Word: britishers
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...Friday morning, British newspapers were lambasting the new terminal as a "disgrace," and BA then announced it would be canceling one out of every five flights during the terminal's second day. The airport held overnight meetings (while some passengers were sleeping on the premises) and its attitude toward journalists became decidedly frosty. An army of support staff holding clipboards and wearing blue t-shirts emblazoned with the question "Can I help?" marched around the terminal. Their answers to media queries mirrored official statements and were structured with supporting evidence. As one employee, who asked not to be identified, says...
...first time I visited Belfast, in 1977, it was a city under siege. Stores were closed. British bunkers protected by anti-rocket meshing sat on most intersections. Police and military patrols were the only sign of life on the street. The Europa, which had to be the most bombed hotel in the world, was a sandbagged fortress...
...hasn't exactly panned out like that. Thursday's opening was a disaster. British Airways, the sole carrier operating from the terminal, canceled 34 flights, owing to computer glitches, human error and, according to airport officials, "initial teething problems." There were also staff shortages: some employees struggled to get through security checkpoints, while others couldn't find the employee parking lot. Only one of the terminal's eighteen elevators was functioning, and at least one handicapped passenger was left stranded curbside - for an hour...
...Yesterday was definitely not British Airways' finest hour," its CEO Willie Walsh said in a statement. "We disappointed many people and I apologize sincerely. I take responsibility for what happened." It's a far cry from the feelings he exuded about the terminal's planned opening in an interview with TIME last year: "Judge me by it ... I'm very confident it will be a fantastic success...
...Chris Short, a conference organizer, waited an hour and a half for his clients to retrieve their luggage and says that expectations for the terminal have exceeded what it's capable of. Still, he feels the British media have purposely put it on a pedestal, purely to bring it down. "In America they'd say, 'This is great. We're going to make it work.' But here we say, 'It's great, but that door could be a little bit closer there,'" he says. "It's a British disease to knock things...