Heathrow Terminal 5
The recent chaos at the newly opened £4.3b3 ($8.6b) Terminal 5 at UK’s London Heathrow airport has been a main news story daily since its opening 10 days ago, on March 27th 2008.
The new terminal is exclusive to British Airways, and was designed to cater for 12,000 bags per hour[2], and 30 million passengers per year[2].
Heathrow Terminal 5
The problems since its opening have been significant, causing mass cancellations of short haul and domestic flights, severe damage to BA and BAA’s reputations, and amounting huge costs of an estimated £16m[1].
In its first four days, around 250 flights[1] in and out of the new terminal were cancelled, 28,000 bags[4] have been delayed to date and just today the baggage system has completely crashed[1] due to a computer glitch, necessitating all baggage processing to be done manually, causing further flight cancellations.
The outcome of the problems has been the effect of the massive baggage backlog problems, where travellers have been forced to fly without their baggage, if they have been able to fly at all. The backlog of baggage meant that the system failed, as the limit of 12,000 bags per hour was exceeded.
There have been several issues that have been identified as causing the problems.
The first admission is that of ‘staff familiarisation’ problems with the baggage systems. It appears that staff had problems logging into the system and that the system has crashed on numerous occasions.
The second problem is also with the staff. It appears that staff had problems with parking, clearing security[5] and lack of knowledge of where they were supposed to be[10], leading to them being late to their positions, which caused the initial backlog of luggage.
Another problem has been passenger difficulty in transferring between terminals. Reports of misguidance from staff[6], lifts without buttons[7] and non-existent scheduled buses[7] are appearing in many news reports. This has caused delays, frustration and missed flights.
Terminal 5 stranded passengers
All this comes after BA’s six-months of testing, which they claimed made them completely ready for the opening day.
We wanted to reach a period of stability and have achieved that successfully. It is all tried, tested and ready to go.[8]
The testing that BA undertook appears to have been carried out from September 2007 to March 2008, after the computer system was put into action in September.
The testing included 16,000 volunteers and allegedly covered all aspects of the terminal, from parking, to toilets, check-in and seating[9]. The trials were a mixture of four large-scale full tests, with smaller tests and staff training programs, undertaken by BA’s Information Management Testing and Assurance Teams.
An interesting post by Tamara Petroff[10] makes some very interesting points. Firstly, she points out that the admission that staff were late getting to their positions because they did not know where to go indicates that they had not been inside the building before. Therefore, they seemingly had not been involved in the testing. Petroff points out that apparently only a small number of staff were ever involved in the testing.
Secondly, she points out that the baggage problems when the capacity of 12,000 was exceeded had clearly not been anticipated or tested either. Perhaps they had tested with many bags, but clearly had not tested what would happen in the event of staff shortage.
What seems to have been the failure in the testing is that until the opening day itself, a complete ‘dry run’, with all the realities in place, had not taken place. Yes, they had tested how passengers flowed through the system, but had the staff already in place. Yes, they had given those particular staff a chance to familiarise themselves with the system, but had not given all the staff the chance. They did test all the aspects of the system itself, but apparently disregarded all the external issues that could impact on the system, such as staff delays or system crashes.
And what about pre-testing of the system? There has been no mention by BAA or BA of any pre-development testing of the system. The company who developed the software have so far refused to comment, so whether they undertook pre-testing is unknown, but surely BA would have to have been involved, to provide them with the users to test on?
Overall, it seems that Terminal 5 has fallen into the all too common trap of not considering human factors over the technical operations of a system[12]. If the testing had considered user experience design concepts, such as persona’s, user goals and user flows, these issues could have been uncovered before the system had even been implemented. As is generally acknowledged, post-testing is not sufficient for any software system, let alone one as large-scale as Terminal 5[11]. BA may have been trying to stay within budget, which they did apparently succeed in doing, but had they spent slightly more on testing, the massive costs they have now run up could have been avoided.
3. BBC article
11. Alan Cooper ‘The Inmates are Running The Asylum’ 2004: Sams Publishing
12a. Clegg report 2004
12b. Clegg report 1996
