I can only hope they get it sorted out by the end of July. I have an absolute policy of not booking with BA but the British Olympic Association' deal with them to take the British Team to the Games in Beijing means I will have no choice.

Maybe T5 will be fixed by then but the pilots will be on strike? What an unholy mess......

As fas as I am concerned all the main London airports are now 'third-world' standard at best. Much of Africa and most of Asia is in fact much better. Classic monopoly-supply pricing and customer service and it can only be a mater of when, not if they are broken up.

St Pancras International being the exception to the rule? I know which I prefer - you don't have to worry about BAA at St Pancras...

BABlue(s)

I am wondering if the bonuses to the top executives responsible for the move will be paid (with an additional amount for exceeding targets) as is usually the case?

Rwy in Sight

I hope for you that you didn't shake his hand!! :E

Just saw the pathetic statement he made on Sky News , finished and turned on his heels and just walked away, refusing to answer any questions . I watched opened mouthed at this petulent display from a senior BA executive.
A truely unforgivable thing to do in the circumstances but ther you have the true face of Senior BA management , and people wonder why BA has such bad industrial relations.

Next time we see Gareth Kirkwood he'll probably be wearing an orange boiler suit , sharing a cell with crazy Bubba in the good old US of A. Nothing less than than he deserves imo.

Hand baggage only... my god BA 027 / BA 031 / BA057 to name but three of tonights big departures , you couldn't make it up !
I really feel for the passengers and the ordinary staff , this is the chickens coming home to roost after Walsh and his leadership team have slashed good experienced staff and generally managed to upset those that remain , all so the magic 10% margin can be achieved thus triggering huge bonuses for the senior management.



Make no mistake this is a complete and utter disaster for BA and i truely believe heads will roll over this .

WW for one, should seriously be considering his future,

Well I am off to Newcastle tomorrow so it will only be hand baggage for me. I cannot afford my penguin suit to not arrive with me.

If you want to know something about someone - consult Wikipedia (but to date, there is no entry for Gareth Kirkwood . . . ).Funny old World.

BA check-in staff should be compelled to ask one extra question............have you packed anything in your bag that you actually need?

What a complete bunch of w@nkers!

BA are without doubt now the laughing stock of the world.

If I worked for them I'd actually be ashamed to admit it!

Full service airline? What a bloody joke!

They make Ryan Air look like silver service!

Although having said that do you think some of that stems from having someone who used to run Downing Streets communications in charge of BA's?!? Could it be he is directed on how and what to say by them?

Whats the bets Ryanair take a advert out tommrow offering free flights for T5 Refugees and for a extra couple of quid their luggage can go to!!



:ugh:

Pax stuck on A/c due late TRM's, lack of jetties, missing bags, check-in queues, lengthening delays, domestic then European canx, hand baggage check-in only, A/c departing without bags, inbound pax waiting hours for their bags, bad publicity and a total shambles in the glare of Worldwide media - hang on, isn't this a normal day for BA and their long suffering passengers? :hmm:

As a 20 odd year BA employee I cannot tell you all how ashamed this whole sorry mess makes me feel.

In a perverse way I'm actually glad that it's rained on Willie's parade.

Perhaps now the world will understand what a bunch of charlatans are running BA. From the turf accountant at the top, to the legions of 'Apprentice'-esque managers who beset every turgid day of the misery that is Breathtaking Arrogance, there is not one that would merit employment in a fast food outlet.

With any luck, Willie will be fired before we have to face him off in the summer.

One way or another, he'll have to go - and take his 'Leadership Team' with him.

Shucking fambles.

Do we actually know what the problems are?

T5's baggage system is specified for dual redundancy at full capacity, so there must be some other problme that was just not captured, as today the terminal is running at around 30-35% of designed capacity

Ah yes ... Julia Simpson head of corporate communications forgot about her and her previous employer , bet she's keeping her head down now.

