The recent chaos at Heathrow brought about when the new Terminal 5 opened to passengers last Thursday has shot the airport to people’s attention across much of the world. Many people have been saying for years that the world’s most busy international airport is a nightmare to deal with, and hitherto I mostly haven’t agreed. I’ve used the airport frequently enough—several times a year—that I got to know it (Terminals 1 & 4 in particular) fairly well. However, I think that because I was comfortable using those terminals I didn’t realize quite how unfriendly Heathrow is to less-frequent travellers.¹

All that changed for me last week. On Friday I was due to fly from Heathrow back to Geneva after the short university Easter holiday. I would be flying from Terminal 5, the day after it had opened to the public. At 11.19 p.m. on Thursday BA sent me a text message and an email saying that my flight had been cancelled. At that point I hadn’t heard about the chaos which had unfolded that day at the new terminal. Fortunately I was under no particular pressure to get back to Geneva on Friday, and so I was reasonably happy to rebook my flight for Sunday afternoon, assuming that two more days would allow BAA and BA to resolve those first-day problems.

My parents were still due to leave for Sydney on Friday evening from Terminal 4, so since I was still in England, I accompanied them to the airport to see them off. It was my experience that evening, and my subsequent experience at the new terminal on Sunday, which really opened my eyes to how much of a mess Heathrow is in.

BAA, you’ve successfully turned Terminal 4 into a backwater

For the last year or so the outside of Terminal 4 has been a maze of building-work as the car parks are reconstructed. There are sections of car park and road outside the terminal building which are completely boarded-off, which makes getting around the outside of the terminal increasingly difficult. A round-trip from a car parked by the curb to get a trolley for luggage has in many places been lengthened exponentially (depending where you are able to park, of course) as you try to navigate the construction-work hoardings.

Inside the terminal there was a certain degree of chaos precipitated by BA’s recent large-scale departure (although BA had moved most of its operations to Terminal 5 the day before, there are still some BA flights from Terminal 4; meanwhile the other airlines were expanding to fill the now-available space). We got past this and my parents were able to check in. The whole terminal is decidedly battered, but in a (to me) friendly, ‘lived-in’, kind of way.

Looking for the buses

The fun really began when I tried to get the coach back to Oxford. As far as I could see, there were no signs in any of the places I had been which gave details about how to catch buses from the terminal. I got outside and spoke to a BA employee standing on the curb; she said that buses leave from the bottom level (the departures are at the top). I negotiated the building works to get down to the bottom.

Outside the terminal at that level there were only signs to numbered bus stops, but no information about which buses leave from which stops. I went in to the terminal building, and eventually found (in spite of the lack of proper signs) something called ‘Bus information’ where there was a handwritten note saying that since the day before (when Terminal 5 had opened) buses only left from the central bus station which serves Terminals 1, 2, and 3. In order to get there, the sign said, you would have to take the (free) Heathrow Connect inter-terminal railway service from Terminal 4 to Heathrow Central. From the other end of the terminal building. Of course. Now, it would have been more helpful if the person I’d spoken to had told me that so I could have gone straight to the train, but perhaps she herself didn’t know that Terminal 4 is the new end of the universe from which the only way out is via Heathrow Central.

The ‘express’ train which isn’t really

The Heathrow Express is the much-vaunted express railway service from Heathrow to Paddington. I vaguely remember once hearing it described as ‘the most expensive railway in the world’ based on distance travelled vs. ticket cost. It used to be that you could get on the HEX at Terminal 4 and be in Paddington within twenty minutes. That is no longer the case—BAA, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that the HEX no longer needs to run to Terminal 4. Instead, the new(ish) Heathrow Connect service, which is a ‘slow train’ (in the common usage of the term) runs from Terminal 4 to Paddington (via Hayes, Southall, Hanwell, West Ealing, and Ealing Broadway).

In order now to get the really express service to Paddington from Terminal 4, you have to change trains at Heathrow Central. If I were someone arriving at Heathrow for the first time, having just stepped off a long and tiring flight, perhaps not being too comfortable with English, I wouldn’t be best pleased to be told to change trains in order to get the quickest service to Paddington. Terminal 4 is now officially a backwater.

On my way down to the railway station at Terminal 4, I was stopped by a Japanese girl looking for the Piccadilly line. I looked around for an obvious sign to the Underground, and since there’s nothing obvious in the vicinity, I assumed that like the Heathrow Express and the buses, the Underground no longer deigns to go to Terminal 4.² When it became painfully clear that this girl’s English was so limited that she couldn’t understand my suggestion to take the train for free and change at the first station, I said that I would take her to the Heathrow Central Underground station.

When we arrived at Heathrow Central station (for the HEX and Heathrow Connect), there were no signs anywhere of how to get to the Underground station.³ Because I was familiar with the basic layout of the place, I was able to follow my nose to the Underground station. We walked for about ten minutes, and it was only when we were within 100 yards of the Underground station that we saw a sign indicating its presence and both heaved a sigh of relief.

I then had some difficulty finding the Heathrow Central bus station, once again due to a lack of proper signs. When I eventually got there I was relieved to see that there was an Oxford bus sitting in its stop taking on passengers.

Terminal 5 tries to be too clever by half

I was quite looking forward to my time in Terminal 5, even more so following the problems of the terminal’s opening. (Yes, I revel in that sort of thing.) The building itself is as impressive as everyone seems to be saying—there are huge amounts of natural light streaming in to the building (at least on the departures level, and compared to the dark Terminals 1, 2, 3, and 4) and the structure itself is quite ingenious. Of course, it remains to be seen whether a pile of concrete, steel, and glass will still be considered good design in ten, twenty, or fifty years’ time. Terminals 2 and 3 in particular are very much architectural victims of their own ages.

