I have the deep joy of having recorded episode one of a Channel 5 TV show called Big, Bigger, Biggest, shown last Tuesday 25th.  It was about ... airport terminals!  And the star of the show was ... Heathrow Terminal 5!  I’ve finally got around to watching it.  Quote of the show so far:

“At Terminal 5, lost bags will be a thing of the past ... or so they hope.”

Heathrow’s T5 is now a mess, but they’ll surely get it approximately sorted in a week or two, and in a few months it will be a memory, unless political moaners like Janet Daley decide to keep it going in order to bash Gordon Brown, which maybe they will.

It occurred to me over the weekend, as the almost unbelievable shambles continued into a fourth day, that Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is really a perfect metaphor for Brownism: enormous amounts of money having been lavished on an over-hyped project which fails spectacularly to provide a workable service.

However, I suspect that there will turn out to be too much private sector involvement to serve this particular purpose, and too much hard work, and, I bet, sheer bad luck.  Will it emerge that some wise souls really did say: “I told them this was going to happen, but they wouldn’t listen”?  Much depends on whether that’s true, and if so, who “they” were, and what was the nature of their folly.

I found another juicey little quote, here:

New airport terminals are usually plagued by faults and problems within the first couple of days of opening. BAA are hoping this will not be the case with T5 ...

To illustrate the wisdom of such a fingers-crossed attitude, let me take you back to that Channel 5 programme.  Here’s more of the commentary:

If the bag handling fails, it could bring down the whole Terminal, as it did in 1993 in Denver. Denver’s brand new airport boasted fully automated bag handling, but the expected triumph turned into a disaster.  Bags kept flying off the conveyors, jamming the tracks.  The airport was unusable for over a year, costing the city a million dollars every day.

Heathrow needs to do better than Denver ...

And the good news is that it surely will.  For this is what Patrick Crozier says about it all, at Transport Blog:

… it appears that what’s happened is that a number of small problems combined to make one big one.  The good news is that most of these are “soft” issues - to do with staffing and training and therefore reasonably easy to sort out - rather than “hard” issues - to do with the infrastructure and computer systems - which would take ages.

Terminal 5 was a massive project brought in on time and on budget.  This says some pretty good things about the people involved.

I suspect Terminal 5 will be working pretty well pretty soon.

A central point here, I suspect, is that big airport terminals are, by their very nature, damn hard to get working exactly right, exactly on time.

They often make use of highly innnovative technology, which is hard to make work perfectly just exactly as soon as the curtain goes up on the first night, so to speak.  This is because, although the cost, in disruption as well as in mere money, of innovation can get very high, the rewards of successful innovation are even vaster, so innovation simply has to be done.  It would cost too much not to.

But, as I say, the costs can be frightful.  Another airport horror story from America concerned, I think it was, LAX, where a radically innovative moving pedestrian walkway seemed splendid, until one day it ate a small child, and had to be entirely rebuilt after months of delay.

That first night has to be decided upon months – years? - in advance, and once decided cannot easily be altered.  The slightest delay costs fortunes.  They test and test, and they try to think of everything that could possibly go wrong, but, as Patrick said, little things that they didn’t see coming trip them up, and sometimes several little things can combine.

I further suspect that there is something inherent in airport terminals that says that they just have to open all at once.  They can’t be slowly or gradually opened, and then brought carefully up to speed.  This can’t be done.  Is that right?  I bet it is.

I’m gratified that Patrick and I came to similar conclusions.  I’d written a lot of this before reading his posting, and would have put this up at Transport Blog, minus Patrick’s words of wisdom, if there’d been nothing there about all this.

Here, however, is a different slant on it all, from the BBC:

By Saturday, BA said it had a backlog of at least 15,000 bags at Heathrow - with one source telling the BBC that the number may have been closer to 20,000.

BA as in British Airways.

BA has already said “teething problems” with car parking, delays in getting staff through security screening and staff familiarisation resulted in the backlog of baggage which led to the severe delays and flight cancellations over the days that followed.

But, according to Mr Bowden, the airline’s bosses had been warned by staff they were not fully prepared for the transition to T5.

“Many areas of BA had told their managers month after month that they were not ready to move in or didn’t feel confident to move in - but there was a general feeling of hubris - ‘Don’t worry, it will be okay on the day’.”

There you go.  “I told you so.” Patrick is right that this will all soon be sorted, but the chaos meanwhile does seem to have been someone’s fault.  Not the fault of the people who supplied the thing, who, as Patrick says, did a fine job, but the fault of the people who were supposed to be in charge of it once it was delivered.  The guy who built the baggage handling system, Iain Bailey of Vanderlande Industries (I know this from the Channel 5 show), was told to make it work for 12,000 items per hour, and he did.  But because BA cocked up the managing of it on the first day, the system was asked to handle more than that.  At which point, just as Iain Bailey of Vanderlande Industries had already predicted, it gave up:

“It’s just like a sponge.  The more you put in, the more it absorbs, but then there’s a point where it can’t soak up any more.”

And that point arrived.

My guess is that BA boss Willie Walsh won’t survive this.  I see that the politicians are already gunning for BA.