In the early hours of Thursday, British Airways staff arrived at Heathrow’s terminal 5 to open the glittering temple to aviation. After years of planning, £4.3 billion in investment and months of rehearsals, this was the moment of truth, the dawn of a new era.

Except that staff could not find anywhere to park. And when they finally did get inside the vast building, they did not know where to go.

“Nobody knew how to get to the work stations,” said one baggage handler, who asked not to be named. “We had these hand-held computers which allocated work. Instead of having people on the ground we could actually speak to . . . we were told by computer where to go. It was like the comedy sketch: ‘the computer says no’.”

As ever at Heathrow, small glitches began to have big knock-on effects. Like a giant stack of dominos, all the hopes for the enormous terminal – designed to handle 30m passengers a year – began to topple. Within hours the baggage system was jammed; check-in queues snaked across the concourse; scuffles broke out; scores of flights were cancelled; others took off without luggage and chaos reigned.

Paul Greenfield, a company chief executive and BA gold card holder, was looking forward to a few days’ skiing in Switzerland only to find his flight delayed by 90 minutes. No big deal, he thought.

“There were lots of apologies and explanations about a late inbound aircraft,” he said. “That was fine.”

What made his blood boil was when the flight took off only for the captain to announce that no checked-in baggage had been put on board. “Coming off the flight I was frankly ashamed to be British,” he fumed later.

At least Greenfield got on a plane. Michael Cottillard, who was supposed to fly to Johannesburg, was separated from his baggage and found himself without a flight or anywhere to stay for the night. All he got was a £5 food voucher.

“The most annoying thing has been the appalling communication,” he fulminated. “No one told us anything useful.”

Summing up the anger and despair, Alan Gibson, 52, who missed a flight home to Edinburgh, simply said: “It was billed as a state of the art terminal; but if you ask me it’s just a state, plain and simple.”

By this weekend BA had cancelled more than 240 flights affecting 20,000 passengers, thousands more had suffered delays and a flagship project had descended into a national farce. The disruption is still continuing today with 37 flights expected to be cancelled.

The day before the terminal opened, Willie Walsh, BA’s chief executive, had boasted that it would be “fantastic”and added: “I think we do a very good job in difficult circumstances”. On Friday he made a humiliating apology, with the memorable understatement that the opening of terminal 5 was “not our finest hour”.

The debacle raises more than questions over the incompetent preparations by BA and BAA, the airport operator, for opening the terminal. If they cannot even get terminal 5 right, why should the public accept their claims about a third runway and sixth terminal at Heathrow? Is the chaos at terminal 5 a sign that the best departure for passengers would be to another airport site altogether?

NOBODY can say that BA was not warned. Since last autumn the airline has been running trials and familiarisation days at terminal 5, a giant creation of steel and 30,000 sq metres of glass designed by Lord Rogers (who also designed the Millennium Dome, another landmark that opened with delays).

In December, Chris Haslam, a Sunday Times writer, participated in one trial and reported delays with check-in, baggage and passport control. The building was packed with upmarket shops, he said, but “beyond the bling, the terminal 5 experience remains depressingly familiar”. He and 14% of others in the trial “missed their flight”.

As recently as two weeks ago, both the GMB and Unite unions warned senior managers at BA that their plans for a “big bang” move to terminal 5 would result in cancelled flights because staff had not been properly trained.

Yesterday BA admitted to The Sunday Times that only 50 senior staff, out of a total of 800 workers involved in baggage handling at the terminal, had been involved in the five hands-on “proving” trials at the terminal before it opened.

Walsh had declared before the opening: “We’re ready.” His staff clearly were not.

As they arrived on Thursday morning they found the N5 car park nearest the terminal was full; many were still driving round the airport looking for spaces as the first passengers were checking in their bags.

“Everybody was driving around trying to find a space, at which point they decided they needed to reopen another car park,” said one BA staff member, who asked not to be named. “But they failed to inform the bus company to pick up the staff.”

Another staffer said: “At 6am we could not get into the staff car park because BAA [which owns Heathrow] had not opened the overflow car park. The queues were back along the Northern Perimeter Road. On arrival at T5 the security queue for staff was out of the front door and back to the bus stops.” When workers finally did get into the building they faced another obstacle: the sheer size of terminal 5. “Many of us just got completely lost,” said one baggage handler. “The place is the size of 50 football pitches. It’s massive. The whole thing was a bloody farce.”

When they did make it to their handling areas, they could not start work. Staff were initially unable to log in to the “baggage reconciliation system”, a computer that has to match every item of luggage with a passenger boarding the plane before it can be loaded. As a result the first seven flights took off without any luggage.

Vanderlande, the Dutch firm which maintains terminal 5’s baggage system, eventually managed to reset the computer codes allowing baggage handlers to log on. Too late.

The terminal has 11 miles of chutes and conveyors capable of handling 12,000 bags an hour. But like so much of Heathrow it found itself operating at the limit – and ground to a halt. “In the end there were simply too many bags in the system for the system to cope,” admitted Paul Marston, a spokesman for BA. A union official was scathing: “I knew it would go wrong. The logistics of Heathrow are rubbish. They don’t work properly.”

