Baggage bungle at T5

London’s Heathrow Airport has had to reunite thousands of bags with their owners after computer failures at its flagship terminal.

The baggage system went down at Terminal 5, home to British Airways, last week, as many expats living in Bahrain flew back to Europe at the start of Ramadan and the summer holidays.
 
The intermittent problems continued for four days, the airport said, resulting in bags needing to be sorted manually and producing a huge backlog.

Heathrow is the world’s third busiest airport, serving 191,200 passengers per day. “We are on top of the situation,” new chief executive John Holland-Kaye told BBC Radio, speaking on his first day in the top job. “We are working very hard, doing our best to get our bags back to passengers. There are a few thousand that we are going to get on their way,” he said.

The baggage problem brought back memories of the disastrous opening of Terminal 5 in 2008 when hundreds of flights were cancelled and thousands of bags were lost.

Terminal 2, a £2.5 billion pound ($4.25 billion) project recently re-opened by Queen Elizabeth, has also suffered minor problems with its IT systems.

Qatar Airways chief executive officer, Akbar Al Baker, joined Her Majesty and The Duke of Edinburgh, at the opening event. The Queen’s Building at London’s Heathrow Airport was unveiled nearly 60 years after the original Terminal 2 was unveiled.

Mr Al Baker, who sits as a non-executive director on the board of Heathrow Airport, was present with other airline CEOs and executives.

The former Terminal 2 was built to handle an annual 1.2 million passengers at its peak; the new building, renamed Queen’s Terminal, has been built to handle 20 million. It has 24 departure gates, 24 fully-serviced aircraft stands and cost £2.5billion to create.

The first carriers to use the terminal are United Airlines, ANA, Air Canada and Air China. They will be followed by another 22 airlines including Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa, Virgin Atlantic Little Red and Aer Lingus by October this year. When fully occupied, Terminal 2 will have 332 flights per day to 54 destinations around the world.

Two airlines – Thai Airways and Turkish Airlines – said they had delayed their move from Terminal 3 to Terminal 2 after the airport started testing the whole baggage system to find faults.

The problems at Heathrow underline the challenges facing Mr Holland-Kaye, who is having to manage a hub operating at close to full capacity.

He is in the process of lobbying for permission to build a third runway at the airport, which is co-owned by Spanish infrastructure company Ferrovial and other partners, which Mr Holland-Kaye says is needed to stay ahead of rivals like Paris Charles De Gaulle, Amsterdam Schiphol and Frankfurt.

A commission set up by the British government to advise on airport expansion in the south east of England is due to report in 2015, with a third runway at Heathrow singled out as one option.

However, any move could drag on for years as the company and the British government would face massive protests from the environmental lobby as well as protest groups representing residents living in and around the flight paths.

In order to fund the extension, Mr Holland-Kaye told the Financial Times British business daily he wanted to increase landing charges at Heathrow by up to 20 per cent, from £20 ($34) per passenger to £24, to secure a return on the £17 billion ($29 billion) investment that would be needed for a new runway.