To offer an answer to the initial post - that xxxxx of a BAA Chief Exec should be the one to walk - what drivel.....
Has he ever heard of Business Continuity plans?
Lesson learnt I hope - that an airport is exactly that - and not a shopping centre....

The mis-information or lack of information has been unprecedented and that is just as bad as the weather situation.


Nivsy

Can someone explain why LHR only has one runway ops even now ??
It hasn't snowed since Saturday :ugh::ugh::ugh:

And on sunday mid day Farnborough was operational. (G-V went out as i drove past)

Fiddling while Rome burns ........
 

Imbecile Hammond has just made another hesitant performance, this time in Parliament and thus on television, to announce his grand plan.

The best that the so-highly-paid whizz-kids at the Department for Transport can come up with - they will, most condescendingly, "relax the night flight restrictions at Heathrow for the next three days".

Talk about monkeys running the zoo.

The first question that needs to be asked is: Snow was forecast on the 18th December. What measures were put in place on the night of the 17th to anti ice the stands?

Now I'm a conservative (small 'c' but)
 

Let's be honest. This lot don't HAVE a transport policy. even the easing of the restrictions mean no departures from 0100 to start of play the following day. It's hardly the Dunkirk mentality, expecially with all those marginals in West London.

Hammond came across quite poorly, he's playing politics pretending this is an incredibly rare event. It isn't. I remember them from when I was a kid. My lifetime is a puddle of gnat's **** in climate terms so whatever loony decided winters would be mild for ever probably got promoted to Head of Retail at BAA.

BAA that strategic asset we flogged off to Ferrovial. Kraft anyone?

Having been past LHR on Sunday, there was ONE active and visible snowplough for the whole of Terminal One.

Well I know FRA has had its problems recently, but last week I taxied past thirty seriously large snow clearing vheicles lined up in two columns ready to roll. I cannot imagine airport UK has anything like that.

Same ****, same country :ugh:

Who took the "Great" out of Britain ?

Someone did !

Why could they not just ask all those pilots sat around with nothing to do to start their engines for a few minutes, that'd surely clear loads of the snow?

Or send for as many shovels as you can find then ask those sat in the terminal if anyone minds helping out, im sure there will be plenty of volunteers.

It does seem that Heathrow have decided that the easiest way to get rid off all this pesky snow is to wait for it to melt and save the expense of using their equipment!

Oh and also it appears that those in Westminster havnt grasped the idea of what a 1 in 20 year event actually means. Its not that there will be 1 event like it in 20 years, just that an event of this magnitude has a likelihood of happening in 20 years, but there is nothing to say that it couldnt happen every year. They seem to think it all means that 'oh, it snowed like buggery last year so it'll be fine for the next 10 years or so!'.

Share winter weather equipment (grit trucks, ploughs etc) with countrys in the southern hemisphere i say, cost is split 50:50 and every March/October we hire a big boat, stick all the equipment on it and ferry them to the country thats about to have a winter. Less storage costs, less purchase costs, economies of scale, all that. Maybe il send that into the Big Idea website!

But the media get in anyway and tell the story how it is, not how some 20 something PR person will no dress sense and silly hair wants it to be told. (Did you notice rather than being at the airport, he was dispatched to the TV studios!)

Same happened when T5 opened, first few days were open house, then when it went ***-up the media were banished to the local cheep and nasty car park.

Remember folks LGW is not BAA owned and to give them credit they have had their runway basically open for the last 2 days. they have announced that they are committed to spending 8M to double their snow fleet.

Finally BAA sold Gatwick for £1.5Billion, shame some of the money was not invested in the operating infrastructure at their other airports.

Lasers?
 

What about the might of power and efficiencies of laser? Laser technology has been mastered from medicine to thick metal cutting, from precision astrophysics to hi-tech weapons, thermonuclear reactors..

A frequency could be set only for snow molecules on couple lasers on mid-high masts next to runways to continuously scan runway surface and automatically adjusting power levels depending on snow intensity. This would do no damage to any other surfaces or materials as frequency would be specific and target only ice type molecules.

I.e. - google for patent "A system to remove ice formed on a surface, such as an airplane wing. Heat generative laser beam is directed upon a snow or ice-covered surface, thereby vaporizing the ice and snow formed thereupon. By translating the laser light generator along the frozen surface, vaporization of the snow and ice formed on the entire surface takes place."

I assume the same principle could be used for clearing fog around airport lets say 10miles radius..

A more powerful laser I assume could be used for disrupting hurricane cores?

If only worldwide industry would work as hard in putting more comfort and performance in industry as in naughty full-body scanner.. :yuk:

In my time here so far it has never closed due to the snow. Yes it gets more of it...but at least it seems to have a plan each winter...we get a winter ops briefing in the terminal long before the first signs of the white stuff.

The basic device is already widely deployed at a much smaller scale - the microwave oven that these days is present in almost every domestic and commercial kitchen. The major problem is that all living things are mostly water, so any stay energy, and there would be a lot arouind, from the runway cooker would rapidly cook anyone who got too close.

A better, and possibly equally infeasible, solution would be to put a roof over the stands. That would keep the snow off the wings and permit the ground handling staff and equipment to work unhindered.

