BA plans to resume some flights in July

BA plans to resume a large number of flights in July, but Willie Walsh has said the Covid-19 crisis had made a third runway at Heathrow impossible. Walsh, the CE of BA’s parent company IAG, said its airlines, which also include Ireland’s Aer Lingus and Spain’s Iberia and Vueling, intended to operate about 1,000 flights a day between July and September. That represents half of the schedule the airline had expected to fly before the crisis forced it to ground almost all of its flights. The group hopes to run about 70% of its previously planned schedule by the final three months of the year, but Walsh said demand was unlikely to recover to 2019 levels before 2023 at the earliest. Walsh, a longstanding critic of Heathrow’s plans for a third runway, said the crisis had made it impossible to build. “There isn’t going to be a third runway. If they want to build a third runway they have to acquire Waterside, the British Airways headquarters. I’ll sell it to them tomorrow ... but I don’t expect they’ll be rushing to do a deal,” he said. IAG made a E1.7b loss after tax during Q1, compared with a profit of E70m in 2019. The loss included a E1.3b charge as fuel and currency hedges became worthless, and will be followed by “significantly worse” during the current quarter, IAG said. Walsh said there would be further job cuts at IAG’s other airlines, but he suggested they might be less affected than British Airways, which is more reliant on lucrative business customers.<br/>