A cautionary tale for those of you Heathrow bound

Alexander Cockburn writes:

I flew home from London to San Francisco from Heathrow's new Terminal 5, inhabited solely by British Airways. I flew on March 27, the day it opened. As the world now knows, this was a day of epic British humiliation. For weeks the British newspapers and television channels had been vaunting the marvels of T5: miles of baggage conveyors rushing luggage swiftly from check-in point through entrails of steel to airplane hold; the gospel of efficiency bodied forth in this new temple of modernism.

The trouble is that the British just aren't very good at this kind of thing. Year after year Q used to hand James Bond his attaché case of handy devices ­ a flame thrower in a handspray, a book which fired bullets out its spine. There was the Aston DB5 with ejector seat and saw blades in the wheel hubs. The cycle of Bond films began just when the Labor prime minister Harold Wilson was urging the nation to cast aside the archaic vestments of the past and bathe itself in the 'white heat of technology'. Things worked in Bond movies but they didn't work in Britain and as Kingsley Amis once sadly remarked, if Bond had really had to use his mini-submarine in combat conditions it would have surely taken him straight to the bottom. In 1983, just when Q gave Bond a staggering number of gadgets in Octopussy, Britain became for the first time in its history a net importer of industrial goods.

I got to T5 at around 11am, having traveled out on the Piccadilly line. Architecturally there's nothing particularly memorable about T5's three main buildings, all essentially aircraft hangers in basic contour. I smugly presented my preprinted boarding pass, checked two bags, wandered about for a minute and then went off to have an early lunch.

We now know that by then T5's systems had already collapsed. In the case of the Titanic there was this same lag between the fatal incision of the iceberg into the hull, with consequent alarums deep in the bowels of the mighty liner and the dignity and repose of the first class lounge. In the case of T5 the planners had forgotten to create parking slots for the baggage handlers. When the handlers finally got to the doors of T5 their security passes didn't work. The few that managed to get through didn't know where their work stations were. The baggage handling software had already failed. My two bags which I had complacently supposed were being whirled at tremendous speed to the Boeing 747 at Gate 38 in Terminal B had in fact joined a mighty logjam in the center of the baggage maze. Everything came to a standstill.

But upstairs chaos was not yet apparent. BA's greeters, soon to be the objects of vilification and physical threat, smiled sweetly. Since T5's policy is not to have strident loudspeakers, there were no quacks of warning or alarm from the loudspeakers. It was 11.35am. A nice young woman next to me at the marble bar in the dining room turned out to hail from Youghal, in county Cork, just like me. As we chatted along, she kept peering at the monitor. Her flight was 15 minutes away, yet no boarding gate was advertised. Off she went, just like a passenger on the Titanic going to check to the bulletin board at the purser's office. I never saw her again; and I'm fairly sure she never saw her flight. She did have an overnight bag on wheels. An hour later BA was telling passengers to send their suitcases home, stuff their essentials into their pockets and bunk down for the long wait.

I went off to Terminal B on a little railway, the sort that was cutting edge at SeaTac in the 1970s when optimists were writing about impending conversion of the war economy to the "social industrial complex". There was almost no one in Terminal B. At Gate 38 I was the only person. No other travelers, no BA staff, just the quiet bulk of a 747 at the boarding port. Gradually the passengers mustered. In a movie this is where we would meet our characters: the noisy fellow who would panic and elbow the old lady; the lovers holding hands as they plummeted through the depressurized door; the unassuming co-editor of the radical website and newsletter who in the end takes control of the 747 and brings it safely down.

Our flight was scheduled for 13.45. At 13.50 we were told there was a change of plan. Our plane was at A 18. We had to go back, in a building designed to deal with people only going forward into their plane. By now, word was filtering to the outside world. The stock price of the Spanish company that owns Heathrow was dropping. The chairman of British Airways was sketching out his speech refusing to resign. Passengers were punching each other in the check-in lines.

We knew little of this at A18. By 4pm we were boarded, wedged into seats so tightly crammed that when I dropped my book, there was no way to maneuver one's body to get a hand under the seat. There was the familiar wait for the tractor to haul the plane out to the runway; the familiar inaudible drone from the Captain. By six pm were in the air. We flew over southern Greenland. I was disappointed to see no signs of farming, amid newly benign conditions. We flew over Hudson's Bay. There seemed to be plenty of ice. We flew over Tahoe. We were four hours late. No bags for most of us of course.

