First US Flight to Heathrow's New Terminal 5

Trip Start Mar 26, 2008
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Trip End Apr 01, 2008


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Where I stayed
Starhotels Metropole
(London hotels)

Flag of United Kingdom  ,
Thursday, March 27, 2008

We arrived at Heathrow's brand new Terminal 5 on opening day. We were the first flight from the U.S. to go through. Even though we were staying in T5 for our connecting flight, we had to go through another security check (long line, shoes off, everything in bins, etc.).

What made it worse, is that many people were having to have additional searches because no one told us we would have to go through security again. I had a bottle of water in my bag from the first plane, so I had to have all my carryon unloaded and wanded. It took forever just for them to get to me because the elderly gentleman in front of me was giving them hell (and rightly so--everything was just utter chaos).

We headed over to the lounge for what time we had remaining before our next flight. The lounge was huge and quite nice with modern, comfortable decor Our Plane--1st From U.S.--At Terminal 5
Our Plane--1st From U.S.--At Terminal 5
 . They had breakfast food out which was not too appealing, but then we had just had breakfast on the flight there.

As we were leaving the lounge we saw Gordon Ramsey at the top of the escalator. A couple was taking pictures with him and getting his autograph. He must have been there to christen his new restaurant at T5: Plane Food.

We got to our gate a little before boarding time. There was hardly anyone around. The monitor said "Gate Closed"--we kind of panicked for a minute thinking we had missed the flight. DH asked, and the person said to just wait. More and more people showed up, all going through the same thing we did.

Eventually the monitor said, "Please Wait." But there were scarce announcements to let us know what was going on as boarding time passed right on by. Eventually they asked for preboarding people to go up, but then they wouldn't let them on the plane. There were several families with young children just standing there for at least 15 minutes.

After finally letting the pre-boarders on, we still waited and waited. The BA people were just standing around with their thumbs up their asses. Everyone was getting antsy. Eventually they let us on. Then after awhile we got a couple of announcements from the pilot about yet another delay. The last one was that they were waiting for our bags to be loaded. HA! We did eventually leave for Rome...but we found out later, without our bags.
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jsskinner
jsskinner on Jul 2, 2009 at 02:15PM

TMI
Do I really want to know the details of your flight? No.

kitkatgo
kitkatgo on Nov 30, 2009 at 10:14PM

Ha ha ha...then don't read it. :)

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