American Airlines’ Heathrow Catering Crisis Is Finally Nearing an End, Seven Months After It Began

American Airlines expects to fully restore local catering on every flight out of London Heathrow by late October, seven months after a sudden split with its longtime caterer left the airline juggling meals flown in from the United States.

The holdup was never really about the food. For months, the bottleneck has been a shortage of the specialized trucks used to load it onto the aircraft, according to Paddle Your Own Kanoo, which first reported the near-final timeline.

How a caterer split turned into a seven-month fix

American abruptly ended its longstanding catering contract with dnata, the Emirates Group’s ground-services arm, in late February 2026. The airline has never publicly explained the decision, but reports at the time pointed to operational and hygiene concerns at dnata’s Heathrow kitchens, without formally confirming a cause, Aviation Business News reported.

The split hit a sizable chunk of American’s transatlantic network. The airline flies up to 19 flights a day between Heathrow and nine US cities, close to a quarter of all Heathrow-US seat capacity, carrying some 14.5 million passengers a year, Paddle Your Own Kanoo reported.

With no local replacement ready, American turned to “double catering,” loading extra US-sourced meals onto outbound flights so the same aircraft could also serve its return leg from London. Passengers got fewer choices and pre-ordered meals that sometimes did not show up, while crews lost galley space to the extra stock, Simple Flying reported. The Austrian caterer Do & Co began covering some Heathrow flights on a temporary basis that spring and was named American’s permanent Heathrow caterer on August 4, Aviation A2Z reported.

Why trucks, not food, were the real bottleneck

Catering an aircraft takes a “highloader,” a truck with a scissor lift that raises a container of trays to door height. They are purpose-built, expensive and not something an airport caterer can simply order off a lot, and American and Do & Co spent months competing for a limited supply, according to an internal memo cited by Paddle Your Own Kanoo.

The truck count, not a lack of food or staff, is why a crisis that was supposed to be a quick fix dragged on for months after Do & Co’s deal began.

What’s still left to fix

American’s Boeing 777-200 flights already have full local catering restored. Its Boeing 787-9 flights are next, scheduled to catch up by October 13 or 14, with the rest of the Heathrow schedule following by October 27 for US-bound departures and October 28 for London departures, Simple Flying reported.

One piece stays double-catered permanently: American plans to keep flying alcoholic beverages in from the US on every Heathrow flight regardless, Paddle Your Own Kanoo reported, a smaller-scale version of the workaround that defined the whole crisis.

The switch to Do & Co has not been free of friction elsewhere. Around 170 dnata workers at a Heathrow-area facility were meant to transfer to Do & Co under UK employment-transfer rules, but the handover broke down in May when the new contractor sent arriving staff home, leaving dnata and Do & Co disputing who was responsible for them, Aviation Business News reported.