"A British Airways baggage handler scans the bar code of his airline passenger's item of luggage before loading it into the aircraft hold container bins. 50-70,000 pieces of BA baggage a day travel through 11 miles of conveyor belts which were installed in a 5-storey underground hall beneath the 400m (a quarter of a mile) length of Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport. T5 alone has the capacity to serve around 30 million passengers a year and was completed in 2008 at a cost of £4.3bn. The system was designed by an integrated team from the airport operator BAA, BA and Vanderlande Industries of the Netherlands, and handles both intra-terminal and inter-terminal luggage. From writer Alain de Botton's book project ""A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary"" (2009)."
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