I grew up with BA being an iconic global airline: the Concorde, the ethnic tails, a sense of sophistication and high levels customer service. Now, when I browse the FT trending threads page, BA dominates the top 15 and not in a good way. Delayed flights everywhere, cancelled flights left and right, baggage missing, customer service recovery lacking or nonexistent, and so on. I know you are a very active group of posters, but even then it seems disproportionate.
It wasn't like this even two years ago, but this last year it seems like things are going off the rails at BA from the outside perspective. Are things really going that poorly and why is that? What needs to happen to right the ship?
The sad truth is that BA no longer need to innovate or be an industry leader. Their biggest asset is Heathrow, people will fly on them because they connect London, a global trade and financial hub, with the world, as someone who lives in London it makes sense to fly BA, since if you choose to avoid BA, you have to choose either to be loyal to another airline (like KLM), which means having to connect on every flight (unless flying to the hub of your chosen carrier), or just fly the airline who goes to where you're going, Cathay to HKG, SQ to Singapore etc, but that means missing out on FF benefits, unless you fly enough to get top tier status on all 3 alliances, which very few people do. Sure there's Virgin, but their route network is so limited that unless you exclusively fly to and from the US (or the smattering of other destintaions they fly to), you'll be missing out on FF benefits (or have to connect) whenever you go anywhere which is not to a Skyteam hub.
BA doesn't have the 'problem' that the likes of Qatar or Emirates face, they have to convince you to pick their [mod edit: inconvenient airport] to connect through, which they do by offering crazy luxury products, BA don't need to convince anyone to come to (or live in) London, it markets itself. Really the only airlines that BA does need to compete with are the US carriers on its cash cow transatlantic routes, but even though it has slipped it is still far ahead of any of them, so they pose no real threat either.
The fact that it dominates LHR, which is so tightly slot controlled, means that no other airline can get enough of the London pie to really be a threat to BA. Now BA's new CEO has stated that he aims to get BA to be more 'premium', which is positive, and I suspect has a lot to do with the planned expansion of LHR, since a new runway means more slots, and therefore more competition (this is also why, counterintuitively, BA were quietly against Heathrow expansion, while Virgin, who are desperate for more slots, were so vocally in favour of it), so if that expansion is coming, then BA need to lay the groundwork now to become more premium if they are to be able to compete with that increased competition when it comes. I suppose time will tell how far they will go (and how much money they're willing to spend to achieve it).