Heathrow’s highly anticipated and massively hyped Terminal 5 had a rather chaotic opening day on March 27. The Queen officially opened the £4.3 billion new T5 and according to the first passengers the terminal was a delight, but later as the day progressed chaos broke out, writes The Guardian.
It was a meltdown of the the terminals 11-mile state-of-the art-baggage system (designed to deal with 12,000 bags an hour), which lead to long queues and baggage delays - two of the notorious biggest causes of delay in Heathrow.
"It was shambolic, but totally predictable", said one British Airways handler, according to The Guardian. Another baggage handler told the newspaper: "Doors that should have been open were locked, staff passes wouldn't work in the car park, lifts were jammed inside the terminals - nothing was working."
At night British Airways announced that it would cancel at least 76 of the next day's 380 flights operating in and out of T5, giving the carrier more time to restore the baggage operation and giving it room to deal with further problems.
Some passengers manage to see the postive aspects of all the airport misery. Anna Williams, from Pretoria, said according to The Guardian: "It's good to realise that this sort of thing doesn't only happen in Africa."
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