In the bowels of the building, tempers boiled over as the baggage piled up. A brawl is said to have broken out between more than 30 workers who had to be pulled apart by security guards, although BA denies knowledge of any incident.

Certainly staff were stressed. One baggage handler said: “Everyone was going mad and because all these hand-held computers are not interactive, you’ve got nobody to talk to. You couldn’t eyeball somebody and say this is a f****** mess.”

By 11am the public address system was announcing “baggage performance issues”.

Compounding the sense of shambles, 300 demonstrators protesting against Heathrow’s expansion entered the building and began stripping down to red T-shirts and massing in the arrivals hall. They were ringed by police with machineguns.

As queues lengthened at the desks handling cancelled flights, BA offered only “out-of-pocket” expenses for stranded customers. The airline suggested it would pay a maximum of £100 for two people sharing a hotel room. Some local hotels were charging more than double that amount.

The Air Transport Users Council (AUC) claimed BA’s offer breached European rules on passenger compensation by not properly informing travellers of their rights. Under EU rules, passengers can claim up to £460 for cancelled flights. “It seems BA was trying to minimise its costs,” said Simon Evans, chief executive of the AUC. If so, the airline may face fines of up to £5,000 per passenger.

As the disruption continued, one passenger found that even the glitzy “retail experience” offered little respite: he reported that restaurant chip-and-pin machines were out of action and he could find only one working cash machine.

Although there were signs of recovery yesterday, with more than 80% of scheduled flights going ahead normally, the fall-out was still affecting thousands of passengers. BA is now struggling to shift a secret baggage mountain of nearly 20,000 “lost” and delayed bags owned by transfer passengers.

The luggage is piled up in storage units at terminals 3, 4 and 5, waiting to be transfered to flights leaving the new terminal. BA stopped transferring the bags on Thursday after the system became overloaded.

A source close to Alstec, the company in charge of baggage transfers, said between 5,000 and 6,000 bags are held in a tent in terminal 1. A total of 8,000 bags are held in two tents in terminal 4, while a further 5,000 bags are held in two trailers and 30 containers outside terminal 5.

BA estimated yesterday that about 15,000 bags had been piled up, although it admitted that the luggage had not been counted. It will be forced to pay up to £800 compensation for each bag which it fails to reunite with its owner. THE new terminal was meant to be BA’s golden bullet. The “next generation” baggage system and soaring architecture would revitalise the airline’s battered image, consigning memories of lost luggage fiascos, grounded flights and price-fixing to the past.

Instead, terminal 5 could mark the start of an annus horribilis for the airline. From today it will lose its coveted status as one of only four airlines allowed to fly between London and America, which it has enjoyed since 1977.

An “open skies” deal between Europe and Washington means that four of BA’s rivals will begin offering transatlantic flights from London, giving passengers more choice and potentially cheaper flights. At the same time, high oil prices and an impending recession in America have combined to make BA one of the worst performing stocks in the FTSE 100.

Further disruption for passengers is also on the horizon. Pilots have voted to strike over concerns that BA will use the open skies agreement as an excuse to employ new air crew on inferior pay and conditions. The strike action is on hold while the High Court rules on a BA challenge to it going ahead.

Walsh, the man charged with solving these problems, apologised for last week’s debacle but still believed terminal 5 would prove a success.

“I’ve got to accept responsibility for this because we didn’t do the job we should have done,” he said. “If you want to blame someone, you should blame me. It [terminal 5] is going to be a great success for us, but we have taken a battering. I’m sorry for passengers and I’m sorry for staff.”

Rogers, the terminal’s architect, is also optimistic. “In terms of the construction process and the building, I’m tremendously happy with terminal 5,” he said yesterday.

“It is a very complex building and I know that when we opened Madrid [its £4.2 billion Barajas airport was also designed by Rogers], there were baggage problems there, too. It seems to be part of the bedding-down process of these very complex buildings. It’s annoying and infuriating for people but that’s the complexity of modernity.”

Others are not so sanguine. One BA staff member who works at terminal 5 said: “So far we are only dealing with European flights and a handful of long-haul flights transferred from terminal 1. Imagine when terminal 4 flights come over at the end of April.

“These flights are with aircraft twice as big, with twice as many passengers and a higher baggage allowance. The system will explode, not collapse.”

When Denver International airport tried to introduce a heavily automated baggage handling system in 1994, the saga dragged on for a year, costing the airport $1m a day.

BA is reviewing plans to transfer flights from terminal 4 to terminal 5 and has postponed a multimillion-pound advertising campaign for the new terminal which was to have trumpeted the speed at which passengers and baggage would glide through the building.

One senior City banker involved in transport projects summed up the chaos: “The basic problem is that you are dealing with two horribly inefficient organisations in BA and BAA. When you put them together, you get something like this.”

BAA, which owns Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, is mired in debt and seen as anticompetitive because it controls all London’s main airports.

Its owner, the Spanish infrastructure group Ferrovial, is also saddled with £10 billion of loans that it took on to buy BAA and is struggling to refinance them amid the credit crisis.

