I took part in one of the T5 proving trials today & here are a few thoughts. (I was unsure which forum to post this in & the BA one seemed the most appropriate - Mods, feel free to move this if you see fit).
Firstly, this was a pretty big trial [the T5 website says some are up to 3000 people] - most of the big hotels along Bath Road seemed to have a line of coaches there with BAA people in blue tabards [the giveaway for a T5 trial person] around.
I started off at the Marriott. Having had my ID checked & T5 pass issued, it was time for "rent-a-large gentleman in a bomber jacket" security to go through the hand baggage you'd taken along [you were asked to take some] to check for prohibited items. What was notable was the very visible armed police / sniffer dog presence - and this was just at the off-airport hotel. A brief intro followed from a member of the T5 trials team, then they showed the BAA promo video for T5 / Heathrow improvement plan that includes Heathrow East.
We were then bussed to T5. As we started to go down the road parallel to the North runway, I got a great view of a VS 346 landing thanks to the height advantage of being on a coach. Our coach driver completely missed the dropoff point at T5 so we did a nice circuit of the Western perimeter road to have a second attempt – he found the right place to stop this time.
When the trial started at 10am, it was up to departures to check in for my first flight – to Glasgow (yeah, of all the places on the BA network… I got Glasgow!) Checked in fine with one of the kiosks and my brief said hand baggage only, so straight through to security. As a domestic passenger, you have a photo & fingerprint scan taken of the 4 fingers on your right hand at the pre-security boarding pass checkpoint. Security was interesting. The x-ray machines use a fancy system that automatically returns the empty trays you have to put bags / coats into back to the landside of the x-ray machine. It was returning them too fast and they were falling onto the floor. I picked up a tray and put it onto the rollers that feed into the x-ray scanner to put my bag into it – the tray was already well on it’s way to the scanner, empty. You are only supposed to put the tray onto the rollers when it’s got your bag / coat in it ready to be scanned. This automated tray feed / return system also stopped the scanner working at one point as someone decided not to remove their bag from the tray after the x-ray scan. There is a sensor on the last position before the tray goes into the mechanism to send it back to the start [or landside if you like] and if it detects a bag in the tray, everything stops.
Cleared security no probs [no laptop removal / shoe carnival] and had a good wander round airside. Basically, everything is pretty much finished. Just about all of the shops & food outlets have had at least a basic fit-out and some are just awaiting merchandise / equipment. There are some great views of the airfield to be had from T5 – I sat and watched the departure runway for a while from what will be a food outlets seating area in just over a month. You could see the aircraft line up on 27L in the distance, then watch their entire takeoff run. It’s interesting to see how little runway some of the smaller aircraft use & how much some of the larger ones need. I know it was fairly quiet in T5 today, but you could still hear a good rumble when a heavily loaded plane did a long takeoff roll & climbed out very near T5.
The gate number was now up on the screens for the Glasgow flight, so went to the other end of the terminal to board. The fingerprint recognition system did not appear to be working at the gate, as I was not asked for a scan of my right hand fingers again [all the kit was there to take the scan]. On reaching the jetbridge entrance, we were given our next brief. I was now arriving into T5 from Copenhagen, transferring onto a flight to New York.
Headed down to the flight transfer area, which is on one side of the large immigration hall. The transfer passenger queue is not ideally designed. You have the tensa-barrier zig-zag but when you get to the front there are several points at which you can join a small queue to be fed into one of a few desks for a boarding pass scan / ID check. Naturally, people get to the front of the zig-zag and join the first queue – so the staff on the desks furthest away from this point were getting next to no people through their desks. Once through the transfer area, back up an escalator 2 levels to be re-screened for security and back into the departures lounge.
I went back to the aforementioned food outlet seating area to watch more departures & got to see 2 VS 346’s leave (did not see a single VS flight go when last there). Before too long the gate was up for New York – A10. Clearly remote stands will still feature when T5 opens, as gate A10 is actually 5 or 6 gates (A10a – A10e or f, I cannot remember). You descend from the departures level right down to ground level, then are bussed out to your aircraft. In our case, we were bussed round T5B [the satellite terminal] then back to T5A [main terminal]. A bit of a glitch here, as neither the bus driver’s or T5 Trial person on the bus ID card would open the door back into T5A – but we got in after a call or two had been made. Here we got our final brief, I was now an arriving passenger from Delhi.
