A terminal situation?

It's kind of fitting that my last post was about the failure of English football's "golden generation" - reading about the 'teething problems' with the baggage handling system at Heathrow's brand new Terminal 5 building (creating a backlog of 15,000 bags), this sceptred isle seem to be cursed with projects that are either late, never function correctly, are hugely over budget, or all of the above!

Who can forget the £758 million ($1.511 billion) Millennium Dome which was insolvent almost from the day it opened? It's now the 20,000-seat 02 Arena, after a £350 million ($698 million) makeover, which hosts concerts and sporting events.
Or the new Wembley Stadium, whose construction (according to unconfirmed newspaper reports) went over budget - some say by more than £100 million. Then there's the ill-fated Beagle 2 probe, which went missing en route to Mars in December 2003.

And why stop there? Let's not forget the fiasco involving Northern Rock, which got into difficulties last year because the bank was ill-prepared for the global credit crunch. The UK financial watchdog, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), has recently admitted that it failed to monitor Northern Rock adequately.
Watchdog admits failure over Rock

But it's more than just embarrassment. The latest publication from the venerable Time magazine, reported how Britain's youth are terrifying the adult population. OK - all youngsters in this country aren't out of control yobs. But when one considers that 27 teenagers were murdered in London in 2007 (and 11 have died already in the capital this year), when one sees the latest display of public drunkenness on TV, there is a perception that responsibility for one's actions is an unknown concept in Britain today.
Britain's Mean Streets

But I digress....
Looking at the misfortune befalling Terminal 5, which cost £4.3 billion ($8.7 billion) and was supposed to be the pride of airports operator BAA and British Airways (which currently enjoys exclusive use of the facility), it appears that no real testing of the systems was done to ensure that this chaos didn't occur. Whomsoever was in charge of this mess should be given the boot.
T5 cancellations set to continue