Meanwhile, Heathrow remains an embarrassment. In a survey of passengers by Sky-trax, a website that rates airlines and airports, Heathrow was ranked 103rd out of 162 airports around the world. Indeed, some airlines claim that BAA has manipulated customer satisfaction data in an attempt to cover up its dismal level of service.

Yet BA and BAA, and their associated vested interests, are at the heart of plans to expand Heathrow with a third runway and another terminal.

Despite the fundamental problems of its location – hemmed in by urban sprawl – they remain a powerful lobby in political circles.

The Sunday Times revealed earlier this month how BAA rigged some evidence on environmental concerns to pursue its plans for a third runway. This newspaper has now uncovered further details of how the private companies and government are collaborating. IN a private gathering at terminal 5 before its opening, Ruth Kelly, the transport secretary, mingled with BA and BAA executives and heaped praise on their efforts.

“This is a building that exhausts superlatives,” she told them. “After the delays and inconvenience suffered by many passengers, a new terminal will play a vital role in helping Heathrow meet increasing demand in the years ahead.”

Kelly has been just as effusive about expanding Heathrow. The move would increase the number of flights over densely populated areas by 40% to more than 700,000 a year. In November, even before the conclusion of a public consultation on a third runway, Kelly had claimed that an expanded Heathrow was “vital” for Britain’s economic interests.

Last week new documents, released under freedom of information laws, revealed just how cosily the government and BAA have been operating.

At one meeting about plans for Heathrow, the Civil Aviation Authority raised concerns that the extra flights might pose a safety risk. But the Department for Transport seems to have been more interested in BAA’s commercial prospects. One document records: “The Department for Transport’s main concern was to know whether . . . there was a feasible . . . proposition for consultation, and one that was commercially attractive to BAA.”

Another suggested that government officials – unlike BAA – had been kept out of the loop on data about future traffic movements around the expanded airport. “DfT [Department for Transport] expressed concern that they were not given prior warning of this issue,” say the minutes of a meeting on the subject.

The documents also reveal that while the government has publicly appeared confident about the case for expansion at Heathrow, in private it has feared a legal challenge.

One document records that “the threat of judicial review of the consultation process and materials” is serious. Indeed, a lobby group of local residents opposed to the third runway, Hacan Clear Skies, is preparing a legal challenge.

The papers also reveal that officials have found that additional flights at Heathrow will create an “island of noise” near the Queen’s official residence at Windsor. “The shape of the contour looked odd, with a potential noise ‘hot spot’ near Windsor,” says the document.

Justine Greening, MP for Putney and an opponent of Heathrow expansion, said: “Thousands of households may well need substantial noise insulation as a result of these plans. Given that the Queen may be living in an island of noise, her own home may qualify for double glazing.”

A spokesman for the Queen declined to comment. But the government is facing opposition to the expansion of Heathrow from members of all political parties. In London, 19 local authorities are protesting, as are the leading mayoral candidates and many local MPs.

The latest issue of The Economist, usually a proponent of enterprise and growth, advocates the better use of existing facilities before any expansion; it also observes that “a new airport may yet be needed” in a new location.

On Wednesday the Liberal Democrats will raise questions in the Commons about Heathrow, while several former Labour ministers have also expressed concerns. They include Nick Raynsford, the former planning minister, who writes on this page about his belief that an entirely new airport in the Thames estuary is the only way forward, and Michael Meacher, the former environment minister.

Whether the government is listening, however, is another matter.

As one passenger said when faced by an escalator at terminal 5 that was not working: “You don’t expect anything to work here, do you? You have to go abroad for that.”

If, of course, you can get abroad in the first place.

TERMINAL TROUBLE

What BA said before the opening

“Will T5 open without a hiccup? Yes and yes.”
Willie Walsh, chief executive of British Airways in The Sunday Times last year

“We have done as much as we possibly can and we are ready. Our customers will absolutely love T5 and our people will love working there.”
Walsh, writing in British Airways News, March 20

“The terminal will be fantastic. I think it’s particularly pleasing that we’ll get an opportunity to do a better job at Heathrow when we move into Terminal 5.”
Walsh, the day before the terminal opened What BA said after the shambles

“I’m sorry for passengers, and I’m sorry for staff. If you want to blame someone, you should blame me.”
Walsh on Friday

THE VISION

Terminal 5 cost £4.3 billion and took more than fi ve years to build. Designed to handle 30m passengers a year, it has a computerised baggage system capable of processing 12,000 cases an hour on 11 miles of conveyor belts travelling at up to 23mph. The terminal’s fi ve fl oors could accommodate 50 football pitches.

THE OPENING REALITY

The baggage system ground to a halt from overloading. Mountains of bags from transfer passengers are stuck in storage at other Heathrow terminals. More than 240 fl ights were cancelled in the fi rst three days, affecting 20,000 passengers. Thousands more have suffered delays.

Times recommends

• The Green Spaces Travel Awards, 2008 - the winners
• Britain's 12 best winter walks
• The insiders' guide to bohemian Paris