The lingering post-Covid 19 supply chains issues affecting the entire aerospace industry were taking a turn for the worse, notably for airlines, as British Airways just announced flights suspensions on key routes departing gatwick for the next few months. At cause, the increasing difficulty to source critical spares for the Rolls Royce Trent 1000 engines that power its Boeing 787 aircraft.
Two weeks ago, the issues began affecting the airline’s flight operations causing temporary grounding of five of the airline’s Boeing 787s. Directly impacting long haul flights operations from London’s gatwick airport, the airline announced the cancellation of flights to New York JFK and Doha, Qatar while also postponing the re-opening of its daily route to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Faced with a growing crisis with no potential solution in sights for the short term, the airline finally decided to suspend flights on those routes for the coming months.
The most affected route is the highly popular London Gatwick to New JFK route whose daily service is suspended from December 12th until March 25th, meaning all passengers service during the busy year’s end holiday season will have to be redirected to a different airline at Gatwick or transit through Heathrow where British Airways will maintain its eight daily flights to JFK.
Similarly, the post-covid 19 return of the airline to Kuala Lumpur which had originally been scheduled to resume on November 10th using a Boeing 787-9 has now been pushed back to April 2025. With cancellations also affecting the airline’s daily service to Doha, British Airways is now expecting to cancel 103 flights throughout the period.
The Trent 1000s engines built by Rolls Royce are one of two engine options available for the Boeing 787 with the other designated the GEnx being produced by General Electric. British Airways which operates a mixed fleet of Boeing 787 comprising 12 Boeing 787-8s, 18 Boeing 787-9s and 11 Boeing 787-10s has reportedly 24 Boeing 787s fitted with the Trent 1000 engine. As five of these aircraft became grounded these past few weeks, the airline lost 15% of its 787 fleet.
While the industry has been plagued by technical issues affecting the reliability of the most recent engines across the commercial aircraft fleet, such as the Rolls Royce Trent 1000 on the Boeing 787s, the Rolls Royce Trent XWB97 on the Airbus A350-1000s, the Pratt & Whitney Geared Turbofan family on the Airbus A220 and A320, supply chains issues have decimated spare engines inventories. With shortages of spare parts, airlines engineering and maintenance departments have been compelled to ground aircrafts. Facing the same problems, manufacturers have postponed the deliveries of new aircraft, driving airlines in return, to retain older aircraft in operations just for the sake of maintaining capacity. These problems have also propagated to defense programmes such as the F-35 aircraft whose production has been delayed by the low production rate of its Pratt & Whitney-designed F135 engines. The latest British Airways announcement seems to suggest that supply chains issues that had once only been negatively impacting flight operations managers are now poised to begin disrupting the flying public preferences.