[toopyimport]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2...iness.heathrow

From the Guardian


Air travel: Terminal 5 still losing 900 bags every day

· Passengers face one in 12 risk of missing luggage
· Transfer flights hit by poor links to new terminal


Terminal 5 came in for renewed criticism yesterday after it emerged that passengers transferring between planes at Heathrow's troubled new £4.3bn building are losing more than 900 bags a day.
Trade union officials said T5's baggage handling system still needed improvement and travellers on connecting flights have a one in 12 chance of being separated from their luggage. Iggy Vaid, senior shop steward at the Unite union and a former T5 baggage handler, told MPs that 932 bags miss their onward journey from the terminal on a daily basis.
"If we change the process it will get better. We have to. There is no alternative," he said.
The baggage figures for passengers flying into Heathrow in order to catch a further flight, are still worse than for the rest of the airport, three months after the building's disastrous opening. According to Unite, 80 out of 1,000 bags on connecting flights from T5 do not get to their plane, against an average of 65-70 bags for the rest of the airport.
Steve Turner, Unite's national secretary for aviation, said the state-of-the-art automated baggage handling system at T5 was to blame. "That system is still in place and is still resulting in a significant number of bags not connecting with passengers."
The opening of T5 saw the cancellation of more than 500 British Airways flights after the baggage system failed. That cost the airline, the terminal's sole tenant, at least £16m.
BA said the main cause of lost transfer bags at T5 was flights arriving late because of runway congestion or delayed departures at other airports. However, Unite also blamed inadequate links between the building and BA's other terminals at Heathrow, meaning that bags arriving at Terminal 4 have to make a laborious journey to T5.
"There are lots of transfer bags landing in T4 and they have to be manually transferred to T5 because there is no mechanical system for loading the bags," said Vaid, who witnessed the T5 chaos at first hand as one of the BA baggage handlers in the building. BAA, Heathrow's owner, said a baggage link between T4 and T5 was under construction.
The Unite official's comments to the transport select committee alarmed MPs.
"Passengers will be surprised and disappointed to learn that there is still a one in 12 chance of losing their bags," said Philip Hollobone, Conservative MP for Kettering.
BA said T5's overall performance had improved significantly since the March 27 opening and the airport's overall missing baggage numbers had fallen since last year, with eight bags a thousand going missing. A BA spokesman said: "All major hub airports have issues in making sure that transfer bags travel between flights in the same way that transfer passengers do. This is due to the complexities of baggage procedures and how bags are moved through a series of security systems to get loaded on to their next aircraft."
Colin Matthews, BAA chief executive, told the committee that T5 is now "working well". He added: "It's not perfect. It's perfectly true that if an aircraft arrives late, transfer bags do not have a chance of making their connecting flight." He also agreed with MPs that the T5 opening had been "a national humiliation".
"Everybody was hoping and expecting a great performance and was deeply disappointed by our failure to do so."
Matthews said poor communication between BAA and BA had been the main cause of the fumbled opening.
BAA also contradicted BA's claim that small "teething problems" combined to cause the T5 crisis. Matthews said the biggest operational flaw had come at the end of the baggage handling process, when the BA staff who were to transfer luggage on to aircraft were not able to load the bags. As consequence, the baggage system soon overflowed and more than 20,000 bags were separated from their owners."


Seriously, the HeafRow Critique Bashers should just admit something isnt right about this "grand" airport.



Heaf Row


The Troof is Out There.