Glad it's not T5 for me

I am heading for London again late April and I was hoping to have the joy of Terminal 5 rather than the bleak and harried T's 1 through 4 that I have hated and blogged about before - but it was not to be - and aren't I glad after the last few days of total chaos after the inglorious opening.

The news reports here mention that BAA executives were doubtful of the systems capability to handle the volumes some weeks ahead of the opening. The baggage handling had only been tested to 80-90% capacity. Even though they throttled back the number of flights for the opening days they still managed to choke the systems.

As usual it looks like BAA treated their customers with complete contempt and left them to lie around the place for hours on end without much succour and comfort. Catastrophic. Thank goodness it wasn't me. Makes the old T's look like a walk in the park.

I wonder what would happen in Beijing if they hit the same problem pre-Olympics. I suspect they would bus in 500,000 workers and just manhandle the bags around the place, chin up, smiling hard!