In the current crisis, with incoming flights diverted to places such as Birmingham, Newcastle and Mancester that have good rail links, it should be feasible to take passengers, crew and even cleaners to the aircraft by train, rather than waiting for the snow to melt. Apart from third-rail electrics, the railway is much less susceptible to snow than airports of roads. Diesels are more weather resistant than overhead electrics, and steam locomotives could get through drifts several feet high. We don't have enough of them to make a difference anymore, but we do appear to have a number of Eurostar electrics standing idle at present. Why not use them to take the passengers to the planes?

Re the YYZ experience, the airport authority's take is that a complete shutdown due to snow and icing, such as LHR has done, is not a viable option. They have worked very hard and invested large sums to prevent it from happening. Yes things slow down significantly when the going gets tough, but many flights still get through.

I've had the pleasure of seeing their snow clearing team in action up close and it's pretty impressive. They run a conga line of equipment and clear the centre 150 ft of a runway with one pass each way along the runway. The whole thing takes about 10 to 15 minutes.

Channel 4 had the CEO of BAA on last night. He had clearly been given some media training and came out with the same vacuous phrase four times.

John Snow pointed out that Ferrovial were rumoured to be short of money so how could they invest in better snowclearing. Listening to the reply, you could smell the BS from here.

Credit to LGW...they have got their act together.

Ferrovial might be shyte but l think you will find BAA when state owned was shyte in winter as well!

More profit for BAA
 

The longer that the terminals are full of passengers going nowhere, the more the retail outlets are making money. All BAA has to do is to let a few more into the terminal when those who have been there a few days have spent all their cash. A happy Christmas for somebody:bored:

About 40 years ago we fast taxied a viscount down 27L to clear the fog so that a 1-11 could position to CWL. Maybe BAA should get a few of the pensioned off Harriers to do a hover over the runways, that should do the trick.

Some have said that the comparison between Helsinki and LHR is invalid. I don't quite see why. Helsinki has fewer passengers and presumably less revenue and yet it copes far better than LHR. Why? Investment.

OK - it might have a third runway and I can see how that makes things easier but surely LHR could adopt a one runway operation (albeit at a seriously curtailed level of service) by clearing the other one?

LGW was castigated (quite understandably) the other day when they were closed down but my understanding is that they got their finger out and got some more snow clearing equipment.

For the first day or so I was pretty unimpressed with the media in their constant efforts to isolate a "lack of preparation" during what was clearly more snow more quickly than we have had for a long time.

However I am at a loss to understand why the second runway hasn't been cleared by now?

It certainly seems that the balance between infrastructure being there by the country for the country and it just being a profit centre has swung too far in the wrong direction.

An earlier poster mentioned using trains to get passengers to where the planes are. Can you imagine how that would go given the number of different private companies involved? It would be a car crash, but when there is no effective single control of such big elements of infrastructure you can't get them to interact like that.

Some serious questions need to be asked about the senior BA and BAA management with regard to LHR .With one runway down BA was assured by the BAA/Nats that they would get at least 12 departures away per hour.BA invested millions in a state of the art de-icing facility and de-icing Rigs at T5 so should have had no difficulty achieving this target.

Ever since the 747 came into service in the 70's its been known that a fully fuelled aircraft at low ambient temps on snow will be diffficult to move .Why were the aircraft not moved earlier and the stands cleared of snow and de-iced before repositioning on stand ?

BA had a very robust snow plan a few years back ,it seem the management eyes have been firmly off the ball.

4 days on and i'm embarrassed every time i switch the TV on.

Stormin Norman, I imagine the reason is that all the old experienced people have been pensioned off and their jobs taken by young whipper snappers who have never seen snow in their working lives and don't have the experience to know what works.

How many times do we see people having to relearn lessons from previous incidents? I would love to see the BAA Operations Manual on what to do when snow is forecast.

Its lack of investent
 

BAA Traveller magazine page 66-67 has a piece about how prepared they are for the weather with their "68 strong fleet of de-icers, snow blowers, ploughs and tractors"

A total of 68 bits of equipment to clear 8 kilometres of runway and 200 stands.

Skavsta ( also Spanish owned) has around 30 bits of equipment for 2.3km of runway and 15 stands.

even taking into account the shortage of equipment, not being able to clear the second runway is baffling

'ploughs and tractors'

Its snow thay want to get rid of, not grow potatoes.

What really annoys me ( among many things:\) is during interviews with that BAA bloke nobody actually challanges him as to why one runway is STILL closed. He just side steps the question. Time to bring on Paxman...

I have to say I have absolutely no sympathy with either BAA or ANY of the airlines. We are given to understand that Lhr works at about 98% capacity and carries what, maybe 20m more pax than it was designed for. So what happens, Lhr keep letting more flights in and airlines want to get more flights in. Look at the number of services that have been transferred from Lgw. All in the pursuit of profit. If it all works perfectly, then not too many serious problems, but there are still problems. When the smallest thing goes wrong, it all goes very badly wrong. Why, because working at almost 100% capacity allows for no room to try and make anything work if something goes wrong, it all falls apart and very fast. And so the extra profit they claim to make by flying from Lhr over say Lgw has just disappeared over the past few and next few days. The first thing that Lhr should be ordered to do is reduce to say 90% capacity to allow a little bit of wriggle room. If Lhr and the airlines had their way, they would have Lhr operating at 120% of capacity or any other figure. Nothing can work at 98% all the time and work well. We see the effects of this all the time, snow, fog etc. I often wonder why H & S has nothing to say about the overcrowding at Lhr. Would they allow it elsewhere, apart from Lhr, trains and underground.

