Boy, am I glad the SPA 2008 conference wasn't this week - just look at the problems in Heathrow with the new terminal 5 opening. It sounds like they planned nothing, and just expected everything to somehow work. The results - passengers without bags, passengers waiting for 6 (or more) hours to get bags, 1/5th of BA's flights at Heathrow cancelled. Meanwhile, the guy running BA says this:

'It's going to be a difficult day and we have got to put the problems we had yesterday behind us. We clearly learnt some lessons from yesterday. We have just got to be focused.'

You can read the article for the basic mistakes, but some of them seem really stupid, like not having enough parking for the T5 staff. How do you not know how much parking you'll need? Is the size of the staff a mystery?

This kind of mistake requires some simple PR: the head of BA has to take ownership of the problems, and either resign or issue a simple "mea culpa" - along with a commitment to get things fixed. For starters, they might want to move to a small number of flights in and out of T5 and use that to debug the problems - and only scale it up as they fix them. Based on what I read, that doesn't sound like the approach they are taking though.

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