches come from Marks and Spencer, it only adds to the cheapening of the BA product.The airline is also somewhat behind on what it provides for long-haul flights: the other week I flew to San Francisco on a 22-year-old Boeing 747. It’s a dear old aircraft - perhaps my favourite widebody still flying - but is definitely showing its age. Even BA's inclusion - finally! - of inflight WiFi on the outbound flight (notably missing on the return trip…) and a refresh of the seats doesn’t mask the fact that other airlines are streets ahead in bringing new planes into their fleets. But even where BA has introduced new aircraft, there are mixed results.

Picture: British Airways

A while ago I flew to Newark in New Jersey from Heathrow in one of BA’s new Boeing 787 Dreamliners, an aircraft much vaunted for innovations to enhance passenger comfort. The reality was that, flying in economy, it was probably the most uncomfortable flight I’ve ever experienced. Similar complaints can be found online of BA’s Dreamliner service between London and San Jose (a return journey on such planes I’ll be taking at the end of October...). Rather than being a sumptuous experience, BA has, it would appear, crammed as many revenue-bearing seats and rows into the 787 as possible. Frankly, I’m not looking forward to it, to the extent that when I repeat the trip to California in December I’ll be booking myself back onto the ageing 747, flying to San Francisco and putting up with a long hour on the 101 freeway to get down to San Jose.

Of course, I have options. Even with corporate travel, there are probably better options with other airlines, but these will almost certainly involve either American carriers (to avoid at all costs) or time- and patience-sapping stopovers where, inevitably, luggage will go missing, to be retrieved usually after the trip is complete. And now I think of it, BA’s history of losing luggage is not one to be proud of.

Whether they admit it or not (and I’m still prepared to defend it), BA has lost its sheen. Middle-eastern airlines like Emirates, Etihad and Qatar, have long eclipsed BA for service, comfort and innovations. Likewise one or two of the Asian carriers, like Singapore and Cathay Pacific. In Europe, I’ve had better experience with Air France, KLM and Lufthansa, carriers of similar or equal historical standing to BA. CNN’s business and travel reporter Richard Quest recently blogged that BA-bashing is “a national pastime”, saying that its status as a national institution put it on a similar par to the BBC or the Church of England for sniping. But having travelled almost exclusively with BA for many, many years, its decline - while not necessarily acute - has been palpable. A spoon fewer here, a more basic meal there - it all adds up. Quest points out that BA is, at least, refreshing its fleet with newer, more efficient planes like the Airbus A380, the Dreamliner and the A350 (which, in the example of the Finnair examples I’ve been on, is extremely comfortable), but if it is just going to squeeze in the maximum number of economy seats as possible, as my experience already of a BA 787 has found, all they are doing is putting Ryanair-standard cabins in the air on premium routes.

Picture: British Airways

Not everyone can fly in business class, and yet those of us flying economy on corporate tickets have often forked out business class pricing, as business travel agents tend to book expensive, fully flexible tickets, rather than the cheap-and-cheerful prices we see as consumers when booking our holidays. I have no problem with budget airlines: easyJet and BA’s own stablemate, Vueling, are perfectly fine for travelling down to the Mediterranean, for work or pleasure. But for long distances, the sort of flights that made BA the national flag carrier to begin with, there’s a sense of non-premium passengers being treated like commodities. I recognise the argument that we, as travellers, want to fly for the least amount of money possible, but I also think that if you want no-frills, you fly with a no-frills carrier (like Norwegian). For what British Airways charges for its longer flights, you’d have thought that passenger comfort - for those of us who ‘turn right’, would be given more attention.

As Quest points out in his post, BA will be 100 years old next year, “a perfect chance to turbo charge the necessary changes”. It was, once, a pioneer, introducing things like premium economy, in which you can ‘almost’ experience business class without paying the high price. Perhaps with a little premium thinking BA could do something about overhauling its currently bruised reputation, both on the ground and in the air.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should

"When Qantas created the 'Kangaroo Route' [from Australia] to London in 1947, it took four days and nine stops. Now it will take just 17 hours from Perth non-stop." So declared, yesterday, the chief executive of Australian airline Qantas while announcing plans to launch the first regular passenger flight directly between Australia and Europe.

Just think about it: 17 hours, probably sat in economy class. Not even in my most slovenly moments of box-set binge-watching could I imagine being able to remain mostly inert, squeezed into an airline seat for the equivalent of how much I'm normally awake during an average day. With four toilets between 232 passangers. Even an upgrade to business class wouldn't make much difference.

Despite my phobia that Australia contains most things that can kill you, it remains a country I would love to visit. But with my occasional flights out to the US West Coast at the very edge of long-haul tolerance (my longest-ever journey - San Francisco to Taipei - was partially aided by an accidental over-prescription of sleeping pills), the only way I could ever manage going Down Under would be by stopping halfway in Dubai or Los Angeles. I know a direct flight would keep the overall trip relatively brief, but I just don't think the risk of DVT, air rage (mine or others') or being sat next to someone with personal hygeine issues for 17 hours is worth shaving half a day off the flying time.

Even the prospect of flying on a Boeing Dreamliner - a plane that actually lives up to its manufacturer's hype and is both more comfortable for the passenger and more economic for the airline - doesn't make the ordeal any easier to contemplate. You'd still feel housebound at 38,000ft, and there are still only so many episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Friends you can take.