Heathrow airport’s new Terminal 5 opened for business today with the first flight arriving just before 5am, but what else is there to know about the £4.3bn structure?
• The new terminal covers the area of 50 football pitches. Including its satellites, taxiways and aircraft stands, it is equivalent in size to Hyde Park, London
• The amount of earth shifted during construction of T5 would have filled Wembley stadium one and half times.
• The terminal is designed to handle 35 million people a year at capacity – equivalent to the population of Lincoln – every day of the year.
• 60,000 people were involved in making the new terminal – enough to fill Arsenal’s Emirates football stadium.
• The UK’s biggest single-site dig unearthed 80,000 items including pots, cups, buckets, flints and a hand axe dating back to 3,000BC .
• T5 has 11 miles of baggage conveyor belt, with late-running bags being sent on a separate fast-track conveyor.
• T5′s baggage system can deal with 12,000 bags an hour — roughly double BA’s baggage capacity at T1 and T4.
• The road, rail, underground and drainage tunnels are equivalent in length to a third of the Channel tunnel’s underwater section.
• The T5 public inquiry was the longest in UK history, lasting four years from 1995 – 1999.
• During construction, two rivers were diverted around the T5 site. Fish and other water creatures were moved before the diversion, and the new channels were made habitable for wildlife.