Well, this last Friday I had the pleasure & displeasure of getting to know the brand new Terminal 5 from the Heathrow airport in London.
Pleasure because it’s gorgeous: lot’s of top shops (Harrods, Prada, Tiffany’s and many more), interesting restaurants and what is most modern in airport technology.
Displeasure because it’s luggage system seems not to be working at all. My plane boarded on time but we sat almost 1h without even a glass o water waiting for them to find our luggage. The pilots words were literally: “Ladies and gentlemen, sorry for this delay. We have lost your luggage but we are using all our efforts to find it and bring it safely to the plane.”
After another 30min, the pilot announced they finally found it and we would be departing shortly. When we had almost reached the line for taking off, the pilot announced: “We will have to return to the terminal since there was some kind of confusion with the luggage. We are taking the bags of a passenger that didn’t board and for safety reasons we can’t depart with it on the plane.”
NO WAY………
We returned to the terminal, they opened the luggage compartment and another 30 min went by before they said: “The passenger is actually on board, so we are preparing for take off in another 5 min. We hope to be reaching Düsseldorf before the closure of the Airport.”
At that moment, I was just thankful for the fact that there were only German and English people on the plane, besides me. If it were in Brazil or Italy for example, people would be screaming and flying out of the plane already! hehehehe
Anyway…in the end, after a glass of wine, I was glad that after more than 2h of delay we managed to take off and arrived in Düsseldorf at 11:29PM, just one minute before the airport closed. I think we flew in 40min, they gave really gas! To land in Cologne and take another 30min bus ride would be really messed up, especially on Friday at midnight after working my ass off this week!
So people, I would really recommend avoiding British Airways from/to Heathrow for now, until they fixed this whole luggage system.
I hope they find a solution soon!
hahahhahhahahahaha
sem mais.. ahh… ahahhaaahahaha
aah!!! been reading about this everywhere and hearing about it from everyone! i think incidents like this (and the not so smooth opening of new airport in thailand) will make me appreciate singapore’s changi airport all the more. new terminals open, new regulations are introduced – but everything remains efficient.
well…at least some advantages of being paranoid control freaks