Moral: just don't travel BA and don't go through Heathrow. It's not worth the hassle. With T5 it's all worse. Go to Paris or Frankfurt and head on to your destination by plane or rail from there. And don't travel Ryanair either. The tickets look cheap but by th time you pay overweight and a thousand other outrageous imposts it's cheaper to go on a regular airline. In a properly functional Hell Michael O'Leary, Ryanair's bosss, will fly endlessly between Stansted and the Arctic Circle. He will be told that every article of clothing he wears will require a charge of one million Euros.

Eh? He reads like he had a perfectly pleasant float through an airport (chaos was happening in other parts that he found out about later), then it takes him an unexplained two hours to change gates, he has a wait on the tarmac and his bags go missing. He sounds like an oblivious lucky one who wants some of the moaning rights.

Right about O'Leary, though.

flying ryanair is great short haul, just discipline yourself on the luggage.

For weeks the British newspapers and television channels had been vaunting the marvels of T5: miles of baggage conveyors rushing luggage swiftly from check-in point through entrails of steel to airplane hold; the gospel of efficiency bodied forth in this new temple of modernism.

Yes, the British media and its well known positive and can-do attitude to government projects, systems engineering and I.T.

The British aviation industry rivals the only the national football team for incompetence.

Britain doesn't have a national football team.

wedged into seats so tightly crammed that when I dropped my book, there was no way to maneuver one's body to get a hand under the seat.

Now, come on, that really is just moaning for the sake of it (as is the whole article, really). Did BA get in new special planes with weeny seat pitches just to annoy T5 passengers? No? Well, stop moaning like this is one of the things that is wrong with the new terminal.

hahaha a-cock writes really well there.

MORE LIKE LOLROW

I am flying out of Terminal 3 tomorrow. There is a shop I want to go to beyond security in Terminal 1. Is this possible? Can I take some sort of bus for people on connecting flights between the two terminals? Presumably security at Terminal 1 will not let me through and then back out again just to buy a pair of shoes?

NB: shoes will not have bombs in

No, is the answer, according to the guy on the phone : (

BRITISHES AND TRAVELERS! TELL ME ABT RECENT DEVELOPMENTS WRT US---->HEATHROW--->US TRAVEL

It was recommended to me that people should avoid the new BA terminal which is far enough away that it is effectively in Wales

I recently flew into Heathrow from Philly then took a connecting flight to Glasgow, into and back out of Terminal 5. Departing US -> UK plane and getting through security and customs and getting to departure gate for other domestic flight took less than 15 minutes. My bags made it to Glasgow as well (they were checked right through from the US). There was nothing weird or hassly on the way out of the US.

Going to the US (Orlando International), I went from Gatwick, not LHR. We went through a domestic -> international special security gate which took about ten minutes as opposed to HORRIBLE QUEUES OF DOOM that you usually get flying from Gatwick. We had to get to our gate early and get our carry-on luggage hand searched and an individual pat down (this happened to everyone). And, er, that was it. Everything was fairly easy really. This was last week, if there's been further developments, someone else can help.

Backing up ailsa's smoove experience. Flew from Heathrow T5 to Dallas and on to San Diego on 8 Jan. Fairly long queues for check-in and security, but not monster, and after that all fine. Gate shown in plenty of time. Pat-down at the gate took 1 minute.

Just don't stay at the Thistle Heathrow the night before.

Yeah, with the exception of everyone on US flights getting a pat-down at the gate rather than just random ~10%, nothing is different. This means Heathrow is still the worst place in the world, but it's not any worse than it was tbf. Going the other way is unchanged.

Heathrow can't be the worst place in a world that contains Gatwick. This domestic -> international special security gate is the first time I haven't wanted to kill myself rather than stand in a queue at Gatwick. Haven't done a check-in/security at Gatwick for a couple of years, so it might have improved, but dear fucking god if it isn't the worst organised longest shittiest queuing system on earth. Reasonable airports have separate security for domestic and international, I'm pretty certain some airports (Tampa? probably more, I'm not that well-travelled, I tend to go to the same places all the time) have separate security for different airlines/flights. Gatwick = everyone in the place into the one big long queue. Chaos + homicidal tendencies ensue.