Mervyn Walker, who had served the company since 1986, is said to have stepped down voluntarily from his post as UK airports director 10 days ago.

Thousands of holidaymakers were left stranded at Heathrow airport in late August after BA was hit by a severe shortage of check-in staff, causing huge delays and prompting a barrage of negative publicity.

While BA’s chief executive, Rod Eddington, has not publicly apportioned blame for the shambles, insiders said that Walker’s decision to fall on his sword is directly linked to the summer crisis.

It cost BA about £10m in revenue during its busiest period of the year.

Along with operations and customer-services director Mike Street and Peter Read, operations director at Heathrow, Walker’s future had been seen as vulnerable since a series of wildcat strikes in 2003 almost brought BA to its knees.

“This was an inevitable consequence of the problems we had in August,” said an industry source. “Eddington was spitting blood about it at the time, and the only surprise is that this had not taken place sooner.”

Walker will remain chairman of the trustees of the BA pension funds until the end of March. He could not be reached for comment.

In a memo circulated to BA staff announcing Walker’s departure, Street said another BA veteran, David Noyes, the head of UK and Ireland sales and marketing, would take control of its Heathrow operations.

Reporting to Street, Noyes is charged with overseeing all BA activities there during the run-up to the opening of Terminal 5. In other changes to Street’s team customer-service executive Beverley Bennett will take on the broader role of head of UK regional and international customer service.

Since the Heathrow crisis, BA has focused on continuing its programme of cutting costs and maximising productivity at a time when, like the rest of the industry, it has been hit by the impact of rising fuel costs.

Last month Eddington revealed that quarterly pre-tax profit in the period to September 30 had reached £220m, more than double the previous year’s corresponding figure.

However, BA chairman Martin Broughton warned at the time that fuel costs were £245m more than last year, and only £160m of this cost had been offset by passenger and cargo fuel surcharges.

Traffic and capacity figures announced later in November showed a continuing decline in market conditions, with BA predicting that the outlook for revenues in the year to March 2005 pointed to a volume-driven improvement of no more than 3%.

On Friday the shares closed down 1p at 224p, valuing BA at just over £2.4 billion.

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