Airline passenger news and views

As you might expect, Heathrow will be significantly affected by the coming Olympics. Tens of thousands of foreigners are expected to arrive in the UK through Heathrow's doors, including athletes, family members, media, officials, spectators and sponsors amongst many others.

After the mess that followed the opening of Terminal 5 last year, the coming summer wave is creating immense pressure on Heathrow officials to make it right this time…This will however prove to be a real challenge as Heathrow will be, for the very first time, operating at maximum capacity.

Indeed, three days are predicted to be extremely hectic at the hub airport: July 16th 2012 - the opening of the athletes' village - July 26th 2012 - the day before the opening ceremony - and August 13th 2012 - the day following the closing ceremony and predicted to be the busiest of all. On August the 13th, 7% more passengers than usual will have to be attended for, and August is already the busiest month for the airport.

To deal with this major additional influx, Heathrow will create several dedicated 'Olympics lanes' just for those coming to take part in the event. Thousands of immigration staff will be redeployed to these lanes to attend to the newcomers, but more especially to gather biometric data such as fingerprints or photographs, to be checked against security watch-lists before allowing them in.

Heathrow has in fact already asked Olympics immigrants to provide them with biometric information well before their arrival in order to accelerate the general immigration process. Also, Heathrow is planning to open an 'athletes only' terminal on the 13th of August; the Terminal 6, also dubbed the Games terminal, to compartmentalize the mass of passengers on that day.

All private jets and charters carrying entire teams, heads of state and other officials will not be allowed to land at Heathrow but will have to go to Stansted instead, or to other airports.

All these measures will surely ease the massive pressure. But with such a high number of staff being redeployed and with the time needed to collect biometric data from each Olympics immigrant, important delays are expected to occur for the other, non-Olympics immigrants through border control...