British Airways and Heathrow - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

On October 4, my husband and I set out for Denver International Airport (DEN) on a clear, windless weekday afternoon. We arrived in the airport, and no one was ahead of us in the ticketing line. Splendid. The pleasant ticket agent gave us fine seats, 15 A and 15B in the two-across bulkhead seats. Window. Aisle. No middle seat. Terrific. Then we learned that the 8:15 departure for British Airways' had been pushed back an hour. Why?

After an uneventful seven-hour flight, made more comfortable thanks to the bulkhead seats , we landed not terribly late at London's Heathrow (LHR) on another cloudless, windless afternoon. We wound our way from Terminal 3 (international flights) to Terminal 1 (domestic flights). We made our way through the terminal labyrinth, went through passport control, caught an inter-terminal shuttle bus and walked through another labyrinth to Terminal 1, gate 5, where we were told our ongoing flight would be an hour delayed.

In the last minute, the flight was switched from gate 5 to gate 7. No big deal. We boarded the plane, which waited for some delayed flight(s). The doors finally closed. We taxied for so long to such a distant departure point that I mused we might be driving to Manchester (MAN). We landed there to a scene of, to be politically unPC, a functionally nonexistent baggage claim area. The conveyor runs along one side of a fairly narrow corridor. Unclaimed bags encroach on the right side. The conveyor occupies the left, with people waiting for luggage taking up most of the floor space between as they peer at the conveyor.

The bags did finally come in, and we learned that we were fortunate to have them, because we later heard that some people at the convention we are attending have been waiting for theirs for up to three days. THEN, we sat for more than half an hour in the motorcoach that was to take us to our hotel for because some people on our flight (some in our group) were trapped behind an automatic glass door that wouldn't open. Sparing you the details, we finally arrived at our hotel too late for the welcoming reception, and six full hours after we landed at LHR.

Fast forward to October 5, when the convention's luncheon speaker was Willie Walsh, CEO of British Airways. I learned that LHR has been operating with only the original two runways with which it opened more than 60 years ago. British hopes to eliminate or at least mitigate what he admitted was the "Heathrow Hassle" when the luxurious new $8 billion, British Airways-only Terminal 5 opens in March 2008 (hopefully). There are also plans to build a third runway, a short one for smaller aircraft. That should help the Heathrow Hassle, but I wonder what about Manchester Mayhem.