London: The British Airways has suffered a loss of over 16 million pounds following the mishandling of baggage in the last eight days at its newly opened terminal in Heathrow airport.

"The impact was borne by the short-haul schedule, where there were 300 cancelled flights, equating to 0.2 percentage points of capacity," the British Airways (BA) said in a statement today.

Earlier BA announced there would be a full schedule of flights at the new Terminal Five on Saturday.

If so, it will be the first time Terminal Five, built at a cost of 4.3 billion pounds, will be operating normally since it's disastrous opening day on March 27.

The airline has been forced to cancel scores of flights because of problems with the baggage handling system.

Today the airline cancelled 34 flights, an improvement on the previous two days when more than 50 were axed. All BA flights operate from the newly built terminal.

Baggage handlers are still sorting through 14,000 items of luggage lost in the chaos.

Bags owned by European passengers have been sent to Milan where they are being sorted out by a contractor.

The airlines claimed that once things are running smoothly it will take terminal five passengers just 10 minutes to check in.
Source : PTI