T5 a complete shambles, but Flashmob a success.

Heathrow’s Ter­mi­nal 5 opened today with a great fan­fair. By mid after­noon the much vaunt­ed, com­put­erised, lug­gage sys­tem was shut down and dozens of flights can­celled.

How­ev­er the 11am Flash­mob went ahead with­out a hitch.

10.59, and the Inter­na­tion­al Arrivals area was a pre­dictable dull grey.

11.00, and it turned red, as hun­dreds of activists stripped off their out­er lay­ers to reveal their ‘Stop Air­port Expan­sion’ T‑shirts.

We’d all tak­en cam­eras, expect­ing to crack of a cou­ple of shots and run to the bogs to hide the mem­o­ry cards but — no need!. The bal­cony above was packed shoul­der to shoul­der with pho­tog­ra­phers and film crews, all ignor­ing the meed­ja ops pro­vid­ed by BAA in favour of cov­er­ing the Flash­mob.

Lat­er cov­er­age was dis­ap­point­ing (dun­no about tomor­rows papers) but because even bet­ter news was emerg­ing that the T5 open­ing had turned out to be a com­plete fuck up. After promis­ing to the fly­ing world that Heathrow’s prob­lems were licked, the place ground to a mis­er­able halt with­in hours.

Amongst oth­ers, www.news.bbc.co.uk writes:

“The sus­pen­sion of lug­gage check-in was just the lat­est prob­lem to hit pas­sen­gers hop­ing to leave T5 on its open­ing day.

BA ear­li­er announced “ini­tial teething prob­lems” with car park­ing pro­vi­sion, delays in staff secu­ri­ty screen­ing and staff famil­iari­sa­tion had result­ed in a back­log of bag­gage. ”

Very good news indeed for every­one except BA and BAA. Now all we have to wait for is for BAA and its par­ent com­pa­ny Fer­rovial to go bust, wide­ly expect­ed to hap­pen less than a year from now, see:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3ca6b20a-fad7-11dc-aa46-000077b07658.html

Watch some footage of the flash­mob here