When the new Terminal 5 opened up at Heathrow Airport on March 27th, we were supposed to be in awe of its technological brilliance.

Unfortunately the project was never adequately tested and chaos ensued on the opening day, with thousands missing flights due to the baggage system giving up the ghost.

“If I were to pick one issue I would have done differently, it is that, having recognised the importance of testing and having designed six months of testing, we subsequently compromised on that,” said Willie Walsh, British Airways Chief Executive to MP’s last week.

As construction work on the Terminal was not completed on time, staff training and IT tests were “compromised”.

The problems included a software filter being left on the BAA baggage system. It was used to restrict baggage-system data to the BAA testing operation, and ensue it was not sent to other baggage systems. However, it was not until March 31^st when British Airways staff discovered the problem. The filter interfered with the messages coming into the system which meant a number of bags were not recognised.

In addition to this problem, the servers could not cope with the number of message the baggage system generated. Walsh said the amount of data the servers had to cope with was much greater than expected.

He said the airline took a “calculated risk” and decided to go ahead, even though they were aware of the problems.

Unfortunately for British Airways this ‘calculated risk’ cost them £16m in the first five days of operation. More than 500 flights were cancelled and 23,000 bags were lost. Walsh said losses could have been “many times that” if the opening had been postponed. All but 125 of the lost luggage have been returned to their owners.

In addition to the IT problems, there were issues with staff parking, air bridge jetties, with getting staff through security because they didn’t know which gates were open and to top it off, 28 lifts were not working.

Unsurprisingly MP’s branded the terminal opening a “national humiliation” and accused BAA’s chief executive, Colin Matthews, and non-executive chair of the board, Nigel Rudd, of complacency when they could not answer several of the MP’s questions.

Matthews said he had spent time trying to fix the problems, rather than apportioning blame, but the BAA officials were told they would have to investigate further and provide written answers, or return to another evidence session.