Ultimately I didn’t have too bad an experience at Terminal 5, but the place was pretty empty, presumably as a result of the number of cancelled flights. My impression, though, is that there are a number of things which can go wrong, and which (sooner rather than later) will go wrong. There’s a large amount of innovative technology throughout the terminal, which I fear hasn’t been thought through properly.

My brother-in-law Toby kindly drove me to the airport. In the car park we found that there are green lights which appear over empty spaces, thus allowing you quickly to identify an empty space from a distance. However, I noticed a few lights over occupied spaces flickering on and off as we drove past.

I had checked in online the day before; I now simply needed to drop off my two bags. The woman at the desk I went to told me immediately that it was her first day—not only in the new terminal, it seemed, but this was her first time doing the job anywhere. There was an unnecessarily complicated series of buttons she had to press in order to get the belt to move my bags in to the hidden void beyond.

Then, when I got to security, I found that the system there is almost totally automated—you move a tray onto the moving rollers so that it automatically goes through the X-ray machine; then it’s supposed to stop automatically for you on the other side (I’m not quite sure how that’s supposed to work). You then go through the attendant rigmarole of emptying the tray: returning your coins, keys, and phones to your pocket; desisting from holding up your trousers long enough to put your belt back on; returning watch to wrist; and replacing your shoes. Once all that has been effected, the now-empty tray is supposed to take up its journey once more, and move to the end of the track where there is a unit which automatically drops the tray onto a lower-level track which moves in the opposite direction, ready for someone at the beginning of the process to take the tray and put it onto the top-level track replete with his own belongings.

Sounds frightfully clever, doesn’t it? I only had to watch for about thirty seconds to see that the system is inherently flawed. I watched one man grapple with the machine which had stolen his laptop from him: the tray had started moving again before he had taken his computer out, and had moved into the unit which drops the tray on to the lower track. It was only with the combined struggle of this hapless passenger and one of the security staff that the laptop was rescued from the inner workings of the machine. Then I watched as another tray couldn’t get into the transfer unit because it wasn’t precisely straight on the track (it had been skewed slightly by the person removing his belongings from it)—it got stuck at the entrance to the transfer unit, while the following trays began to crash into it. I can see that system getting old very quickly for staff and passengers alike.

Finally, when I got on the plane, and after everyone was seated, it was announced that the baggage hadn’t yet been loaded on to the flight.⁴ We were told this like it was the most normal thing in the world, and the Captain said that it would only take fifteen minutes or so. After an hour we were finally ready to depart. It’s been widely reported that the problems with Terminal 5 stem principally from the baggage-delivery system. If that system is as dunderheadedly ‘innovative’ as the track at the X-ray machine, it’s easy to imagine why the whole thing fell over on the first day.

I can conclude with little else than to say that BAA desperately needs to sort out Heathrow, and fast. But I think that they know that already.

Much of this article was written while listening to a live audio feed of communications with Air Traffic Control for the final approach to JFK airport in New York, which helped to keep me in the right frame of mind. John happened to send me the link on Skype while I was sitting here writing!

1. Nevertheless, I freely acknowledged, and frequently complained about, the problems with arriving at Heathrow. All too often when on a long-haul flight landing in the early morning we would have to sit on the tarmac for an extended period after landing because the requisite ground staff hadn’t bothered to show up for work—either to operate the airbridge, so we couldn’t get out—and/or to supply the generator, so we had to sit in darkness because noise restrictions at that time of day prevent the use of aero engines on the ground. Then there are the long queues at immigration, for both the UK and outer-darkness sections, often thanks to the Home Office and BAA only employing a tiny number of people at any one time to man a much larger number of available desks. Then there is the almost interminable wait for bags to show up on the carousel. All this makes for a slow arrivals process—at Sydney my record is seventeen minutes from touchdown to standing on the curb outside the terminal; it’d be a good day at Heathrow if I could manage the same thing in forty-five minutes.↩
2. As it turns out, I was wrong here—the Piccadilly line still goes to Terminal 4. The Underground station was closed between January 2005 and September 2006 while the junction for the new section of track going to Terminal 5 was built, but the station is once again fully operational. It seems that half of all Heathrow Tube trains go on the Terminal 4 loop and then to Heathrow Central; while the other half go to Heathrow Central and then on the new spur to Terminal 5. The fact remains, however, that there were no signs for the Underground in Terminal 4 that either the Japanese girl or I had seen.↩
3. This is where BAA perhaps suffers from a conflict of interest. On the one hand they have some duty to their customers—the passengers—to provide understandable signage to all of the services available at the airport, including the Underground trains. However, because they own the Heathrow Express and part-own the Heathrow Connect (with First Great Western), they want to trap people into using those services rather than the Tube, from which they don’t stand to make any profit.↩
4. I’m going to say nothing of the fact that BA managed to stuff up my seat-selection. When I got to the gate, they were hyper-apologetic because the system was giving them a bizarre message saying that I wasn’t checked-in, which was patently untrue. I didn’t cotton on that part of the reason they were being so apologetic was because I had effectively been moved from a front-row window seat to a back-row middle seat. I was told to speak to the senior member of crew on board the plane, who was not nearly as dignified as his colleagues at the gate and brushed me off in a highly discreditable manner.↩