Terminal Delays

Why is the government spending millions of pounds fighting alleged terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq? Why do they waste yet more money ramping up security at airports, stations and the underground so as to avoid terror attacks causing travel chaos? The past week or so has made it abundantly plain that all they had to do was arrest the combined managements of British Airways (BA) and the British Airports Authority (BAA). Judging by the chaos surrounding Heathrow's new Terminal 5, these two organisations are clearly in the pay of Al Qaeda to create travel chaos. Threatening to blow up an airliner flying from Heathrow wouldn't have been any more disruptive. Actually, to digress slightly, I remember the time when making an anonymous call to the authorities claiming that there was a bomb on your flight, was an accepable way of ensuring that you didn't miss your plane when you'd been delayed on the way to the airport. These days, of course, they'd trace the call and you'd find yourself looking down the end of a sub-machine gun before being banged up in Belmarsh before being extraordinarily rendered to an East European jail to be tortured for information by the CIA's protegees.

Obviously, there's no chance of any BA or BAA executives having their nipples wired up to the Azerbaijani National Grid - they didn't perpetrate any bomb hoaxes. They just buggered up the baggage handling system by implementing an untested and clearly faulty mechanised system. Whilst this was undoubtedly motivated by the desire to cut costs, it is hard to see how significant savings could be made by replacing poorly paid baggage handlers with a multi-million pound computer controlled mechanical system. Mind you, the problem could be that they've tried to emulate the human handlers they're replacing too perfectly. As I understand it, it is the automatic luggage pilfering module which is causing all the problems. The mechanical hands they use to open up and go through passengers' baggage in search of valuables are far too complicated and are always breaking down. Consequently, a backlog of non-pilfered luggage has built up. There's a very real danger that an unacceptably high percentage of passengers could receive their baggage with all their valuables intact. That's why they've been forced to bring human baggage handlers in on their days off to try and rectify the error, and even send some luggage to Italy for pilfering. It's a sad state of affairs when we have to out source this kind of thing.