Tonight:
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I'd like a few short, sharp words with Willie Walsh
David Cohen, Evening Standard15 Apr 2008
The day I flew out of Terminal 5 bound for Paris is a day I would gladly forget. I was with Sara Fox, an American project director known as the "Queen of the Gherkin" for delivering that iconic building on time and on budget. The plan was that she would cast her forensic eye over every detail of the £4.3 billion Terminal 5 on behalf of the Evening Standard.
We'd begin in the departures hall, fly to Paris to enjoy a brasserie lunch, and return to sample the T5 arrivals experience before heading home in time for dinner.
But things did not work out that way when we flew last Friday. Willie Walsh, British Airways's chief executive, had just announced a delay in transferring long-haul flights to T5 until glitches in the baggage-handling operation could be ironed out, so the departures hall was virtually deserted and at such low volume, BA staff assured us the baggage-handling system was fine. So far so good. Later we would learn that 10 short-haul flights were cancelled "as a result of poor weather and congestion" from T5 on Friday, a relatively "good day" when compared with the 703 flights cancelled since its opening a fortnight ago, and evidence, claims BA, that it and the British Airports Authority (BAA) are getting on top of the situation.
Our experience would prove otherwise. Our departure on BA312 was delayed for 35 minutes due to thunderstorms according to BA; however, the flight got under way at 12.40pm and was then uneventful.
On the return leg as we waited to board our 5.15pm flight BA319, the monitor flashed up that our flight was delayed one hour. Moments later, it became three hours, and then, at 6pm, a BA official emerged to announce that because of "technical problems with our aircraft at Terminal 5", our departure was "indefinitely delayed".
By now Sara, 54, was livid at the lack of information and disregard for passengers. When we asked a BA customer-services agent for more detail, she shrugged and said: "Problems at Terminal 5. All flights out of T5 to Paris are delayed. I don't know why. They don't tell me, either."
WE WATCHED easyJet board its passengers to Luton. All the other airlines to all other airports in the UK appeared to be operating "on time". By 7pm, with no further information forthcoming, Sara, an MBA from Stanford University who settled in London 20 years ago, could stand it no longer and we legged it for the Eurostar, returning to St Pancras by 10.30pm.
We later learned that our flight limped into T5 at 20 minutes before midnight, more than six hours late.
"What a nightmare," fumed Sara. "It's such a shame that an absolutely gorgeous building like T5 is ruined by such arrogance. I wouldn't mind a few short, sharp words with Willie Walsh."
The only high point of our day was lunch of superb entrecôte steaks washed down with a bottle of Chinon at the Hippopotamus Restaurant Grill at Charles de Gaulle airport.
MUST TRY HARDER: 30 THINGS THAT WENT WRONG WITH TERMINAL 5
Here is Sara Fox's rigorous judgment on what works and what doesn't at Terminal 5:
1. They fail to do what you pay them for: fly you to your destination and back at the times indicated on your ticket.
2. Customer service is appalling. When we asked BA for a refund on our £387 tickets for a flight that was six hours late, it said: “As the flight operated, we don't offer a refund.” By contrast, Eurostar gave a free one-way ticket to everyone to compensate us for arriving in London an hour late.
3. The baggage-handling fiasco could have been averted if they'd done the equivalent of Boeing's “dead chicken test”: rev up the engines and chuck dead chickens at them to simulate flying into a flock of birds. Despite BA's insistence that it conducted trials, it appears it failed to test the baggage system to breaking point.
4. BAA staff manning the x-ray screening machines seemed to be asleep on the job. We carried a Swiss army knife with a three-inch blade in our hand luggage without it being detected. BAA staff directing us to security slouched in their chairs looking bored and disaffected.
5. It takes 20 minutes to reach your departure gate but with just 15 minutes to take-off, some flights had yet to be allocated departure gates, leaving passengers in a panic. The reason, it emerged, was flight delays, but with nothing on the monitors, passengers were none the wiser.
6. The escalators are too long, too steep and not on a human scale. Daunting for the elderly.
7. The alternative to taking the escalator is the lift to nowhere. Of the three taking you down to concourse B, for international departures, one was out of order and the other two failed to indicate which floor you should exit for concourse B. Someone had stuck a pathetic Post-It note to direct passengers. In a £4.3 billion airport, this is beyond a joke.
8. The departure gates area for concourse A (domestic and some European departures) is disappointing: the roof is too low, the lighting gloomy and the air-conditioning non-existent, so it feels stuffy and claustrophobic.
9. The boarding pass is printed on flimsy, facsimile-type paper. Sara lost hers in the “black hole of Calcutta” that is her handbag, leading her to empty the contents in an undignified scene at the departure gate.
10. There are insufficient seats at the departure gates. This causes bottlenecks as waiting passengers back-up into the general circulation areas, preventing other passengers from passing by.
11. The lavatories are oppressive with low ceilings and dark wooden doors. Some fixtures are already breaking: the latch on one cubicle door was faulty and a number of coat hooks had come loose so there was no place to hang a coat. Some soap dispensers did not work.
