British Airways is reviewing plans to move its long-hauls flights to recently opened Heathrow Terminal 5, following the chaos that has reigned in the facility since it transferred its short-haul and domestic flights to the terminal on 26 March.
BA had planned to be fully operational in T5 by 30 April, but ongoing problems with the baggage handling system has thrown the move into doubt.
Any delay will have a knock-on effect at the airport, as Air France-KLM is scheduled to move into T4 after BA’s departure. Travellers passing through T5 continued to experience delays today, with close to 250 flights cancelled in the four days since the facility opened.
The farce began just hours after the first passengers arrived at the terminal, with the BA staff car park filling quickly, too few staff security checkpoints open, workers experiencing problems finding work stations in the vast building and difficulties logging into the baggage reconciliation system.
The first seven flights to depart from the terminal took off without any checked baggage, while backed-up bags overloaded the system, seeing it grind to a halt.
BA is struggling to reunite travellers with delayed bags – around 15,000 are being stored in terminals 3, 4 and 5, with many being sent to a specialist sorting facility in Milan.
The baggage handling system at T5 is the largest baggage handling system in Europe for a single terminal, comprising 11 miles of conveyor belts, travelling at 23mph.
Designed to handle 12,000 bags per hour, one belt failed completely on the first day of operation.
The system was designed by an integrated team from BAA, BA and Vanderlande Industries of the Netherlands.
Bags undergo several processes on the way through the system including automatic identification, explosives screening, fast tracking for urgent bags, sorting and automatic sorting and passenger reconciliation.
The baggage processing system, designed by Alstec, directed staff to process bags for cancelled flights – leading to a luggage build up elsewhere in the system.
The Commons Transport Select Committee has launched an enquiry into the chaos, the Independent reports.
Committee chair Gwyneth Dunwoody has labelled the opening "a disaster".
"We need to find out what went wrong and make sure it is put right," she says.
According to the BBC Aviation Minister Jim Fitzpatrick, it is regrettable that T5 has fallen "well short of expectations".
Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne also says the infrastructure project was an "incredible shambles" which "neither British Airways nor BAA seem to be able to put right quickly".
The blighted terminal, touted as the answer to BA’s past problems and the dawn of a new era for the travelling public, opened on Thursday at a cost of £4.3 billion.
The state-of-the-art building was designed by Lord Rogers to handle 30 million passengers a year and will be used exclusively by BA.
Rogers told The Sunday Times he was "tremendously happy" with the design of the building, despite the teething problems.
"It is a very complex building and I know that when we opened in Madrid [Rogers designed the £4.2 billion Barajas airport], there were baggage problems there too.
"It seems to be part of the bedding-down process of these very complex buildings.
"It’s annoying and infuriating for people but that’s the complexity of modernity," Rogers says.
Trade unions Unite and GMB say BA was warned there would be problems as staff had not been properly trained on the new baggage system.
They recommended the switch to T5 take place over several weeks, rather than moving 380 flights in one day.
BA chief executive Willie Walsh has admitted the launch was not BA’s "finest hour", admitting both his company and airport operator BAA made mistakes.
Walsh says more than 400 staff from across the airline have volunteered to help clear the baggage backlog.
"We are working hard to tackle the difficulties we have had with the terminal’s baggage system," he says in a statement.
"From time to time problems have developed that were not encountered during the extensive trials.
"The manufacturers and a team of engineers and IT specialists from BAA and BA are working together to fix the problems."
By Elizabeth Clifford-Marsh
