Dear silicon.com... T5 chaos, mobile maladies, and laptop losses…

The Heathrow Terminal 5 (T5) chaos has dominated reader comments this week, with many readers, unsurprisingly, astonished it went so wrong. Following that, another topic on readers' radars is the debate over the dangers of mobile phones, and lastly, government laptop losses are ruffling feathers again...

The T5 big bang…
Heathrow Terminal 5 suffers first day baggage chaos

Editor's choice

silicon.com editor Steve Ranger flags up his picks on the site this week...

♦ Photos: High-tech Bangalore
♦ The McCue Interview: Steven Bandrowczak, CIO, Nortel
♦ Photos: Road testing wi-fi at 320kmph
♦ Peter Cochrane's Blog: Searching for the truth
♦ How did the Heathrow T5 launch go so wrong?

Quote: "A BA statement said: "This is not unexpected following one of the most complex and largest airport moves in history."

Maybe they should have had a gradual phased in move over, instead of an overnight 'Big Bang'.
-- Anonymous, Birmingham

Before St Pancras International rail station was opened; three or four days were devoted to testing all the systems and processes, using an army of thousands of volunteer 'passengers'.

This allowed the staff to familiarise themselves with the systems and get actual hands-on experience before the station was opened to Eurostar traffic. Lessons were learnt and adjustments made before exposing paying customers to the St Pancras experience. The result was that everything went without a hitch on the first day of international service. I'm surprised BAA didn't take a leaf out of the rail industry's book.
-- Chris Smithers, UK

"BA added the issues have now been resolved".

But of course that is not the case. Witness today's news articles.

Just like massive software projects, hardware and infrastructure changes of this sort are always going to be problematic. You would have thought a phased-in launch would be more sensible...
-- John Rutter, Surrey

An optimistic BA spokesman thought problems were sorted out late Thursday. It's now late Saturday and there are still problems - cancelled flights, missing baggage, etc.

One bright spot - the data commissioner told BAA exactly what they could do with their fingerprinting plans.
-- Anonymous, Poole

On the bright side, thanks to passengers refusing to be finger printed, problems with the "high-tech" computer security systems failing were avoided and as a result planes managed to leave the airport with passengers onboard.
-- Anonymous, London

Questions, questions
How did the Heathrow T5 launch go so wrong?

My colleague was on a flight to Vancouver yesterday and had to leave (and arrive) for a week's skiing without any luggage.

As a firm that specialises in customer engagement and advocacy we're interested in what the long-term effect of this will be for BA - bad experiences like this are spoken about a lot more than good ones!
-- Anonymous, London

Doing a band-playing, big-bang move of so many flights and services to the new terminal was a fool-hardy move in the first place - they should have trickled stuff into it over six months. Thank God, the long-haul stuff has not moved yet.

A train-wreck of a migration plan, always likely to fail, and driven by BA marketing puff of how great we are...
-- Anonymous, Birmingham

Perhaps BA and BAA were a tad over-ambitious in transferring all BA operations to the new terminal in one go.

It would have made more sense to transfer over one group of services first. When the terminal was proved to be okay with that then the other services could have been moved over in stages.
-- Ian Sargent, London

I was astonished that BA and BAA made a once-for-all switch to T5. Surely all project management logic says that the switch should have been phased, starting with a few flights a day, and ramping up as and when bugs were ironed out. Sounds to me more like a case of 'invincibility' syndrome than proper planning.
-- Anonymous, London

Mobile maladies
Mobile phones: A public health time bomb?

Immediately move all the cigarette taxes to mobile phone sales and usage fees.
-- Anonymous

Although highlighting a possible problem and encouraging further research (a very good idea), this paper does nothing to facilitate a proper risk assessment. How many hours use of a mobile phone per week or per day does the author regard as 'safe' and how many as 'dangerous'? He does not know?
-- Dr Mike Fryer, Dartford

It is worth noting that, if there is an effect, we should minimise the radiation that people receive by having more masts around, therefore allowing the phones to transmit at lower power. I notice he hasn't suggested that.
-- John H Woods, UK

Lost laptops
More than 1,000 gov't laptops lost since 2001

"It is time we had a complete rethink on the way electronic equipment is protected."

I have an idea, take the value of lost equipment and the information it holds directly out of their salaries instead of the public purse.
-- Karen Challinor, UK

Talk of docking civil servant's pay for losing equipment is absurd, unreasonable and unhelpful. Let's hear no more of it. I applaud their coming clean.

People are a lot more forgiving of honest mistakes, and less forgiving of secrecy just to keep mistakes secret, than they think. We must create a culture of admitting mistakes.
-- Haydn Rees, Eindhoven

I'm sorry but to lose a laptop is just plain stupid, let alone careless. If a laptop is entrusted to you then it's your responsibility to look after it. It's too easy to get a replacement when the tax payer is paying for it. No doubt if it were personal laptops they were losing, they'd soon make a better effort to ensure they're not lost.

Also, if they contain sensitive information that impacts on security or people's data, then they should be sacked on the spot.
-- Disgruntled tax payer, Paignton

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