LONDON -- Last month, as British Airways made ready to unveil its glittering new Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport, CEO Willie Walsh was predicting that the $8.5 billion facility would "change the way international travelers look at Britain."
As it turned out, Walsh was right, but not in the way he had intended.
The opening of T5, as the new facility is popularly known, has turned into an operational and public relations nightmare that has forced BA to cancel hundreds of flights, inconvenienced thousands of passengers, left tens of thousands of baggage items strewn from Glasgow to Milan and given unions a new opportunity to wag fingers at the airline's management.
As for Walsh's prediction, the opening of T5 has left many international travelers seeing red when they look at Britain.
Moreover, no one is really certain when the fiasco will end.
Agents with passengers flying BA to Heathrow over the next few days are still being advised to check the airline's Web site (www.ba.com) for flight cancellations. Although BA claimed more than a week ago that it had almost recovered from the meltdown, nearly one in 10 of its Heathrow flights was still grounded as Travel Weekly went to press.
An airline spokeswoman said last Thursday, April 3, that 92% of flights from T5 were operating and that 360 out of 394 flights were expected to take off the following day.
"We are trying to get back to 100% as soon as possible," she said. "But we can't say when that will be."
Most flights between the U.S. and Heathrow are operating normally, primarily because the majority still use Terminal 4. Flights from Miami, San Francisco and Los Angeles have been switched to T5, but the BA spokeswoman said none of those had been canceled.
U.S. passengers using Heathrow as a transit point to or from other U.K. or European destinations were the travelers most likely to be affected because BA has shifted all its short-haul flights to T5, and it's these services that have borne the brunt of the delays and cancellations.
T5, which was supposed to improve passenger experience at Heathrow, went into meltdown on its opening day, March 27, one week after Queen Elizabeth II, the Duke of Edinburgh and various high-ranking ministers and airport officials had toured the facility with pride and ceremony.
According to BA, which has exclusive use of T5, there was no single cause for the debacle but rather a series of relatively minor glitches that combined to wreak havoc.
Problems started at the crack of dawn on March 27, when confusing signage outside the terminal prevented employees arriving for their first day of work at T5 from finding the staff parking facility. Then there were further delays in screening the employees for security purposes, and finally, the new automated baggage-processing system, designed to handle 12,000 bags an hour, suffered several minor breakdowns.
Unions also claimed that the staff had been poorly trained and so were unable to operate the system efficiently.
The result of all this was a backlog of bags waiting to be sorted. Some flights left with passengers but no luggage. Dozens of other flights were canceled. By afternoon of the first day, BA was forced to suspend all baggage check-ins, leaving passengers with the stark choice of flying with only hand luggage, switching to another airline or not traveling at all.
As of press time, although normal check-in services had resumed, BA still could not guarantee that passengers departing from T5 would travel with their luggage.
"T5 is operating fairly smoothly, and if your flight isn't canceled you should be OK," the BA spokeswoman said. "But we don't want to say everything is perfect. The best advice to passengers is to pack essential items, including medications and important documents, in their hand luggage."
Even once T5 is working as planned, the mess could take some time to clear up. More than a week after the opening, the airline still had a mountain of at least 20,000 bags waiting to be sorted.
Some bags being sorted in Milan
Thousands of bags whose owners have flown to destinations in continental Europe have been shipped by road to Milan in northern Italy for sorting. Those belonging to passengers who traveled on U.K. domestic flights have been taken to sorting centres in Scotland, Gatwick and Manchester. BA could not say when the backlog would be cleared.
Originally, BA had planned to move its long-haul operations, including U.S. flights, to T5 at the end of April, but now the airline is considering postponing moving those flights, which account for about half of BA's passengers.
The Sunday Times of London last week quoted Walsh as saying, "I'm still of the view we should continue to work on April 30, but we will have to look at it. We need to be sure the problems we encountered are completely resolved."
In the meantime, passengers who were caught up in the chaos face long delays for compensation while BA tries to process thousands of claims. Under European Union law, anyone whose flight was canceled is entitled to as much as 460 pounds ($917) in compensation. (Visit www.ba.com for more information.)
BA's bill for lost-luggage compensation alone is likely to top $100 million, and that's just the beginning of its financial woes; the airline also faces fines of up to $10,000 per passenger for failing to provide hotels for travelers who were delayed overnight and for not informing them of their rights to compensation. BA initially tried to offer passengers a maximum of $200 per room per night for two people, but later removed the limit.
All in all, the move to T5 has been a public relations disaster that couldn't have come at a worse time for the airline. The new open-skies treaty, which started this month, means that the British carrier will be facing increasing levels of fresh competition from U.S. and European airlines for a share of its lucrative transatlantic traffic in and out of Heathrow.
T5 is operated by Spanish-owned BAA, which also runs Heathrow's other four terminals and several other U.K. airports, including Gatwick and Stansted in London and Edinburgh and Glasgow, but Walsh has claimed full responsibility for the fiasco.
Trade union leaders last week asserted that they had warned senior BA executives two weeks before the terminal opened that its 2,000 baggage-handling staff had not been properly trained to use T5's new state-of-the-art system. They said their suggestion that the airline stagger the transfer of flights from Terminals 1 and 4 had been ignored.
T5 was designed to handle 30 million passengers a year, thus easing pressure at Terminals 1 to 4, which are currently handling close to 70 million passengers a year.