Aviation industry insiders fear flight cancellations and airfares are both set to soar next year.
They say a severe shortage of plane engines and spare aviation parts is causing a crisis.
Airlines – including British Airways and Virgin Atlantic – have already been forced to ground planes due to a Rolls Royce Trent 1000 engine shortage.
The situation is already causing a spike in airfares as airline competition narrows.
And industry insiders say flight cancellations linked to supply chain issues will peak next year.
Last month BA, removed 200,000 seats from the available capacity between the UK and southeast Asia this winter, in a move it blamed on “delays to the delivery of engines and parts from Rolls-Royce”.
This included its cancelling the resumption of daily flights between Heathrow and Kuala Lumpur.
Earlier this month, it also cut routes to Routes to Kuwait and Bahrain.
It is also halting more than 100 long-haul flights from London Gatwick to New York.
A BA spokesperson said: “We’re disappointed that we’ve had to make further changes to our schedule as we continue to experience delays to the delivery of engines and parts from Rolls-Royce.”
Virgin Atlantic also blamed Rolls-Royce shortages after it postponed plans to reume flighst beteen London and Accra in Ghana and Tel Aviv in Israel until next winter.
Paul Charles is a former director of communications at Virgin Atlantic and is now CEO at The PC Agency. He told The Indpendent that the engine supply issues have “caused massive problems for airlines and consumers”.
He said: “Airline planning teams have had to rewrite their rulebooks on how they use their fleet on the most popular destinations that they need to protect – and gamble on which routes will pay the price and be deleted from their networks.”
He warned that airfares will continue to rise – and that 2025 will see “record fares on many routes”.
The shortage are understood to be a hangover from the Covid-19 pandemic, when manufacturers scaled back production as demand for precision-engineered components dwindled. One analyst told The Independent the supply chain issues could take “years” to resolve.
A spokesperson for Rolls-Royce said: “We continue to work with all our customers to minimise the impact of the limited availability of spare parts.
“We have been taking decisive action and moving quickly to prioritise the resources needed to reduce the impact created by the current industry-wide supply chain constraints, it’s the highest priority for our Civil Aerospace division.”
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