BAA promises to get its Heathrow act together

The answer lies in Top Gear!

Their Combine Harvester/Snowplough _nearly_ worked.

Given that combines have a power feed at the front for the harvester bits,

a snow blower attachment might have been a better idea.

BAA could keep a dozen or so of these attachments at each airport,

and when the weather starts looking dodgy, rent some combines from nearby farmers.

Yeah right!

Cock up, piss poor communication, lack of planning, failure to act on information received, failure to accept contractor offers of assistance, the list goes on and on...

But hey, this is England. Nothing ever goes wrong here.

What's that you say?

Bwahahahahaaaaa Who don't get screwed in this?

So let's see, British Taxpayers paid for LHR

British Taxpayers paid for T-5

And the British Taxpayers will be paying for this. Heaven forbid the sky high gate fees will be raised, thus (sic: gain) raising the ticket prices.

Clearly they didn't see the recent series on *5* that covered Stansted, which was only closed for 2 hours in the Dec 2010 blizzards where investments had been made.

Oh that's the other BAA, a tourist airport owner in the Midlands where no one cares.

Just a bunch of excuses

It's all just a bunch of excuses to cover up for their incompetence and lack of investment.

Fact: Stockholm's Arlanda airport has never in it's 50 year history closed because of snow. They have the infrastructure to clear all three runways in about 20 minutes. Snow fall is common in that area of Sweden any time between mid-October and mid-April.

I'm almost sure that Heathrow generates more money per passenger than Arlanda. They should use this money to invest in some better infrastructure instead of just lining the pockets of shareholders.

I blame the owners of BAA

who are the Spanish construction company Ferrovial, for spending the absolute minimum on LHR.

IIRC the Times ran a sizeable article on Ferrovial but I can only put my hands on this Independent article - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/baa-owners-shares-dive-on-heathrow-fines-fears-2171095.html

Gatwick didn't close on that particular day but then I believe their owners had recently brought a load of 2ndhand snow kit from the Norwegians.

I must be stupid

I got stuck at LHR 2 years running on the same date. Wondering whether to make it 3/3 :-D

To be fair to LHR (which is just shit and not because of the snow) I have been snowbound at Roissy, Munich, Frankfurt, Zurich, Shithole Amsterdam (which is not as bigger shithole as LHR) and Vienna. Oh and Manchester. So we Brits do not have a monopoly on the wrong kind of snow.

Only in Russia and the Nordics have I never been snowbound with impressive amounts of snow - think three feet / 24 hours, not the 3 inches that paralysed the UK.

My solution to it all. Find bar. Drink beer.

the (lack) of importance of passengers

"... focused on the needs of the passenger".

Can someone check the change log on the document as see if the word "cattle" had been globally replaced with "passenger".

Heathrow sucks even when it is working

And BAA are wholly and completely to blame. Why does a modern terminal require you to keep zig-zagging side to side to get in, through security, to the gates, and other places. Oh, to increase footfall at shops. This results in something like a 2km walk for an average long haul business flier at Heathrow. And do you know how many moving walkways there are in T5? If you guessed none then you were right. Heathrow T5 is just a big fail, if it wasn't for the fact I had the best part of a million BA miles keeping me flying BA, I would be using another airport by now.