I made my way back to the immigration hall I had visited earlier and BAA were throwing a lot of people at immigration at once, but I only waited about 5mins – and not all the desks were open either for EU passports. Sure, it was a bit artificial as you were using your traveler profile document as the passport, so nothing for immigration to inspect as such. I had no checked baggage to reclaim, but the baggage reclaim hall looks really good and easy to navigate. Straight out through Customs in the green channel – again, very artificial, as you knew they could not stop you for anything.
Back on the arrivals concourse, my brief said to leave the terminal via the “Trains and Underground” exit – this does not exist. There is a Trains exit and a separate Underground exit [presumably they both feed into the same station]. Tried asking a BAA person in a blue tabard about this and they said they could not help, it’s all part of the trial to see what people look for.
I collected my T5 goodie bag & got the bus back to the hotel. The bag contained the following quality items;
• T5 passport holder – my UK passport won’t fit into it
• T5 pen
• T5 baggage tag – looks like it cost about 10p to make
• Most worryingly, a travel power adapter. If used in the UK on one of those 4 or 6 way in-line gang sockets, if you press the wrong button on it when it’s plugged in, it releases the *LIVE* USA socket pins for you to electrocute yourself on. I will be calling the T5 trials team about this on Monday morning – the company I work for issued a few of the same model of adapter last year & condemned them all when this defect came to light. It’s not unreasonable to expect that someone may try to use this adapter to power something in the UK that they purchased abroad
All in all today was a very interesting & enjoyable day. T5 is a great building – I’ll be 100% honest and say it is not as architecturally amazing as I thought it would be, but it’s light, airy, spacious and very pleasant – certainly a far cry from T3.
I am sure that BAA & the authorities got a lot of information out of today – there were loads of observers observing just about every aspect of the trial. A lot was being filmed too. I have never seen so many police in an airport terminal either – don’t know if this was related to the trial or because the building is still a partial building site.
It will be interesting to see how T5 unfolds on the 27th March – I am sure any good failures will be accurately reported by the press [not!] From what I saw today it is clear that BA & BAA have thought very long and hard about this project & the finished article I saw is good. It will be even better if they can iron out the few niggles in the next month and a bit.
James
Firstly, this was a pretty big trial [the T5 website says some are up to 3000 people] - most of the big hotels along Bath Road seemed to have a line of coaches there with BAA people in blue tabards [the giveaway for a T5 trial person] around.
I started off at the Marriott. Having had my ID checked & T5 pass issued, it was time for "rent-a-large gentleman in a bomber jacket" security to go through the hand baggage you'd taken along [you were asked to take some] to check for prohibited items. What was notable was the very visible armed police / sniffer dog presence - and this was just at the off-airport hotel. A brief intro followed from a member of the T5 trials team, then they showed the BAA promo video for T5 / Heathrow improvement plan that includes Heathrow East.
We were then bussed to T5. As we started to go down the road parallel to the North runway, I got a great view of a VS 346 landing thanks to the height advantage of being on a coach. Our coach driver completely missed the dropoff point at T5 so we did a nice circuit of the Western perimeter road to have a second attempt – he found the right place to stop this time.
When the trial started at 10am, it was up to departures to check in for my first flight – to Glasgow (yeah, of all the places on the BA network… I got Glasgow!) Checked in fine with one of the kiosks and my brief said hand baggage only, so straight through to security. As a domestic passenger, you have a photo & fingerprint scan taken of the 4 fingers on your right hand at the pre-security boarding pass checkpoint. Security was interesting. The x-ray machines use a fancy system that automatically returns the empty trays you have to put bags / coats into back to the landside of the x-ray machine. It was returning them too fast and they were falling onto the floor. I picked up a tray and put it onto the rollers that feed into the x-ray scanner to put my bag into it – the tray was already well on it’s way to the scanner, empty. You are only supposed to put the tray onto the rollers when it’s got your bag / coat in it ready to be scanned. This automated tray feed / return system also stopped the scanner working at one point as someone decided not to remove their bag from the tray after the x-ray scan. There is a sensor on the last position before the tray goes into the mechanism to send it back to the start [or landside if you like] and if it detects a bag in the tray, everything stops.