Form over function---exactly

We are sitting in Christchurch NZ having the best laugh of our lives.
Proud to be British--i dont think so.
Nearly every British person here,and probably some Europeans have had to fly through LHR to get here-usually from the Chaos of T3-- but you should hear how many will now try to re-route to other European hubs and then get LCC flights to regionals in the future.
Frankfurt ,Schipol Zurich owners must be watching with interest!!
I used Luton a lot in the UK.OK its Terminal looks like a a bit like an MFI warehouse but at least its organised enough to handle 10Mil passengers a year .
You would expect BAA to get this right with the world watching--or maybe ive been in NZ just that little bit too long. :ugh:

"For t5 despite all the problems, nobody will get burnt by hot water in the toilets as every tap will have had a warning that this hot water is HOT and may burn you, yes every single penny that should have been spent on equipment, quality staff and training will have spent on health and saftey and nice shop fronts."

I heard that the car parks are technically illegal because Public lifts open onto areas without fire detection/cover.:confused:

Just as well there's only 2 of the 18 lifts working in the car park then!:E

A very disappointing start
 

As an ex BA employee whose wife still works there I feel very sorry for the staff and passengers caught up in this. Make no mistake BA staff are some of the most dedicated and professional I have ever encountered in fifteen years in the industry (and I now work for a rival airline)!

I do know that my wife and countless of her colleagues have yet again turned out ON A VOLUNTARY BASIS UNPAID to help passengers stranded at the terminal - many of them working deep into the night. You don't see it in any other company I can think of, but I have to say that the senior management are in severe danger of losing this goodwill if they continue to amply reward themselves while seeking to hold down the workers terms and conditions.

Like everyone else I want to know where accountability lies for these problems, but it seems to me that much of the blame may lie not with BA but BAA but unfortunately the BBC and other media much prefer to make it all look like BA's fault.

Lets hope that the problems are ironed out asap and simple things like communication are improved - surely it can't be too hard to give passengers instructions on where to go for vouchers, etc via mobile phone text, electronic display board and tannoy. That being so I find seeing so many pax complaining about no information rather puzzling.

Desk-pilot

Well according to CNN, BAA are saying all the baggage infrastructure is working correctly and it's BAs staffs inability to meet the operational demand that is causing the problem.

And BA are seeming being rather quiet on that score, HS...

My Volvo V70 T5 runs like clockwork..........:p

Who is the to$$er they have put on the TV.....'the most complex terminal move in history'. says he...I think not!! Clearly another of those not actually brought up in the industry, a pretender from some fast food joint or what ever? T5 is around the corner from T4 and across the way from T1. Hardly a difficult move? Try loading ALL the ground equipment on boats/ trucks at midnight and re-opening 35 miles away at 5AM as they did in HKG. (Yes I know that was a cock up too!!).

Thank goodness we still have AMS! Comes in to its own now, remember when it advertised as Londons 3rd Airport?

They ain't supposed to tick

Fingers crossed
 

LHR really is now the laughing stock of the world. It looks like that instead of BA flights its now all the proverbial chickens of miss-management that are coming home to roost.

I'm due to fly down from EDI to T5 tomorrow morning - day trip only so thank goodness no baggage to worry about. Usually use BD but thought that I'd give BA a try and see T5 - how wrong can a decision be !

I think it would be an interesting exercise to hear if the new terminal 3 at Beijing is having similar problems, having also opened only just recently and on a similar scale to T5. Can anyone give a view on this ?

Keeders

bloody hell, i click on sky news & this has made front page!.
damn! :ooh:
after all the promising talk mr walsh & his cargo boys gave us over at world cargo :* :rolleyes:
ever since i started with BA back in July 07, all i have seen, heard & feel is so much negative energy, from what i believed all that time ago was a world class leading airline. we're well behind....:ouch: so much laziness & blame culture going on. seems everyones in it for the money without doing anything positive, not only for the company but a goal for themselves in life.
how wrong was i or am i in the wrong department?.

i know for T5 it's like early days still, but come on, it's not as if T5 just arrived out of nowhere...its been ages to get everything with all the trials & what not, running good enough by now.

what was all my t5 training for?...from what i know, it taught me nothing really...maybe only like where the tea machines are, the best places to hide & skive! etc..;)

i thought that only a handful of comments on this topic would be thumbs down, but its like every post :\
im still on a few days hols from BA but will dread my first day back to see just how messy which im sure it still very much would be it really is.

will be handing in my notice soon its looking too!..:)
im sure there is something better where good teamwork & communication in a company mean something & can actually work.

