So far so good for British Airways, as it today began shifting extra flights to Heathrow T5.The first of 9,500 extra bags and 8,000 passengers passed through T5 smoothly, including Hollywood actress Uma Thurman on a BA flight from New York.
The morning however was not glitch free, with passengers on a flight from Zurich suffering luggage delays of more than an hour. But the terminal’s state-of-the-art baggage system was coping with the increased demand, BA said.
“The first flights from T5 have departed early and on time,” a BA spokesman said. “The terminal is working well, but there could be bedding-in issues as everyone gets used to operating the new routes into a different terminal.”
Eight routes are transferring to T5 today, including Lagos, New York, Cairo, Beijing and Cape Town. The increase, to be followed by two further moves in the autumn, takes the number of passengers using the terminal daily from 45,000 to around 53,000 and increases the number of bags processed through the building from around 40,000 a day to around 50,000. The number of flights in and out of T5 will rise by 30, to 424 a day.
——-