Cleared security no probs [no laptop removal / shoe carnival] and had a good wander round airside. Basically, everything is pretty much finished. Just about all of the shops & food outlets have had at least a basic fit-out and some are just awaiting merchandise / equipment. There are some great views of the airfield to be had from T5 – I sat and watched the departure runway for a while from what will be a food outlets seating area in just over a month. You could see the aircraft line up on 27L in the distance, then watch their entire takeoff run. It’s interesting to see how little runway some of the smaller aircraft use & how much some of the larger ones need. I know it was fairly quiet in T5 today, but you could still hear a good rumble when a heavily loaded plane did a long takeoff roll & climbed out very near T5.
The gate number was now up on the screens for the Glasgow flight, so went to the other end of the terminal to board. The fingerprint recognition system did not appear to be working at the gate, as I was not asked for a scan of my right hand fingers again [all the kit was there to take the scan]. On reaching the jetbridge entrance, we were given our next brief. I was now arriving into T5 from Copenhagen, transferring onto a flight to New York.
Headed down to the flight transfer area, which is on one side of the large immigration hall. The transfer passenger queue is not ideally designed. You have the tensa-barrier zig-zag but when you get to the front there are several points at which you can join a small queue to be fed into one of a few desks for a boarding pass scan / ID check. Naturally, people get to the front of the zig-zag and join the first queue – so the staff on the desks furthest away from this point were getting next to no people through their desks. Once through the transfer area, back up an escalator 2 levels to be re-screened for security and back into the departures lounge.
I went back to the aforementioned food outlet seating area to watch more departures & got to see 2 VS 346’s leave (did not see a single VS flight go when last there). Before too long the gate was up for New York – A10. Clearly remote stands will still feature when T5 opens, as gate A10 is actually 5 or 6 gates (A10a – A10e or f, I cannot remember). You descend from the departures level right down to ground level, then are bussed out to your aircraft. In our case, we were bussed round T5B [the satellite terminal] then back to T5A [main terminal]. A bit of a glitch here, as neither the bus driver’s or T5 Trial person on the bus ID card would open the door back into T5A – but we got in after a call or two had been made. Here we got our final brief, I was now an arriving passenger from Delhi.
I made my way back to the immigration hall I had visited earlier and BAA were throwing a lot of people at immigration at once, but I only waited about 5mins – and not all the desks were open either for EU passports. Sure, it was a bit artificial as you were using your traveler profile document as the passport, so nothing for immigration to inspect as such. I had no checked baggage to reclaim, but the baggage reclaim hall looks really good and easy to navigate. Straight out through Customs in the green channel – again, very artificial, as you knew they could not stop you for anything.
Back on the arrivals concourse, my brief said to leave the terminal via the “Trains and Underground” exit – this does not exist. There is a Trains exit and a separate Underground exit [presumably they both feed into the same station]. Tried asking a BAA person in a blue tabard about this and they said they could not help, it’s all part of the trial to see what people look for.
I collected my T5 goodie bag & got the bus back to the hotel. The bag contained the following quality items;
• T5 passport holder – my UK passport won’t fit into it
• T5 pen
• T5 baggage tag – looks like it cost about 10p to make
• Most worryingly, a travel power adapter. If used in the UK on one of those 4 or 6 way in-line gang sockets, if you press the wrong button on it when it’s plugged in, it releases the *LIVE* USA socket pins for you to electrocute yourself on. I will be calling the T5 trials team about this on Monday morning – the company I work for issued a few of the same model of adapter last year & condemned them all when this defect came to light. It’s not unreasonable to expect that someone may try to use this adapter to power something in the UK that they purchased abroad
All in all today was a very interesting & enjoyable day. T5 is a great building – I’ll be 100% honest and say it is not as architecturally amazing as I thought it would be, but it’s light, airy, spacious and very pleasant – certainly a far cry from T3.
I am sure that BAA & the authorities got a lot of information out of today – there were loads of observers observing just about every aspect of the trial. A lot was being filmed too. I have never seen so many police in an airport terminal either – don’t know if this was related to the trial or because the building is still a partial building site.
It will be interesting to see how T5 unfolds on the 27th March – I am sure any good failures will be accurately reported by the press [not!] From what I saw today it is clear that BA & BAA have thought very long and hard about this project & the finished article I saw is good. It will be even better if they can iron out the few niggles in the next month and a bit.
James
