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A story of greed, indifference and incompetence causing Heathrow airport to go into shutdown
A story of greed, indifference and incompetence causing Heathrow airport to go into shutdown
The fine upstanding collection of investors who own Britain’s Heathrow Airport could probably organize the proverbial piss up in a brewery as they have shown quite a knack for developing ludicrously overpriced bars and restaurants on their premises. But are they up to running Europe’s largest airport?
Excuses for shutting down Heathrow airport on 21 March started to unravel within days. FGP Topico, Heathrow’s owners, blamed a power outage at its main supply station for forcing them to cease operations. However it now turns out that other sources of power supply were available but the Muppets running the airport had failed to get their electricity switching operations to work in time.
Before this became known the airport’s bosses declared that all their safeguarding and backup systems had worked like dandy. When pesky sceptics asked how working like dandy could possibly include shutting the whole thing down, they barely bated an eyelid before coming up with the line that the airport was very, very big, and on any given day consumed as much power as a medium sized city. Therefore any reasonable person should understand that it could not possibly have a backup plan which included keeping operations running.
Having explained just how difficult it was to run an airport of this size they somehow forgot to mention that they had just managed to con the hapless British government into approving plans for its massive expansion.
Does this mean that bigger will be better? Or to put it another way are you convinced that a reckless small car driver would do less damage were they to be put in charge of a bigger vehicle.
This is not a case of being smart after the event because what Heathrow Airport failed to do was the most basic requirement of ensuring that mechanisms were in place to safeguard its infrastructure. Like an insurance policy which is not purchased to guarantee that the insured will never incur harm, sensible people buy insurance so that should harm occur they will be better able to handle the fallout.
Safeguards cost a great deal of money, not least when it involves providing a backup power supply system. The consortium which took over a flailing airport had other priorities involving lots of ideas for income generation.
And my oh my, they sure did have any number of ideas for squeezing extra cash out of their property, ranging from levying some of the world’s highest airport fees (paid by passengers but not transparently as they are wrapped up in ticket prices), turning their terminals into high priced shopping malls and even slamming on fees for dropping off passengers to complement the extortionate cost of airport parking.
Were it the case that all these extra charges and overpriced facilities have produced a fabulous transportation hub, some people might just shrug and say, ‘you get what you pay for’.
The reality however is that for most people Heathrow offers a thoroughly miserable experience where lack of staff and poor management ensures that endless queuing is the norm. Where delays are routine, on average 20 minutes per flight (other UK airports are worse, if that’s any consolation). And where the service ethos has been securely locked away because, as everyone knows, if there is a problem, the likelihood of obtaining assistance bears an uncanny resemblance to waiting on a telephone ‘hotline’ for a response.
Obviously things are different for so called premium passengers. Heathrow has even just launched its ‘signature’ Windsor Suite where, for prices starting at £3,300 per visit, you can be totally insulated from the hassle and sheer nastiness that is the fate of less premium passengers.
So, there is a way of making the airport experience really nice but it is only for the very few. As for the rest, well, hopefully they will appreciate just how difficult it is to run a very, very big airport and will have noted the fresh paint and nice trimmings in the refurbished Terminal 2.
Most passengers however are confronted by the reality that the real job of Heathrow’s owners is to get a decent return on the money they invested in a consortium put together by the rather shadowy Ardian company and its eight partners including the Qatar Investment Authority and the China Investment Corporation.
If this means saving a wodge of cash by not shelling out for a highly resilient power backup facility, so be it because at the end of the day the only people who really suffer are the passengers while those who matter are sitting in the Windsor Suite sipping some rather decent bubbly (other beverages are available).