GodAtum

Looking at Flightaware https://uk.flightaware.com/live/flight/BAW33, BAW33 is scheduled to leave at 2015, but has always been late the past week. Anyone know why?

Cymro

My reading of that is that it's just the usual Heathrow noise...

It's scheduled to arrive at 1605 and it manages to arrive on time on those numbers.

If Heathrow is at capacity it then makes sense to let other flights with less padding in the schedule go first and have two on time arrivals instead of one early and one late.

simons1

BA33 is to KUL, for those that do not carry around a list of BA flight numbers.

I don't really follow the OP though, from what I can see in the last 14 trips the flight has arrived more than 5 minutes late only twice, and both of those were within 30 mins. If it's leaving late then there is padding in the schedule and it is probably being allowed to happen.

nux

The preceeding flights have mostly arrived on time as well, so not due to late inbound aircraft. Probably just the LHR factor. The flights have mostly arrived on time.

Airprox

Flight aware lists take off times. Take yesterdays BA33 for example:

Schedule departure time: 2015
Actual Pushback time: 2018 (only 3 minutes late)
Actual airborne time: 2043 (25 minute taxi, pretty normal for LHR, 20 is the default)

Flightaware declares in red that the aircraft was delayed and departed at 2043, whereas in fact it was a totally normal on-time departure.

Oxon Flyer

Looking at the list of runway departure times for the past week, you appear to have picked on one of BA's more consistently on-time flight numbers as being "always late". Why the interest in this one in particular ?

stanian

Hi I have only just joined after typing into google, the exact same question asked here. Why is BA33 nearly always late? I was on BA33 last october and got lucky we departed slightly late but as mentioned above we caught up time. Now early next year I will travel the route again and have been looking at this flight, but on flightradar24 it shows an average delay of 37 minutes and looking at arrival times over the last 2 months it has been late more than it has been on time. MH1 in comparison although it quite often takes of with more of a delay to start with seems to make up more time. As we have connecting flights in KL and BA33 has been late enough at least twice in the last 2 months for us to miss the connection, even allowing 3 and a half hours I have booked on an alternative option. So the question I feel is still valid. Even if you look through the plane registrations, they are mostly late on the LHR-KUL route. .

rapidex

I would guess closure of Pakistan airspace due to conflict with India has something to do with this. Its causing congestion on the remaining available routes.

corporate-wage-slave

Hello and welcome to Flyertalk stanian, and a particularly warm welcome from the BA forun, it's good to see you here and thank you for your question.

Currently the route is suffering from geo-political tension between India and Pakistan, Yemen-Saudi Arabia, the Gulf and Iran, which are 3 separate areas of dispute at the moment. So flight times are being somewhat extended at the moment since BA adopts advice received from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and (indirectly) the Joint Intelligence Committee. At some point BA will simply reissue the timetable with a later arrival time.

rapidex

Not forgeting that MH can be a little careless with their routings on occasions with unfortunate consequences.

nancypants

rapidex

It was bad luck they got hit. careless to use that routing given the risks. just because the others were also careless does not make it a correct decision.

stanian

Hi, Thanks for the welcome, that makes sense avoiding the above mentioned trouble spots, but why then are some airlines not avoiding them, is it by choice, are some airlines considered more at risk than others due to their political involvment maybe? I see that the route changes after Turkey, with BA flying through Iraq, then routing through the centre of the vey busy persian Gulf, over the northern tip of the UAE out into the Gulf of Oman before crossing the Arabian sea and India. MH1 routes further East and down through Iran just crossing the southern tip of Pakistan before crossing India and on to KL. With tensions bubbling in the persian gulf, it could be considered that this is a dangerous area too. Is it the Airlines that decide on routing based on risks? I am not sure taking any risks is the right thing to do with peoples lives, better to get there late than not get there at all.

corporate-wage-slave

I don't know a lot about how other airlines handle this, though I know that some relatives of the MH passengers are taking MH and KLM to court over the Ukraine incident - KLM on the basis that the service was a codeshare. MH says they weren't advised, and I imagine their Malaysian equivalents to the FCO and JIC won't perhaps have the same global reach as the UK's institutions. What I do know if that if BA or Virgin gets a hint from JIC that they should avoid a given area, they will do exactly that, and indeed did do that for Donetsk. I think the political allegiances of airlines makes only a minor impact, for example in the Ukraine case the Russians didn't know what they were shooting down since it was so far up they couldn't see identification details.

jbfield