I have great pity for all the poor people stuck there, many will have xmas and other plans ruined.

TB

I have been stuck allbeit at DUS since Saturday and there are numbers of people since Friday. Today once again there is little infomation other than come back tomorrow.

From a customer perspective it is all unacceptable and I agree why do they not know when the second rrunway is to open, why was that BA made the statement -of its closure not BAA.

Let us face it the UK is poorly served in most forms of public transport and with more cuts nothing is going to improve.

I have little doubt that BAA's evidence to the Government enquiry will state that with a third runway, none of this would have happened.

Yes they would have 2 runways blocked with snow instead of 1.:hmm:

Profits came from retail, winters got warmer, the assumption was made this was the norm, forever.....management took a short term profits view and the old skills were lost as the focus shifted from operations to shopping. Now in fairness BAA are trying to turn back with a lot of money being invested into LHR but they're learning the hard way as they have to reinvent the wheel. The fact that Andrew Teacher is the public face of BAA in the worst crisis since well, April frankly, says a lot of how prepared they actually were.

Our ability as a nation to influence events at LHR is also less than it was as we sold off a strategic national asset to a Spanish firm drowning in debt.

Short term profit versus long term strategy. What good is sacking the Transport Secretary going to do? He won't know the job for another six months and bringing in someone else will push that learning curve further back. Our system is broken and we keep saying "Lessons have been learned" except the evidence suggests that often that is merely a platitude.

I'm not moaning as frankly we're all bang at it in the UK. We reap what we sow. All of us. Hands up who's got their pension sorted? *cough* Public sector put your hands down please!

* Having re-read that I am aware it's sounding a little bit Old Testament.

Ok so can someone tell me exactly WIHIH? Is it lack of equipment, lack of de-icer, lack of trained apron personnel or just plain greed to pay 'top people' bonuses rather than on infrastructure. Years ago BAA stood for Build Another Arcade now that philosophy is comming back to bite them - good job we dont try and hold the Winter Olympics here. Still if we did it might mean our athletes were the only ones who would be competing!
I just feel sorry for the paying customers and poor front desk staff who have to face them but are not backed up by 'senior management' or given procedures for these situations. PPPMPP. :sad:
By the way I remember the winter of '63 when deep snow blanketed the whole country from Christmas till March and there was none of the chaos we have today.

Pretty much on the money, actually.

Interesting...
 

Seems a fairly new Executive Committee:

BAA: Executive Committee

Apart from Terry Morgan, I see no Airport or Airline experience, albeit Matthews was head of Engineering whilst I was at BA.

Sky News had an interview with Mathews.

Seems they did nothing at first because the met Office said more snow, which did not happen but now they are going to clear ALL the stands before they start on the second runway.

The PBS machines that they use for the runways are no good for use on the stands so it must be that they do not have the staff and the drivers of the runway clearing equipment are out with the shovels n the stands.

What a shower, couldn't organise a pi$$ up in a brewery.

Just pleased I decided to stay in Sweden for Christmas 6ft of snow and -18 but no problems anywhere.

The thing that really worries me, is that people will accept it. "Oh well, never mind. That's just the way it is, isn't it?" Except it doesn't have to be. The whole of Europe is laughing at Britain, and that's okay. That makes me a bit downcast.

I wouldn't worry too much about that given the problems that AMS, CDG and FRA have had.

I do agree though that it has reached a point where something has to be done...and the same excuse can't be brought out EVERY time it snows. I get tired of hearing how "unique" Heathrow is with the complexities of snow clearing. It seems to be so unique that they can't figure out how to clear the place and keep it moving in the winter.

Comparisons with Helsinki
 

For those who whinge on about how comparisons with never-closed Helsinki Vantaa airport are invalid because Heathrow is such a large airport, some statistics for you, as many won't believe that, in world terms, Heathrow is actually quite a small place.

Total land area :

Helsinki - 1,700 acres
Heathrow - 1,227 acres

Helsinki 38% larger land area

...

Total runway length :

Helsinki (3 runways) - 9,401 metres
Heathrow (2 runways) - 7,561 metres

Helsinki 24% more runway distance to clear.

...

I suppose there's one more statistic.

Master snow-handling plans :

Helsinki - 1
Heathrow - 0

WHBM
Are you saying that LHR doesn't have a snow plan? I wonder what Phillip Hammond thinks of that.

Don'y worry, there's more snow on the way....there is a huge storm over California at the moment, that has so far dropped 12 feet of snow on the SierraNavada mountains, and...the jet stream is all lined up to bring this monster to the UK in about 10 days, perhaps less.
Better get more shovels...:}