Today was the opening of Heathrow's new £4.3 billion Terminal 5 and within hours of passengers coming through the door it was starting to spiral into chaos.

The first flight arrived at 4.42am which was a British Airways flight from Hong Kong and as reported yesterday, passengers were not fingerprinted after airport owner, BAA suspended plans to fingerprint passengers amind UK data protection issues.

The new terminal has a state of the art baggage system and despite this working well in trials earlier in the month, some passengers had to wait over 2 hours to collect their baggage.

Passengers departing from the airport also encountered baggage problems and three flights took off without luggage on board.

Passengers complained that there were poor road signs on the approach to the new terminal and the car park had problems with people not being able to pay.

The new security screening system is meant to reduce queuing with talk that passengers shouldn't have to queue more than 10 minutes. Security staff were apparently struggling with the new system and queues quickly built up.

The demands of the new terminal look to have left staff struggling across all areas and British Airways have had to cancel 20 flights by 1pm - including flights to Munich, Paris, Glasgow and Aberdeen.

British Airways have said that it expected the teething problems to be sorted out as soon as possible.

Airline Booking and Information