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Terminal velocity

It's bigger than London's Hyde Park, cost £4.3bn to build and is set to handle 30 million passengers a year. Patricia Curmi finds out how Heathrow's Terminal 5 will change the face of modern air travel

It's been a tumultuous decade for British Airways (BA) and the British Airport Authority's (BAA) Heathrow airport. With the combined body blows of budget airlines and the 9/11 attacks, both briefly saw profits and public opinion declining. Then, after passenger numbers soared and reporting a gross profit of £124m at the beginning of 2005, staff strikes meant that BA struggled to help thousands of passengers stranded at Heathrow.

Heathrow was originally designed to serve around 45 million passengers, yet today the world's busiest airport has to capacitate for the 70 million who pass through it each year.

While critics have called the airport poorly designed with a confusing layout, Heathrow is still seen as a national treasure by many and, despite substantial changes to the aviation industry - fuel price hikes, tightened security and changing customer expectations to name but a few - it still remains the gateway to Britain.

BAA, bought in 2006 by Spanish construction group Ferrovial, and BA are staking much on the long-awaited, much debated Terminal 5 (T5). It's due to open in March 2008, and BAA is taking the deadline seriously. Very seriously. Unlike almost every major British infrastructure project to date - think London Underground engineering works, and the Channel Tunnel - T5 looks like it will be completed on time and on budget.

Time travel

When T5 does open its monolithic glass and chrome doors on 27 March next year, it will be the conclusion of a project over 14 years in the making. Despite undergoing the longest public enquiry (46 months) in British history and many years of wrangling with environmental groups and local communities, BAA was given the go-ahead by the UK government in 2001.

One of the largest construction projects in Europe, it's difficult to grasp the true, and somewhat daunting, scope of what's being achieved on this derelict site that formerly served as a sewerage facil-ity.The construction includes the main terminal and two separate satellite buildings. T5 will be 396m long by 176m wide and 40m high, and could fit 50 football pitches across its five floors. At 60,000m2, T5 has the largest single span roof in Europe, made up of six sections, weighing 2,500 tonnes each, and it took ten months to lift the entire roof.

When fully operational, the terminal will house 175 lifts and 131 escalators and the satellite buildings alone will be bigger than the whole of the existing Terminal 4. What's more, an additional 30 million passengers a year are expected to use the terminal and, according to BAA, this will allow Heathrow to cater for 80 million passengers annually by 2010, a figure which is estimated to rise to 90 million by 2030.

T5 will provide 47 extra aircraft stands, of which ten will be of sufficient size to handle the A380 Airbus, the world's largest passenger plane. By 2011 another 13 stands will be added to bring the total extra capacity up to 60. The terminal will be the home for all BA flights currently using terminals 1, 3 and 4. There is a 4,000 space multi-storey car park, a spur road from the M25 motorway, a new 600 bed major hotel and an extension of the current rail links, the Heathrow Express and the London underground Piccadilly line.

In terms of layout, T5 has been designed so that wayfinding is logical and intuitive. Mike Forster, BAA's development and design director explains: 'The priorities in the design were natural light, transparency, generosity of space and a feeling of light and air'.

Departing passengers traverse across the width of building from check-in through security to the airside lounges, while arriving passengers do the journey in reverse, so walking distances involved are surprisingly short.

Wildlife watch

One of the most time-critical sub-projects of the T5 construction programme, however, was the diversion of two rivers from their original alignment through the middle of the site. Construction on the terminal or satellite buildings could not progress until the Duke of Northumberland and Longford rivers were diverted around the western perimeter of the airport.

The twin rivers diversion was a complex scheme, involving not only the re-routing of the waterways, but also the realignment of a live carriageway. The challenge was compounded, as with all T5 contruction, by strict time constraints and the works' close proximity to local residents, yet the team still managed to complete the project ahead of time and well within budget.

An innovative bird-exclusion system has also been developed using a lightweight mesh to minimise both the threat to air safety and potential ecological impact.

Dragonfly paths have not been affected and small non-hazardous bird species can still access the river, while the mesh size means there is minimal visual impact.

