After 20 years trying to get off the runway, Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is about to open and promises a better experience for passengers. But what kind of features can make catching a plane less of a headache?
Flying is an inherently stressful experience. There’s the waiting, the queuing, the crowds, the luggage and the wandering kids, even before the butterflies in the stomach at take-off.
Most of these irritations are beyond the control of the passenger and, unlike the bus or the train, flying is a mode of transport that global travellers can’t really avoid.
Increased security measures in 2006 compounded these woes and the sight of queues snaking outside terminal buildings at Heathrow underlined its reputation as a difficult place to begin a holiday.
Terminal 5, which is officially opened on Friday, will go some way to addressing that – and at £4.3bn and 20 years in the planning you would expect it to.
But these are not problems unique to Heathrow. So what makes a good airport? Here are five key features:
SIGNAGE
Orientation is always among the top demands by customers, says Paul Mijksenaar, whose company by the same name has designed the signs for airports in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Athens.
‘The first requirement is reliability, that once you are looking for something that you find it on a sign close by and you are sure it will direct you all the way to reach your destination. A lot of sign systems are not good and sometimes the trail is lost and it stops.’
Charles De Gaulle airport is particularly bad, he says, because it uses too many figures and jargon.
There are so many services in airports that it’s difficult to direct people to everything, so it’s best to point out ‘clusters’ like a food court or shops.
Colour coding saves reading time by a third, he says. It’s common to use black text on yellow background for flying information (departures, arrivals), yellow text on black for bathroom facilities, green for exits and blue for food and retail.
‘Passengers don’t even realise it. People use a system like that but an hour afterwards, you can ask them and they have no idea. It’s very intuitive.’
Pictograms should only be used for services easily imaged like taxis and phones and all signs at one airport should use just one font (his favourite is Gill sans serif).
‘What would be fantastic for a passenger is to fly from London to, say, Hong Kong, and you find the same pictograms, colour coding and nomenclature.
‘It helps enormously and makes you feel at home. Airports like to be different but airport signage is not the tool to be different, it should be in harmony.’
Tell that to the architects, who commonly prefer signs to be discreetly placed and understated.
BUILDING DESIGN
An architect’s key aim is trying to reduce passenger stress, says Simon Smithson of Rogers, Stirk Harbour and Partners.
He was project architect of the new terminal at Barajas in Madrid, which won the architectural Oscar, the Stirling Prize, and he thinks a building’s design can go a long way to easing traveller tensions.
‘The most obvious is being able to understand how the building is organised. Some of the worst cases like Gatwick or Schiphol, you enter the building and you have no idea what your route is.’
Out with corridors and enclosed areas, in with space, daylight and views.
Barajas has a high, wavy roof that makes the space feel airy and unconstrained, he says, and the roof almost floats, as if looking at the water surface while snorkelling. The glass walls are like ‘great big curtains’ and give views of the planes outside.
Airports are the new plazas, the new town squares, he says, and should try to be a public space rather than a building.
‘The visual and acoustic onslaught of advertising spaces and announcements is very wearing.
‘Your foreground is a riot of information and conflicting objectives – ‘Buy, buy, sell, sell, go here, go there’.
‘As architects we recognise that we have little control over that foreground but we have control over the container.’
Travel editor of the Independent, Simon Calder, picks Marseille’s budget ‘mp2′ airport as a model of simplicity.
‘Flying is a simple pleasure instead of the ghastly experience it is at Gatwick and Heathrow.
‘Marseilles is industrial-feeling in design, bare concrete and steel, nothing extra. It’s extremely efficient and a model of airport design, unlike Terminal 5, which is all very well but I can think of better ways to spend £4.5bn.’
TRANSPORT LINKS
No matter how snazzy an airport building, a fraught journey getting there will put passengers in a dark mood.
The luxury and speed of the Heathrow Express, for example, comes at a high price (£15) compared to the often overcrowded Tube.
Driving to Terminal 4 can be stressful too, says Mr Smithson. But Terminal 5, with which he was once involved, is a huge improvement and recognises that airports are major transport hubs.
‘The forecourt connection between air side and land side modes of transport – the space in front of the building – is most innovative.
‘If you come out of an airport you can feel you are nowhere but you exit there and feel you are in a street space. It is setting a precedent.’
That’s great if you want to get a taxi, but it’s still the slow and crowded Piccadilly line for people who need the Tube.
Fewer problems at Birmingham, where the long-term car park is a short walk from the terminal building.
Or at Hong Kong, where the Airport Express train takes passengers from downtown into the heart of the airport in 20 minutes.
NO QUEUES
There are lines for check-in, then passport check, then security, then the gate, then your seat on the aircraft and then baggage reclaim and immigration at the other end.
It’s not all the fault of the airport or airline – the Immigration Service and the government rules on security play their part, says Rod Fewings, who lectures in airport design at Cranfield University. But Birmingham can offer lessons in how it’s done.
‘Birmingham security is very quick and efficient. The airport has expanded its terminal building piecemeal but they seem to have got the balance right and baggage reclaim is pretty quick.’
Other top performers, he says, include Munich, Helsinki and Luton.
Online and self-service check-in is becoming more common to speed things up, and there are plenty of kiosks at T5 for this purpose, he says. But it’s no good if the bag drop-off is under-staffed, as it was once in his experience at Madrid.
The processing of people may be beyond the control of architects but a good design can ease the trauma of queuing, says Mr Smithson.
‘The actual function of the building and the perception of the passengers is to some degree out of our hands but the quality of the space in which we are waiting – the views, the acoustics and daylighting – can make an experience either good or bad.
‘Ten minutes in a horrible space can feel like half an hour but in a nice space can pass relatively fast.’
RETAIL
Air passengers need to be entertained and ever since Shannon, Ireland’s second airport, opened the world’s first duty-free shop in 1947, retail has become a big earner for airport authorities.
This week Ferrovial, which owns BAA, sold its World Duty Free shops to Italy’s Autogrill for £546.6m ($1.10bn), partly to pay off Ferrovial’s debts.
Shopping is now fundamental to the passenger experience, says Robbie Gill, managing director of The Design Solution and an expert on retail architecture.
‘The danger is that too many airports are beginning to look the same and the challenge for the smartest airports is to integrate with local flair the well-known national brands and the international powerhouses.’
This is something that Rome Fiumicino and Barcelona demonstrate well, he says.
But there is an ongoing tension between retail planners and architects, he says, because the latter treat the commercial activities as very much secondary to the ‘architectural dream’.
No passengers like to feel overwhelmed or pressured into buying, says Mr Smithson, and one way Barajas tries to avoid this ‘invasion of space’ is by maintaining outside views.”
