Teething problems

Everything has a dodgy first few days/weeks/months/years. Babies have those horrible few weeks of pain as their first teeth start cutting through. Businesses have a worrying first few months wondering whether they're going to be a success or not. Heathrow's T5 is having the first week from hell.

But why? BAA have been banging on for months and months that T5 was going to be the best air transport facility in the world; that it was going to be the most efficient terminal of them all at Heathrow. Yet they've managed to cancel upwards of 400 flights in this first week, with no real idea when the chaos will end. A backlog of 28,000 bags in transit just makes the situation even more farcical. State of the art baggage system that can process 12,000 bags per hour? I can see a bit of blame shifting in the near future, what with the considerably higher luggage allowance for long-haul flights and all that.

Did anyone look at the logistics of moving the location of all BA's operations in one go? With all that's gone wrong since opening to the public last Thursday, it makes you wonder. But then, Eurostar moved all their operations from Waterloo to St. Pancras over one night, and as far as I recall it went without a hitch. Granted that wasn't on the scale of T5, but honestly, if a load of trains can find their way from one side of London to the other between the hours of daylight, surely a couple of planes can veer their way from one spot of tarmac to another within the same hectare? It's not as though T5 is out of the way of the rest of the airport now, is it?

The question on everyone's lips now? 'Will BA and BAA be fined for the chaos this hideously expensive venture has caused?" Personally, I think they should - Network Rail gets fined for having more than a certain number of late running or cancelled trains, why shouldn't BA/BAA be subject to the same? I know thousands more people are affected by late running or cancelled trains every day than they are delayed or cancelled flights, but it's the principle I'm getting at. In such a short period of time, after such high-profile (and, in hindsight, overhyped) publicity in the build-up to the opening of T5, the parties involved have really shot themselves in the foot. Maybe the government will shoot them in the pocket now... it won't buy back any time lost by all those poor poor passengers, but it'll hopefully make BA think twice about new terminals in the future...