T5 and DIA

The chaos at the opening of the new Terminal 5 at Heath Row airport in London has brought on a soul-searching in the UK that is fairly typical of Britain, where organizational ability has never been the best. The British tend to like to "muddle through," a good example is "Scott of the Antarctic" the British officer who took an expedition to be the first at the South Pole, got there second (Amundsen of Norway was first) and managed to get his team killed in the process. When I was at school in England, Scott was presented as the archtypical Englishman, he may not have succeeded but he tried hard and died in the process. Not an example that Americans would have emulated.
However, the British should not feel so badly about the Terminal 5 fiasco. After all its all been done before, only you may have forgotten. The new International Airport in Denver, Colorado (DIA) was touted to be the new wonder of the flying world in the 1990s. It was supposed to be finished in 1993, but things went horribly wrong and there were incredible cost over-runs. Most troubling was the baggage-handling system, that was supposed to be the greatest thing since sliced cheese. It was all super and computerized and was supposed to deliver the baggage in minutes. However, unfortunately it didn't work so well. When the airport was opened in 1994 baggage simply got lost, some was torn apart when the sorting machines tried to send it two ways at once, and some baggage went missing for hours and noone knew where it had been. In 1995 they were forced to switch to manual baggage handling. The costs for fixing this system, using a completely new software package, and the delays resulted in millions of dollars of extra costs, and the company that owned the airport went bankrupt. There were Congressional hearings as to how such a much-anticipated breakthrough airport could have floundered so horribly.
Now I tell you this not to really make my British friends feel any better, but only to emphasize that complex systems are always likely to go wrong, and human planners are generally over-optimistic. But, knowing the example of the DIA, the organizers of Terminal 5 at Heath Row should at least have been more humble. They should have carried out a series of tests gradually increasing in difficulty, with trained staff, until they got it right, before they opened the place to such hullabaloo. As it is BA and the airport authority BAA are likely to be sued for many hundreds of millions of pounds (every dissatisfied passenger is entitled to $5,000 and there have been tens of thousands of them turned away). Let that be a lesson to you, remember Jurassic Park and don't take a chance of releasing the dinosaurs again.