Roll on summer 2012. Today was only one terminal, 2012 will be a bunch of stadiums. On that note have they even started to build them yet?

I feel the fault doesn't just rest with BA and BAA. Its our culture as a whole. DISORGANISED. And who will be accountable for this chaos. NO-ONE.

I'm convinced our olympics will suffer the same fate. CHAOS

The question is are they going to have this fixed tomorrow or is the carnage set to continue for weeks?

Whether it's ultimately BA or BAA's fault the simple fact is that BA should have had a contingency plan in place that could cope with anything, even if that contingency plan involved a number of pre-nominated flights that could have been quietly moved back to T1/T4 for a week (it would not really have been noticed due to there still being other flights leaving from there anyway), an army of people ready to, y'know, read baggage labels and sort the bags by hand, or even for passengers to carry their own bags through to the plane! As it is with seemingly no contingency plan they have made global headlines as an utter laughing stock yet again.

What's made it worse is all the prepublicity that there's been in recent weeks/months about how smoothly this move was supposed to go and how everything was so well tested! Would have been far more sensible to have kept a guarded tongue and then crow about things after the fact when they went well. If you look at one of the (sadly now rare) engineering successes of the country, the various Docklands Light Railway extensions, in each case they have actually commenced service quietly and without fanfare a few days to a week before the official opening date, so that by the time the official opening date comes and the press are ready to eat the project alive, all bugs are already gone.

The icing on the cake though is that spokesman on Sky News. What kind of a joke was he, turning on his heels before barely finishing his last sentence and clearly seen on Sky News running for his life. If any executive position in BA should have a charismatic person who can own the media scrum with ease it should be that one. And as for his claims that this was one of the most complex moves in history, oh dear me. How deluded.

Shambolic.

edit: I should add that I was on one of the last trials that had a couple of thousand volunteers there all trying to check in at once, and that seemed to go OK, although I absolutely slated them on signage (there was absolutely nothing to say where first class check-in was, or to confirm that the escalators going visibly downstairs from the main hall of T5a did indeed go to the train that goes to T5b) and in my personal interview I got I sarcastically mentioned that I didn't think the five or so Harrods shops were quite enough (seriously - you walk around and you just seem to come to Harrods after Boots after Harrods after Boots shop and very little else), but that didn't mean I wanted to see the place fail today.

Broken Arrow time.

So people pay to fly BA because it's a full service airline and;

"Passengers unable to travel have been asked to find their own hotels"

"he was there at 3pm for an 8pm flight and now it looks as if that was just not long enough. Queues are now back to the door .. and still no information. Chaos rules"

God help is in 2012......................

Wait, you mean they couldn't even get the shops right ? I thought that was the one thing these muppets actually knew how to do ! :confused:

Wheelchair access?
 

I haven't read all posts in this thread but there was a gentleman who uses a wheelchair,stuck on an aircraft for over an hour, and then when he got off he found there were areas with no 'dropped' kerbs for him to get his wheelchair up. How did an omission like that get thru any dry runs and testing? It was also mentioned that only one lift out of 18(?) in the whole Terminal was working and they were failing again as fast as they were 'fixed'.

More to come?
 

Heathrow East Terminal:-

The BAA/Hal should be sued big time over this.Another complete cock up by them.
And its the poor passenger who has to suffer yet again.

Why is it anything they do at heathrow is always a disaster.

A cracker in the Daily Mail,

Crikey, they've even lost passengers!

What a absolute embarrassment Mr Kirkwood is for BA. No respect for his passengers at all. Bet he has just made a million extra customers....... NOT.

There's a nice little airport just up the M1 that will be happy to take your custom. It has flights to 80 destinations all over Europe, at a fraction of Heathrow prices. You can even fly to the Middle East and New York in comfort for a reasonable price.

The car parks are in the same county as the airport, and everything works well most of the time. It's about half an hour from central London by train. It is not run by BAA, and British Airways are nowhere to be seen.

Try it sometime - it's called Luton.:ok:

BA do handle the baggage handling (aeroplane to terminal vv) and take the responsibility for training thier staff!


And for BAA,
time to increase the airport's fees I suppose! :hmm:

Cant believe what I am seeing happening after all the hype, training and practice runs
I work for this lot and am ashamed to see what we are doing to our customers