Queues, cancellations, chaos: what has gone wrong at Heathrow?

theguardian.com:

What has gone wrong at Heathrow? The airport that confidently laid out expansion plans and charged its customers a hefty premium has been repeatedly suffering the kind of chaos people pay money to avoid: flight cancellations, long queues, lost baggage mountains and strike threats. Now, at the start of the full summer peak, it has told airlines to turn passengers away.

In a week when baking temperatures swept across Britain, few places were feeling the heat more. Heathrow’s own posters highlighting the “elephant in the room” – aviation’s contribution to climate change – have never looked more apposite as the mercury hit a record 40.2C at the airport, the grass between its runways parched a desert brown.

Last week, Heathrow announced a 100,000 daily cap on passengers until 11 September, infuriating airlines and putting thousands of customers’ plans in jeopardy. The airport insisted it was “protecting holidays”, but the response was fierce. Emirates initially refused point blank to comply or cancel flights. In some of the milder invective, Willie Walsh, the director general of Iata – and an old frenemy from running British Airways and its parent group, IAG – has described Heathrow as “a bunch of idiots when it comes to running airports”.

Inside the airport terminals this week, the line between exceedingly busy and frantic was thin. At least, though, the air conditioning was working. In a late morning lull in Terminal 5, it did not look like chaos. “Give it a couple of hours,” a BA staffer at the queueing ropes said, grinning, a mild sweat on. “It just comes and goes … Just random.”

The airline sector’s turmoil is self-perpetuating: huge queues grow with anxious passengers turning up ever earlier for flights. Wider travel