The shambles of Heathrow Terminal 5’s first few days will doubtless crop up in every change management training programme for years to come.
By all accounts, staff were expected to move into the massive new building with little real idea how to find their way round, let alone how to operate the complex and sophisticated new equipment within it.
Baggage handling then swiftly descended into chaos because staff could not cope with the volume of cases coming through the system, and found themselves unable to get through security gates or even into the cark parks.
As British Airways chief executive Willie Walsh put it this morning: this “was not our finest hour”.
Our colleagues over at Travel Weekly have done a pretty good round-up of today’s newspaper coverage of events, and for once it looks as though no-one – not even the Daily Mail – is blaming the baggage handlers.
Meanwhile, it is fascinating to look back at Heathrow’s early days as “Britain’s newest port”. The government information film here, from 1949, proudly claims that the airport could handle 450,000 passengers a year. Last year there were 67 million.
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