Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Technology, planning and air travel

James Robertson writes about the disasterous opening of Terminal 5 at Heathrow. For the past 18 months, I’ve been myred in two major airport projects, and perhaps I can shed some light onto the situation. I also happen to have some knowledge of BAA, which is the entity that operates Heathrow (among many others).

First, I think it’s important to understand what an airport is, and is not. To understand airports, one must not think about transportation, but about shopping malls and civic projects. The financial model for an airport, at least in the United States¹, is by and large, based on renting space to airlines, and sometimes services around that space. It’s a shopping mall. Sure, there’s a lot of other financial components, and obviously it has a lot of expenses that a shopping mall doesn’t, but in the end, it’s often operated that way.

Next, all airports are projects of “civic importance”. They are huge projects, often in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, and are seen as a point of pride for a city, county or region. While you would think this would be a good thing, it actually tends to mean that the management is highly politicized, the operations molasses-like in it’s agility, and priorities inverted to ensure difficulty.

For example, I can’t begin to recount the number of meetings I’ve sat in where hours were spent discussing exactly what shade of terrazo stone to use on the floor, and then the entire IT operations were dismissed as being “unimportant”. I’ve had 2 hour discussions about the exact shade of white that a CCTV camera needs to be painted, without anyone discussing whether D1 resolution is really the right choice. It’s a beauty contest, quite honestly. The budget for art is often bigger than the IT capital budget for new construction.

When you’re in that situation, with inverted priorities, and a business model that isn’t really driven by the end consumer, i.e., the traveler, the chances of failure are high. No airport ever opens on time. No airport ever opens without problems. Some of it is complexity, but some of it is lack of planning and priorities around operational concerns.

¹ I believe this is largely true world-wide, though less so in places where a single carrier dominates an airport, like British Airways at Terminal 5.