London City airport dials back plans for 40% hike in capacity

Bloomberg

London City airport dialed back proposals for more early-morning and Saturday flights in a bid to make its plans to lift capacity by almost 40% more palatable to planning officials and local people.
The terminal, favoured by business travellers for its proximity to London’s financial
districts, is sticking with an application to raise its annual passenger cap to 9 million from from 6.5 million while modifying other elements of the expansion goals, according to a statement.
Changes to a planning request include no more than nine flights in the first 30 minutes of the day Monday through Saturday, down from the sought after 12. Saturday operations that currently end at 12:30 pm would be extended only to 6:30 pm rather than 10 pm, plus an extra hour in summer for arrivals.
London City, hemmed in by housing on a former docklands site in the UK capital’s East End, is seeking to add passengers without resorting to extra trips, with a ceiling of 111,000 aircraft movements to be retained, together with an eight-hour night-time curfew and limited operations on Sundays.
The plan also requires no new infrastructure after permission for eight more aircraft stands and a new terminal and taxiway was granted in 2016, though the additional flights would have to be performed by new-generation jets such as the Airbus SE A220, a plane that’s at the limit of the airport’s short runway.
London City attracted 5.1% million passengers in 2019, before the Covid pandemic struck, and expects to reach the current cap in the middle of the decade. A master plan for further expansion envisages capacity for 11 million passengers and 151,000 aircraft movements annually by the mid-to-late 2030s.

BA resolves glitch that grounded flights for hours

Bloomberg

British Airways services suffered hours-long delays after a failure involving flight-planning software led aircraft to be held on the ground.
Only around 50% of British Airways flights were in the air on Tuesday compared with a week earlier, aircraft-tracking website Flightradar24 said. The airline confirmed that it had suffered a “technical issue” with its flight-planning system which was later resolved.
The problem stemmed from a failure of software that BA pilots access via Apple Inc. iPads, people familiar with the matter said. That system was in the process of being upgraded, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal concerns.
“Our teams have now resolved a temporary issue that affected some of our long-haul flight planning systems overnight, which resulted in delays to our schedule,” British Airways said. “We’re sorry for the disruption caused to our customers’ travel plans.”