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OPERATiOns PERfORmAnCE CAn mAKE OR bREAK Any ORgAnisATiOn 47

said BA’s boss Willie Walsh with magnificent understatement, ‘was not the company’s finest hour’.
The chaos at the terminal on its opening days made news around the world and was seen by
many as one of the most public failures of basic operations management in the modern his-
tory of aviation. ‘It’s a terrible, terrible PR nightmare’, said David Learmount, an aviation expert.
‘Somebody . . . still not have their luggage after three weeks is not good for their [BA’s] image. The one
thing that’s worse than having a stack of 15,000 bags is adding 5,000 a day to that heap.’ According
to a BA spokeswoman, it needed an extra 400 volunteer staff and courier companies to wade
through the backlog of late baggage. Two hundred flights in and out of T5 had to be cancelled
in its first three days. The chaos delayed moving its long-haul operations to the new building
from Terminal 4 as scheduled on 30 April, which, in turn, disrupted the operations of other
airlines, many of whom were scheduled to move into Terminal 4 once BA had moved its long-
haul flights from there.
So what went wrong? As is often the case with major operations failures, it was not one thing
but several interrelated problems (all of which could have been avoided). Press reports initially
blamed glitches with the state-of-the-art baggage handling system. And, indeed, the baggage
handling system did experience problems that had not been exposed in testing. But BAA, the
airport operator, doubted that the main problem was the baggage system itself. The system
had worked until it became clogged with bags that were overwhelming BA’s handlers loading
them onto the aircraft. Partly this may have been because staff were not sufficiently familiar
with the new system and its operating processes, but handling staff had also suffered delays
getting to their new (and unfamiliar) work areas, negotiating (new) security checks and finding
(again, new) car parking spaces. Also, once staff were airside they had problems logging-in. The
cumulative effect of these problems meant that the airline was unable to get ground handling
staff to the correct locations for loading and unloading bags from the aircraft, so baggage could
not be loaded onto aircraft fast enough, so baggage backed up – clogging the baggage handling
system, which, in turn, meant closing baggage check-in and baggage drops, leading eventually
to baggage check-in being halted.
During the same year that Terminal 5 at Heathrow was suffering queues, lost bags and bad
publicity, Dubai International Airport’s Terminal 3 opened quietly with little publicity and
fewer problems. Like T5, it is also huge and designed to impress. Like T5, it handles about
30 million passengers a year.But Dubai’s T3 had one big advantage – it could observe and learn
lessons from the botched opening of Heathrow’s Terminal 5. Paul Griffiths, Dubai Airport’s
chief executive, insisted that his own new terminal should not be publicly shamed in the same
way. ‘There was a lot of arrogance and hubris around the opening of T5’, Mr Griffiths said. ‘The first
rule of customer service is under-promise and over-deliver because that way you get their loyalty. BA
was telling people that they were getting a glimpse of the future with T5, which created expectation and
increased the chances of disappointment. We knew the world would be watching and waiting after T5 to
see whether T3 was the next big terminal fiasco. We worked very hard to make sure that didn’t happen.’

performance at three levels
‘Performance’ is not a straightforward or simple concept. First, it is multi-faceted in
the sense that a single measure can never fully communicate the success, or otherwise,
of something as complex as an operation. Several measures will always be needed to
convey a realistic overview of the various aspects of performance. Second, performance
can be assessed at different levels, from the broad, long-term, societal level, to the more
operational level concerns over how operations improve their day-to-day efficiency,

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