British Airways bungles Heathrow Terminal 5

As bad as the Aloha Air­lines pas­sen­ger jet shut­down has been in Hawaii — see yesterday’s Hon­olulu Star-Bulletin for some details -  British Air­ways is fac­ing a much larger prob­lem with its new Ter­mi­nal 5 in London’s Heathrow Air­port. How bad is it?

The British Air­ways web site has a graphic on almost every page that says “We’re sorry”, and BA CEO Willie Walsh may be out of a job soon. Maybe BA exec­u­tives shouldn’t have thrown that open­ing day party, as Jeff Nolan dis­cussed here.

BA has called in FedEx to help deal with an esti­mated 28,000 bags because the entire bag han­dling sys­tem failed. Bags that were headed the the Euro­pean con­ti­nent have been diverted to Milan for sort­ing, accord­ing to this BBC arti­cle. See the BBC, Wired, Busi­ness Week and Bloomberg for more details.

Reli­a­bil­ity is a key suc­cess factor

Air trav­el­ers want to get their bag­gage at their des­ti­na­tion. BA has had bag­gage han­dling prob­lems for years, accord­ing to an 21 August 2007 Wall Street Jour­nal article.

This BBC arti­cle reveals that bag­gage han­dling per­son­nel could not find park­ing spaces and were stand­ing in line wait­ing for assign­ments as the bags started pil­ing up. Work­ers strug­gled to use a sched­ul­ing sys­tem that should have assigned them to spe­cific areas of the mas­sive ter­mi­nal, based upon flight activ­ity and traf­fic pat­terns. A sys­tem that should have han­dled 12,000 bags per hour failed on its first morn­ing because the staff didn’t know where to go in their new work­place.

The new £4.3 bil­lion ter­mi­nal, which was ded­i­cated ear­lier this month and built specif­i­cally for BA, was sup­posed to help mat­ters. Now thou­sands of trav­el­ers are marooned in Heathrow and neigh­bor­ing hotels because the air­line has can­celed flights for the fifth con­sec­u­tive day, accord­ing to another Bloomberg arti­cle. The BBC arti­cle said that 250 flights were can­celed in the first 4 days alone.

Quite a shock

For those stranded in the new ter­mi­nal, it’s a bit bor­ing. BA does offer free WiFi in its Ter­mi­nal 5 lounges, accord­ing to Jaunted. Boing­Bo­ing noted on 19 Jan­u­ary 2008 that elec­tri­cal out­lets are hard to find in the new ter­mi­nal. All in all, it’s worse than being fumi­gated in your seat.

Tagged as: airline, airport, key-success-factors, london, management, reliability, UK