British Airways (BA) came bottom in the Association of European Airlines” table for punctuality and baggage-delivery for the January-March period.
The carrier has mislaid 28.9 bags per 1,000 passengers since January, the disastrous launch of Terminal 5 being a large contributing factor.
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”We have experienced a wide range of operational issues at Heathrow in the first three months of 2008, which have contributed to our low levels of performance,” said a BA spokesman.
”These include a major incident involving one of our Boeing 777s in January, several failures of Terminal 4”s baggage infrastructure and continued issues with the lack of runway and ATC capacity to help manage minor disruption.”
Low-cost airline bmi came second bottom and BA suggested it was no coincidence both are based at London”s largest and most congested hub ” the BA spokesman added: ”It is interesting to note that the worst two carriers in terms of baggage performance are the two biggest carriers at Heathrow airport.”
Turkish Airlines came top of the lost baggage table, losing only 4.3 bags per 1,000 ” followed by Ukrainian airline AeroSvit and Air Malta.
Figures showed that overall punctuality on short-haul services saw a marginal improvement, with 80.4% of flights departing within 15mins of schedule compared with 79.3% in the corresponding period in 2007.
Long-haul punctuality deteriorated slightly to 68.3% from 68.7% in 2007.