Opinion: London, you’re making L.A. look mighty nice
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Take this as the second installment of my open-ended Opinion L.A. series to instill pride in our hometown international airport by shaming facilities in other big cities. Today’s dubious honor of making Los Angeles International Airport look cutting-edge belongs to London’s Heathrow Airport, which should be celebrating the beauty and efficiency of its long-awaited Terminal 5 (popularly known as ‘T5’). Rather, the unmitigated disaster that has been the first few days of operation at the roughly $8 billion terminal, which is expected to eventually relieve some congestion at Europe’s busiest airport, prompted one British member of Parliament to dub T5 a ‘national humiliation.’ Here’s an excerpt from a synopsis of the chaos by the Times of London:
The Terminal 5 luggage farrago has left 28,000 bags in temporary storage and airport staff admit it could take a week to reunite the baggage with its owners. The scale of the problem was revealed today as Jim Fitzpatrick, the aviation minister, conceded that the grand opening of the heralded Heathrow terminal had “fallen well short of expectations”. Before his announcement it emerged that one of the passengers to lose their bag at Terminal 5 was the foreign minister for an EU country ... A high-tech baggage system, which was supposed to revolutionise luggage handling, has failed to work properly since Terminal 5 was opened last week. BA has cancelled hundreds of flights as 400 additional staff battle to reduce the suitcase backlog.
Contrast the situation now with the kind of hype just last week ago that preceded T5’s opening. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Indeed, the Heathrow hassle has put even the famed British stiff upper lip to the test. But that may be about to change - at least in part - thanks to a big, new $8.7 billion passenger terminal opening this week after 15 years of planning, protests and environmental lawsuits. It’s the most expensive airport terminal ever built, and four times the size of the old Terminal 4 used by most San Francisco passengers. Come Thursday, Heathrow will finally open its sparkling Terminal 5. The soaring, glass and steel structure will have just one airline tenant: British Airways ... Like the new airports in Bangkok, Hong Kong and Denver, it’s likely Heathrow’s new terminal will experience birthing pains; expect some glitches over the next few weeks.
Even without the London debacle, our hometown airport has news of its own to celebrate -- carriers that threatened to flee LAX last year are instead adding more flights to international destinations:
Foreign airlines are turning to LAX again despite crowded, aging terminals -- frequent-flier surveys often rank it among the nation’s worst -- that have made it the bane of airlines and passengers. While U.S. carriers are cutting back amid a slowing economy and high fuel costs, international airlines are flocking to LAX as more overseas travelers look to take advantage of the weak dollar. Fares are likely to remain high as long as oil prices stay at their current levels, but the upswing in overseas flights could provide relief to some of the more-popular destinations in Europe, South America and Asia. And with the number of nonstop flights growing, people on international flights can look forward to reaching their destinations faster.
Eat your heart out, London -- we Angelenos will take our ‘crowded, aging terminals,’ so long as they actually work.