andrewr1985

corporate-wage-slave

Is this something you are seeing over the App / BA.com, or have you received an email / SMS notification?

If it is the first category, this comes up in this forum every so often because what BA.com does is join up the allocated aircraft's movements and comes up with delays building up. If you are within a few hours of travel then this make it fairly accurate, particularly in terms of arrival time. But further out what will happen is that the schedulers will simply switch in another aircraft and the delay goes away.

UKtravelbear

this is a situation where too much information is a bad thing. Telling people of delays days in advance due to a current delay on a scheduled plane - which may be caught up or another plane substituted - just causes unnecessary upset and worry

andrewr1985

corporate-wage-slave

OK, it is actually extremely common. If you see that often you will see a legitimate delay here, perhaps due to technical problems (and someone understandably complaining or asking for more information), what is also happening is that all flights using that aircraft for the next 3 days will also show delays, if you look on the App.

Which is why the generally the advice here is
- under 12 hours, use the App to see how things are doing
- 24 to 12 hours, look at the App, if it shows a delay it may well improve before departure
- more than 24 hours: don't look at the App.

In the mean time here are some more examples of this:
Flight Delayed Two Days in Advance (?)
(see post 6)

andrewr1985

Thanks all!

c-w-s, I've had a look and the flight is apparently operated by G-YMMO which is showing on time for the inbound but only has 2 hour turn around at LHR which doesn't seem like much for a 777-200ER and is my thinking of where this delay has come from.

It started out as 90 minutes and it's now down to 35!

A P Yu

Deleted - didn't have my lenses in!

Globaliser

As UKtravelbear says, this really is just a case of Too Much Information.

The process seems to work like this: About three days before the flight, BA allocates specific aircraft to specific flights. In effect, the aircraft has its planned flights for the next three days or so. These all have scheduled times. But the aircraft may at that time already be operating behind the scheduled times of the existing flights planned for it, or the flights allocated to it may involve turnaround times that are shorter than are practically feasible. It's sensible for BA to estimate the times at which the aircraft will actually operate the future flights planned for it. Any issue like these can mean that the times at which the aircraft is estimated to operate each of the subsequent planned flights is later than the scheduled times. And so the estimated times are basically what you are seeing.

What then usually happens is that over the following three days, BA will try to swap aircraft around between flights to eliminate or reduce the estimated delays. This can happen pretty much right up to departure time.

In some ways, it would be better if BA just didn't provide any estimated departure and arrival times any earlier than, say, 12 hours before the flight. Before that, whatever "delay" information you see is as likely to turn out to be wrong than right (or perhaps more likely to be wrong than right).

If you're looking at the current scheduled turnaround time between BA256 and your BA239 tomorrow (1:55), that's actually not been unusual for the aircraft operating BA239. On 16 May, there was a scheduled turnaround time of 2:10 for G-VIIB, on 17 May there was a scheduled turnaround time of 2:15 for G-VIIG, on 19 May there was a scheduled tunraround time of 1:55 for G-VIIH and on 20 May there was a scheduled turnaround time of 2:15 for the same aircraft. In all of these cases, there was no delay to BA239.

So I think that the best advice about this is just to ignore what you're being told until about lunchtime tomorrow. It's very likely to be no delay at all.

Often1

That delay is now showing a departure delay of only 35 minutes. That is close to insignificant on a TATL flight even if it sticks as to the departure. A touch of tailwind, a bit less ground traffic, or a more direct approach into BOS and the 35 minutes could go away.

I do agree that this is largely useless information until the time that it might affect BA notifying passengers that they may check in later than originally scheduled. Clearly not the case here as all it has done is create a time burden for OP and some call center staff who have no visibility into the situation beyond what is already showing.