Having your flight cancelled is almost always upsetting. For it to happen three days before Christmas is usually awful. Travellers are highly invested in their plans, and for them to be torn up at the last minute – with few options remaining for travel before 25 December – can take a particularly heavy emotional cost.

As I write on Saturday evening in Vienna, I am thankful that my flight on Sunday to London is scheduled to touch down at Stansted, not Heathrow. There is a good chance I will land roughly on schedule. But the British Airways departure, expected at 11am from the Austrian capital to Heathrow, is one of 80 flights cancelled by BA on Sunday.

Other airlines have also trimmed their schedules, with Virgin Atlantic grounding a round-trip to Miami. Lufthansa of Germany has cancelled two Frankfurt arrivals and departures. Swiss, TAP Portugal, Eurowings, SAS, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and Turkish Airlines have also grounded flights.

The cause: with strong winds predicted, air traffic controllers have reduced the rate at which planes can land and take off.

Heathrow is the world’s busiest two-runway airport, with landings as close as 80 seconds apart. During strong winds, the rate of arrivals is slowed, inevitably leading to cancellations.

These are ideally made in advance rather than on the day. Carriers with frequent flights at Heathrow are mandated to fillet their schedules; airlines with just a single departure, such as Avianca’s flight to Bogota each night, are largely immune.

Among the British Airways cancellations are six flights to and from Amsterdam and Glasgow, as well as links with Madrid, Nice and Barcelona.

Common to all of these locations is high frequency to and from Heathrow. Here in Vienna, for example, British Airways has four other Sunday departures. If your final destination is Heathrow, you will probably be accommodated on one of them; if, like many passengers, you are connecting, then other routings may be possible, though seats are scarce so close to Christmas.

One passenger booked on a different airline told me: “They first automatically rebooked a flight for Monday. I thought, no way. And got on the phone. “It took hours – and a meltdown – before anyone answered the phone and even then it was a real tussle. They are now sending us indirect.”

There will be thousands of stories like this: I calculate at least 15,000 passengers have had their Heathrow flights cancelled. Which raises the question: is this acceptable? UK governments have largely left airlines to make their own commercial decisions, subject to air passengers’ rights rules. But when fairly standard winter weather causes industrial-scale cancellations at the nation’s main airport, should carriers be told to trim their schedules? After thousands of Heathrow flights were grounded due to heavy snow in the run-up to Christmas 2010, the boss of Gatwick helpfully suggested that some of the winter schedule should be transferred from Heathrow to his airport. That never took off.

Airlines and airports deliver formidable value for British travellers, and anything that constrains their options is, in my view, quite likely to prove damaging to the consumer. The crucial issue? Enforcement of air passengers’ rights. The cancelled traveller told me direct seats on a rival airline were showing as available online, but her carrier said they could not be booked. That is the opposite of the rules. Airlines that do not play fair should be wary of unwelcome consequences.

Read More