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Stephen Pollard

ByStephen Pollard, Stephen Pollard

Opinion

T5: baggage-handling's not the issue (The Times)

April 7, 2008 24:00
1 min read

I have a piece in today's Times on Terminal Five. Here's an extract:

Let's start with the hour-long wait after we'd landed before a gate could be found for the plane. Nothing new there, you say; that's long been a feature of Heathrow. Precisely. Our apologetic - and clearly embarrassed - pilot told us as we waited that there might well be an expensive new terminal but the same old problems remained.

What's the first thing many people do when they get off a plane? Go to the toilet. The genius who designed the men's loos placed the dryer at immediate right angles to the sink. So if one man is washing his hands, no one else can dry, and vice versa. Within seconds a queue builds up and the entire toilet becomes a mass of angry, frustrated and tired loo goers. The loos were, needless to say, disgusting.