We’ve now almost passed the second day of British Airways' strike action. If anything, it looks as though British Airways has been hit even harder by the strike today than yesterday. In fact, at one point today, there was not a single British Airways flight in the sky.

Members of the pilots union BALPA who act as pilots for British Airways are currently on strike. The pilots are not working in a row over pay, despite being offered an 11.5% increase over the next three years. As such, no passenger flights operated by British Airways departed from London Heathrow today.

Day 1 recap

Today marked the second day of strikes by British Airways Pilots. Yesterday only one flight that was operated by British Airways Pilots departed London. This was BA7, a service from London Heathrow to Tokyo.

While unconfirmed, it appears as though the service was operated in order to take fans to the Rugby World Cup. The tournament is currently being hosted by Japan. However, the English rugby team avoided the strike action by flying out on Sunday evening, before the strikes started.

British Airways, Pilot Strike, One Flight
Some of those onboard BA7 were likely heading to the Rugby World Cup. Photo: British Airways

Day 2

If you thought operating just one flight yesterday was unfortunate, things got worse for British Airways today. Today marked rival British airline Virgin Atlantic’s first Airbus A350 service. The flight operated from London to New York. While a British Airways flight did travel from London to New York today, it wasn’t operated by the British flag carrier.

According to British Airways, a BA aircraft takes off or lands somewhere in the world every 90 seconds. However, today only one British Airways Aircraft departed Heathrow Airport. The aircraft had no passengers on board and was merely a maintenance positioning flight. The situation got so dire that, earlier today, there was a period of time where not a single flight was in the air with a British Airways flight number.

British Airways Centenary
British Airways first ordered the Airbus A350 six years ago. Photo: Tom Boon - Simple Flying

What’s next?

Tomorrow, British Airways pilots will once again don their hats and jump back into the cockpit. There is no formal strike action planned for tomorrow. However, some residual delays will remain. A large portion of the British Airways fleet is displaced as the airline couldn’t physically fit all of its aircraft at London Heathrow.

While Heathrow’s Terminal 5 has been largely empty for the past couple of days, things should slowly get back to normal tomorrow. Another day of strike action has been planned by British Airways Pilots for the 27th of September. However, we hope that both the airline and the union can solve their differences before this happens.

At the time of writing Simple Flying had not received and update from yesterday’s statement by British Airways.

Were you due to fly on British Airways during the strike? Did you still reach your destination? Let us know in the comments.