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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that every other UK airport seems to be running smoothly.

There's just something wrong with the operational capabilities at Heathrow. I have a feeling they might be deliberately operating badly to try to get permission for an extra runway...

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Heathrow is the largest British airport by far. The second-largest, Gatwick, pre-emptively cut a whole bunch of flights in July and August about a month before Heathrow decided to do the same, the third largest is apparently Manchester which I think has been having problems for months (so much so that they no longer even make the news anymore), and so on. Iut doesn't seem to be isolated to the UK either, I've been hearing about very similar problems elsewhere in Eruope from people travelling there.

Yeah, the entire travel story of the summer is that every airport is kind of screwed, it's not remotely limited to Heathrow. According to this source, Heathrow actually outperformed every other London airport except Stansted in terms of percentage of flights successfully departing in June.

https://thepointsguy.co.uk/news/worse-uk-airports-cancellati...

And of course Manchester had some well publicized issues, and outside of the UK AMS and CDG had massive problems as well. I mean, KLM flat out stopped flying ticketed passengers into AMS for a day to try to recover.

"At the end of Saturday afternoon, 4 June, KLM was regrettably compelled to decide that passengers at European destinations would no longer be allowed to board flights to Amsterdam."

https://simpleflying.com/klm-suspends-all-flights-from-europ...

A family member who needs to fly to Lima via Amsterdam just got an email that KLM doesn't allow luggage for passengers with a connection from another European airport.

That's after paying nearly 200 Euro for a second piece of luggage.

Oh, they apologize sincerely for the inconvenience caused, but don't bother to provide any options for long haul travellers.

I can't put this any nicer, but: Fuck you! KLM, I, for one, will make sure to never use you again. Especially not long haul, via Amsterdam.

They are doing you a favor. That bag would likely not have made it to its destination due to ground handling troubles outside their control.

Just had family flying TLV through Munich. 2 out 4 pieces of luggage lost (Lufthansa/UA codeshare).

If you are going to travel with a checked bag, 100% recommend airtag'ing them.

Heathrow has always operated badly.

For example, they don't do one-stop-security at all for transit passengers. Fly from UK/EU/North America to Heathrow to somewhere else? Heathrow will re-check your carryon luggage and put you through the metal detector upon arrival as if you came in off the street. The only exception is if Heathrow is your final destination.

Major EU and North American airports don't waste their time with already screened passengers from trustworthy countries, but Heathrow is too disorganized to organize itself to save all this time.

https://blog.aci.aero/dont-stop-me-now-how-one-stop-security...

I missed a connection on a 4+ hour layover at Heathrow once due to this.

The runway is the least of the problems, it's the last/first leg of the whole airport pipeline, it's the whole check-in and luggage handling that's a clusterfuck. An extra runway for planes to land and bring more people and luggage when the staff is already overwhelmed? An extra runway so more planes can take off, i.e. more passengers and luggage that need to be placed onto those planes before the pilot can take off?

I took a delta flight (Virgin doing the check-in) from Heathrow to Seattle three weeks ago and holy shit they were utterly, insanely slow. I had Sky Priority so got the “fast” line. It took an hour and twenty minutes to check in the two families in front of us, plus ourselves. Three sets of travelers in eighty minutes!

The whole place was a mess, with unclear lines and multiple people checking exactly the same things.

It looked like a serious lack of training (the people in front of us had a bag that was too heavy and the agent didn’t know how to handle it) and a complete lack of management.

Oh, and the conveyer belt broke as well.

I don’t think that logic holds up. Why give Heathrow another runway when they can’t even effectively operate the ones they’ve got?

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