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The whole Heathrow experience
Posted by Mark 1 September 2007
Here are my experiences of passing through Heathrow:
First, you have to get to the place. If you arrive by bus or tube or taxi or you are being dropped-off, it's easier. But road traffic still has to come through the bottle-necks leading into the airport which can be difficult because there are almost always roadworks going on somewhere in the area. So you have to allow extra time in case of delays. If you are driving in and parking your car at the airport, it's worse. You have to find a parking place, which take time, and wait for the shuttle to take you to the terminal, which takes more time, and those shuttles themselves can be caught up in traffic congestion. So you have to allow even more time for delays.
Once you are in the right terminal, you have to find your check-in desk and join what can be a huge queue. Skipping ahead slightly, after you have checked you luggage in you then get some warnings about what you are not permitted to take on board in your hand baggage and what you should have put into your checked luggage. It would obviously make sense if they told you that while you still had it, so there should be people moving through the queue at this point telling you this.
After checking-in, you then have to go through security, of course. But before they let you into the security concourse they check your ticket. And there's a huge queue for that too. In other words, you have to queue in order to be able to join the queue.
The queue for security can be particularly daunting. You cannot believe how bad it looks, all the passengers from all the airlines are now herded together and you realise the scale of the operation and just how many people they have to process. And just how slow they are at doing it. You can't sit, you can't relax, it is an agonisingly slow shuffle, a few steps at a time. Then you have the collective humiliation of stripping-off your outer clothing, emptying your pockets, even taking you shoes off on occasion, walking through the metal detector, and then standing there, arms and legs akimbo while someone hand-searches your body.
Then at last you are into the departures lounge and either you have allowed too much time for delays and you find you are there with hours to kill, or you underestimated how bad things would be and you are already late for your flight.
Here, though, is part of the conundrum for BAA. If they significantly reduced the queues to get through to departures, there would be insufficient capacity to cope with everyone. However slow it is, there does need to be movement, a steady trickle of passengers coming through and boarding their flights. The queues, therefore, are a valve, a necessary way of limiting how many people get into the departures lounge.
Of course, if there are delays in boarding the flights, that means more passengers will be occupying an already stretched departures lounge. So here we have another knock-on effect. If BAA fail to get a member of staff to a departure gate on time to move the boarding ramp on or off an aircraft, that aircraft sits there. If BAA fail to get a driver to take fuel to an aircraft, that aircraft sits there. If BAA fail to get a driver for the tractor that pushes the aircraft back from the terminal, that aircraft sits there. In fact, if BAA fail to provide any service on time, an aircraft just sits there. That also adds to the amount of time passengers sit around before their flight finally gets off the ground.
But while an aircraft is sitting waiting for BAA to do something, it is occupying the stand and the next aircraft due in has to wait on the tarmac, so incoming passengers are delayed too, unless they can use a different stand for the incoming aircraft. And because they might use a different stand, everyone who is due to board that aircraft on its outgoing trip is left waiting in departures because nobody knows what gate to send them too.
When they do announce the gate number and invite you to make your way there, you have to pass through passport control, another queue, and when you finally make it to your gate, you have to go through another ticket check to get into that little lounge, another queue. Eventually, after what seems like a lifetime at Heathrow already, they start to board the aircraft, and yes, another ticket check and another queue. And at the end of the walkway, as you step through the door onto the aircraft, there is yet another ticket check.
Now you are on board your aircraft, seated and strapped in, you have been pushed back and you think "Great, we're on our way." Not yet. Now your aircraft has to trundle along miles of taxiway to join another queue just to get to the head of the runway.
It can be several hours, long, frustrating, tedious hours, between arriving on the outskirts of our great international airport and finally taking off into the air.
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