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.

Tags: International Updates

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