How come whenever I land in Heathrow the airport seems unready? It’s not as if planes appear out of the blue, after all. So often you have to wait so long for the connecting corridors to arrive, and there never seem to be enough busses.

Then, when you reach the customs desks, too few of them are operational (it’s always tea break it seems). And when I last came from Japan, for instance, none of the customs officer spoke Japanese, and it was the bilingual passengers that had to help with the translation.

Whatever you might say about handling landing aircrafts, one think is obvious, unlike most normal business, it’s a predictable business, which is easy to plan for. In most cases you know when airplanes will land days in advance, and you know how many people to expect and what languages they speak hours in advance.

There are seldom any surprises, so why don’t they ever seem ready?