[Anonymous]

[Anonymous]

In which our correspondent has Star Wars flashbacks at London Heathrow and a Trainspotting moment in the Middle East…

BA’s Terminal 5 has had a fair bit of well-earned stick. Aside from the
premature opening, there are some fundamental design flaws that leave even the most battle-hardened traveller (me) weary. Business travel with fast-track access through immigration and security is a given, yet it took time for T5 to dedicate even the far end of the terminal to this.

Once there, you are tortured by an elaborate X-ray machine and a
conveyor-belt system that leaves you in a scrum to retrieve your belongings.

Get through that and you¹ll be greeted by the millionaire’s door on the
right, through which only US presidential candidates, papal nominees, Russian oligarchs (pre-collapse), Nobel prize winners, first class passengers and mythical BA black-card holders can pass. And trust me, they are very strict about who qualifies.

A friend travels first class BA long-haul as policy and uses the lounge.
However, if you are travelling within Europe in business class (as there is no first class) you aren’t allowed in. The indignant gold-card holder is asked to walk the 1km round trip to the same point on the other side of the door, and is then guided back 500 metres, down an escalator, back 500 metres and up another escalator ­madness.

At this point T5 starts to work its magic and win you over ­ that is, until
your flight is gated in Terminal B, on the other side of the taxiway. You
descend an Escher-like cascade of escalators to get on a small train
operated by pit ponies and hemp rope, only to go up an identical set of escalators at the other end.

As much as I berate T5, it is modern, spacious and relatively efficient, andI have yet to queue to check in. I only realised how spoilt I was when I recently travelled to the Middle East on a national carrier. Saturday night in Heathrow Terminal 3 looked like the Star Wars bar scene ­ queues stretching outside, huge travel bags wrapped in miles of polythene, and crying relatives.

Check-in was fine at business class but the fast-track security queue
reached the concourse, and economy was all the way to the escalators. You understand why when you make it through the X-ray machine and see staff pulling whole pineapples, two-litre bottles of milk and gallon-drums of baby powder from people’s bags.

Once through, you queue for immigration and the final triumph, the shoe X-ray machine. This is one of my favourites as you are selected for it on an arbitrary basis. If you are one of the chosen ones, you can walk straight through as it seems to be unregulated.

I skipped the lounge and went straight to the gate. On the plane my seat reclined 180 degrees but not horizontally, so on the overnight flight I could not sleep for fear of sliding right off into the footwell.

The real fun started when I landed. I had a morning meeting and planned touse the arrivals facility to freshen up and put my suit on. I had asked the person at Heathrow check-in where it was but they were clueless, so I asked two attendants during the flight. They told me there were showers at the business terminal and ground staff would be happy to help me.

The ground staff, a third-party provider that had nothing to do with the
airline, guided me off the bus at immigration and took the remaining
business passengers to the transit terminal. This is when the wheel cameoff. Transit passengers in business/first have use of the arrivals lounge; people leaving the airport (me) do not.

I resorted to plan B ­ use the airside toilets ­ and had a sense-of-humourfailure. For a hydrocarbon-rich country with a state-of-the-art airport, the toilet reminded me of the one in the film Trainspotting. What made it more memorable was the flight that landed after me and tipped out its hacking, coughing and spitting content. I gave it up as a bad job and cleared immigration to try the toilets landside. Poor decision: like queuing at the post office, you have to pick a line and stick to it.

In the dilapidated toilet in arrivals, I had no choice but to have a bird
bath, brush my teeth with a bottle of water from the plane and shave. Cold water from the hot tap was the cherry on my day ­ and all this before 5am on a Sunday morning.

[Airpocket]

I think the moral here is that Middle Eastern airports have a lot of catching up to do.

[Author]

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