BA flights axed and more to follow

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BA said it would not be until Friday that its full service could be resumed.

BA cancelled 46 flights on Wednesday - 35 at Heathrow and 11 at Gatwick. This took the airline's total cancellations since the anti-terror measures were introduced last week to more than 1,100.

Three long-haul and 32 short-haul flights at Heathrow were axed by BA on Wednesday as well as 11 domestic services at Gatwick. BA said it would be cancelling 19 short-haul flights out of Heathrow on Saturday.

A spokeswoman for the airline added: "We are not planning on any Gatwick cancellations tomorrow and we hope that by Friday everything will be back to normal. We took the decision to cancel Wednesday's flights on Tuesday afternoon as we did not want to overload the system at Heathrow which is still a bit fragile."

BA said it understood that as many as 20,000 bags had gone astray at Heathrow during the last few days, and that the bulk of these would have been BA passengers' luggage.

On Wednesday the airline was still trying to get about 5,000 bags to their owners using a mixture of road and plane transport.

Budget airline Ryanair, which was hoping to run a cancellation-free programme today for the first time since last Thursday, has been extremely critical of the new security arrangements. The no-frills Irish carrier said the new hand luggage regulations were "nonsensical".

Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary said his airline had seen a 10% drop in group bookings over the last couple of days as a result of the travel disruption. "We're seriously considering taking legal action against the Government to force them to get the airports back to normal," he added.

The Federation of Tour Operators (FTO) said travel companies had felt "let down by inconsistent airport policies and clearly inadequate staffing arrangements".