Heathrow Terminal 5

Heathrow Terminal 5 is an airport terminal at Heathrow Airport, the main airport serving London. Opened in 2008, the main building in the complex is the largest free-standing structure in the United Kingdom. Until 2012, the terminal building was used solely by British Airways. It now is used as one of the three global hubs of IAG, served by British Airways and Iberia.

The terminal was designed to handle 30 million passengers a year. In 2018, Terminal 5 handled 32.1 million passengers on 211,000 flights. It was the busiest terminal at the airport, measured both by passenger numbers and flight movements.

The building's leading architects were from the Richard Rogers Partnership and production design was completed by aviation architects Pascall+Watson. The engineers for the structure were Arup and Mott MacDonald. The building cost £4 billion and took almost 20 years from conception to completion, including the longest public inquiry in British history.

The possibility of a fifth terminal at Heathrow emerged as early as 1982, when there was debate over whether the expansion of Stansted or the expansion of Heathrow (advocated by BA) was the way forward for the UK aviation industry. Planning studies for the terminal began in February 1988 and Richard Rogers Partnership was selected to design the terminal in 1989. Richard Rogers compared his design to the Centre Pompidou, an earlier project that has similar flexibility in its use of space.

BAA formally announced its proposal for construction of Terminal 5 in May 1992, submitting a formal planning application on 17 February 1993. A public inquiry into the proposals began on 16 May 1995 and lasted nearly four years, finally ending on 17 March 1999 after sitting for 525 days. The inquiry, based at the Renaissance Hotel Heathrow, was the longest planning inquiry ever held in the UK. Finally, more than eight years after the initial planning application, Secretary of State for Transport Stephen Byers announced on 20 November 2001 the British government's decision to grant planning permission for the building of a fifth passenger terminal at Heathrow.

Construction, which was undertaken by Laing O'Rourke, began in September 2002, with earthworks for the construction of the buildings' foundation.

A preparatory archaeological dig at the site found more than 80,000 artefacts. Among the artefacts discovered by the archaeological dig include 18,000 pieces of pottery, 40,000 pieces of worked flint, and a wooden bowl dating to the Middle Bronze Age, around 3,000 years ago. Earthworks were also discovered, including a pathway and evidence of agricultural boundaries. Objects recovered from the dig site were immediately analysed and catalogued, allowing for the preparation works for Terminal 5 to occur simultaneously alongside the research being conducted.

In November 2003, work started on the steel superstructure of the main terminal building. By January 2005, the nine tunnels needed to provide road and rail access, and to provide drainage, were completed. In March that year, the sixth and final section of the main terminal roof was lifted into position, and in December the building was made weatherproof. The roof could not have been lifted with conventional cranes because it would have vertically intersected with the airport's radar field. Therefore, the roof was assembled on the ground using smaller cranes, then lifted into place by eight custom-built towers, each fitted with two hydraulic jacks to pull the roof up. At peak there were around 8,000 people working on the construction site, whilst over the life of the project over 60,000 people were involved in the construction. Over 15,000 volunteers were recruited for a total of 68 trials lasting from September 2007 until March 2008 to test the operational readiness of Terminal 5 prior to its opening.