12. The noise in the lavatories is horrendous. Supersonic dryers are going continuously: you feel as if you're standing behind a Boeing 747 during take-off.
13. They haven't solved the problem of where a woman puts her handbag while she washes her hands. The taps splash everywhere so there is no dry surface to place your bag.
14. Lavatories are poorly maintained. Some cubicles had run out of toilet paper and the flushes, placed behind the loo seats, which appear to work on motion detectors, are haphazard, with some failing to activate.
15. Two people meant to be carrying out maintenance seemed more interested in chatting to each other than cleaning up the dirty paper on the floors of the cubicles or replenishing paper and soap.
16. One thing that annoys Sara is when things are built with no thought of how to maintain them. The yellow steel frame housing the lifts is covered with oil stains and dust and is already an eyesore.
17. A sign directs you to a lavatory that isn't there on the upper level of departures.
18. There is too much advertising. Everywhere you look, you're assailed by HSBC or American Express adverts as BAA tries to maximise revenue.
19. There is nothing more irritating than having to put your shoes back on after having gone through security with no place to sit down to do it. Some security channels have seats and others do not.
20. It's a nice touch having separate waste bins for recyclables such as paper and cans but the general bins are too small and spill over with unsightly rubbish.
21. They missed a trick by not making Wifi free. Ten minutes of surfing costs £1.
22. There are six different kinds of seating (including sofas, leather chairs, benches and plastic chairs), none of which is screwed to the floor. Although this allows for the fact that people sit in different ways, it risks looking like a dog's dinner by the end of the day.
23. If you fly into Terminal 5 and have an onward connection through Terminals 1, 2, 3 or 4 on another airline, you have to collect your bag, lug it to the other terminal and recheck it in there, allowing for a transfer time of two hours. Airports such as Atlanta allow you to immediately recheck your bag for onward flights of all airlines at your arrival terminal.
24. There is no BAA information or customer services booth. If you have a query, you have to find a roving BAA man in a green jacket.
25. We cannot recall seeing any “you are here” maps.
26. The kindest description for the faith room with its dirty carpet and cardboard boxes is that it's a “work-in-progress”. An amusing touch is the handwritten note that warns users that “compasses do not work” but that “Qiblah is in the direction of the far corner”.
27. There is a constant hum of white noise, perhaps the sound of baggage-handling equipment.
28. On arrival, passengers are often kept waiting on their planes, often for up to 30 minutes, because the gantries — the walkways that allow you to exit the aircraft — aren't open or operating efficiently.
29. At passport control, some passengers are confused by the lack of signs indicating channels for EU and UK passports and having to rely on BAA staff to direct them.
30. Lifts from arrivals to the multi-storey car park are not big enough and there aren't enough of them. Last week one of them was not even working.
AND WHAT WAS RIGHT...
1. The concourse is an awesome column-free structure. It's very Richard Rogers: lots of natural light, a soaring ceiling, and the nuts and bolts of the structure exposed. It's an inspiring building with real wow factor.
2. Arriving at the Underground station for Terminal 5, you emerge on to a platform bathed in natural light. The ride up to departures in the glass lift takes you through all the levels of the building and renders it thrillingly transparent.
3. The shopping is fantastic — very high-end with retailers such as Prada, Paul Smith, Dior and Tiffany & Co.
4. There is an excellent range of food, from Pret a Manger to Gordon Ramsay's Plane Food and Sara's personal favourite, Caviar House & Prunier.
n Check-in was painless. On the day we travelled, there were no queues, the self-service check-in pods were self-explanatory and easy to use, and, unlike the other terminals, the fast bag-drop really operated as a fast bag-drop.
5. The security cameras are housed in stainless-steel multi-purpose columns that look sculptural. They've been properly thought through, instead of hung from beams as an afterthought.
6. The design, airside, of the suspended ceiling is clever. It gives the illusion of being solid and continuous when it's really made up of spaced-out white panels. These are needed to reflect light and provide acoustics, but also leave room for access to routine maintenance.
7. When you board they can tell if your bag is on the plane by scanning your suitcase barcode. This affords peace of mind and prevents you waiting at your destination baggage carousel for a bag that never travelled in the first place.
8. Overall the signs are clear, elegant and effective.
9. There are plenty of trolleys and clever placement of crash barriers to ensure trolleys do not bash into and damage the metal columns.
Reader views (1)
David Cohen and Sara Fox could have saved a lot of trouble if they had taken Eurostar It can now take 2 hours 15 minutes from London to the Centre of Paris and it's a lot more fun. (After all if there been any delays on Eurostar departing they could have spent their time in the Champagne Bar instead of the High Street BAA calls"duty-free".)
Independent research has shown that flying between London and Paris generates ten times as much Carbon Dioxide as the same journey by train so they could have also shown how they care for the environment at the same time.
- Mark, London UK, 15/04/2008 16:20
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