Heathrow ‘shambles’ as thousands forced to fly without checked-in luggage

Thousands of passengers have been forced to fly out of Heathrow Airport without their checked-in luggage after a system failure.

For a little over two hours on Thursday morning, the airport told travellers using terminals three and five to put all essential items into their hand luggage.

Heathrow tweeted the warning at 6.45am, updating it to report that bag drop desks had reopened at 9.07am.

A number of passengers used social media to express their frustration at the issue.

Alongside pictures of large collections of luggage, Tariq Panja tweeted: "Another day another Heathrow baggage fiasco."

Ryan Wooldridge said: "Baggage failure at @HeathrowAirport this morning. Bags won’t be making it onto flights, absolute shambles."

Heathrow’s initial statement read: "Heathrow is currently experiencing an issue with its baggage systems which is affecting airlines operating from Terminal 3 and Terminal 5. Other terminals are unaffected."

It later confirmed the problem had been fixed, saying: "Further to the baggage issues we experienced earlier this morning, bag drop desks are now open and operating normally in Terminals 3 and 5."

It comes less than a month after a British Airways IT meltdown led to chaos as all its flights from Heathrow and Gatwick were grounded.

The global system outage, potentially caused by human error, could cost the airline as much as £80m.

Heathrow was recently voted one of the world’s best 20 airports.

(c) Sky News 2017: Heathrow ‘shambles’ as thousands forced to fly without checked-in luggage