The project scored 92.7 per cent in the civil engineering environmental quality assessment and award scheme's 'whole project' assessment for work that centred on managing the long-term sustainability of the rivers.

Around 95 per cent of the diverted rivers were placed in open channels - the rest were underground - compared with only half of the original waterways, and habitats were planted for small mammals along the banks. A translocation programme was initiated for water voles, plants, fish, mussels and riverbed silts from the original rivers to assist regeneration of the aquatic environment within the new channels.

Excess baggage

Forget having to wait two hours for your case to trundle limply round the carousel, or losing it altogether midway between London and Los Angeles. BAA and British Airways joined forces as early as 1995 to design an effective baggage system that would meet passenger requirements, and the results have been impressive.

Jonathan Adams, who is leading the baggage project at T5, described the complexities involved in its design: 'A terminal building is there to process bags and people. In an ideal world you would design the baggage system first and then fit the building around it. To some extent that is what happens, though with a few compromises along the way!'

T5's baggage system will be one of the biggest in the world, handling around 12,000 bags an hour at peak. That's more than three a second.

It will process, sort and deliver bags between T5's main building and its satellite, T5B, along a series of underground tunnels that link the two buildings. It will also handle baggage from the four other terminals at Heathrow as well as flight connections baggage transferred from Gatwick.

The system requires 17km of conveyor belt, driven by 8,500 electric motors, all of which are supported by 4,000 tonnes of steel. It's a massive mechanical job but it's also a huge software challenge as every bag arriving at T5 is given a 'bag itinerary' that can be managed and controlled throughout the bag's journey. Any changes, such as flight delays, can then be communicated to the baggage system controls.

There will also be 900 small trucks (called destination coded vehicles) that shuttle around the system at high speed carrying the luggage to the right place at the right time.

Terminal technology

Before construction began, BAA set itself the target of using computer technology to reduce costs by ten per cent. This was achieved, in part, by creating a single 3D computer model that BAA and its project partners used to design, build and, after completion, will be used to maintain the terminal building. The T5 project used a computer model called the 'autodesk architectural desktop' single building model as a process checker and to view, review, extract information and detect clashes.

Mervyn Richards, computer-aided design technology manager at Laing O'Rourke, one of BAA's framework partners, has been a key member of the BAA team since 1996, advising on and implementing 3D strategies. Richards says: 'There is a need to ensure that everybody concerned with the T5 project is collaborating. Not just communicating, but sharing information.'

Richards explains: 'Generally, too much construction information is ambiguous. For example, the architect may indicate that he wants a column in a particular place, but subsequently the civil engineer may reposition it slightly as a result of his calculations.

There will then be two instances of one object - the architect's and the engineer's. Items coordinated this way may well clash when installed'. If such errors aren't picked up on until construction, costs can spiral and precious time is lost. With around 2.3 million metres of cabling, 5,000 mobile devices, 546 interfaces, more than 2,000 computers and 96 self-service kiosks, there's plenty of electrical connections to double check.

All in all, T5 contains IT equipment worth around £250m, including a private mobile phone network T5 has created that it will later rent out to phone operators, ensuring complete coverage throughout the terminal.

When BAA and BA begin Operational Readiness trials on 17 September, they are hoping to initiate a legacy that will rejuvenate the aviation industry and, with it, the entire concept of airline travel, reclaiming it from the no-frills concept that has stripped away the enjoyment of browsing in duty free and embracing the airport as part of the trip.

As fine tuning on T5 operations begins and the airport is spruced up in time for the influx of passengers, the future looks bright for Heathrow T5

Fast facts and figures

• shortly after T5 opens, Terminal 1 will close and Terminal 2 will be demolished and re-built as Heathrow East. This is expected to be completed by 2012
• T5 will have the first Prada store in a British airport, along with a Gordon Ramsay restaurant and a Tiffany boutique.
• the terminal's control tower will be the highest in the UK.
• T5 will include a 'VVIP' fast track that bypasses long-haul security checks - available to the Queen and prime minister only
• over 80,000 artefacts were found throughout the project, including pottery, worked flint, and a hand axe dating back to 3,000BC