Milan Airport Hits Heavy Turbulence

Returning smartly dressed from a New York business trip, Tiziana Bocus landed here Sunday on one of the first flights into her city’s smartly designed Malpensa 2000 air terminal--a $1.1-billion effort to stake a place for Italy among the continental economic elite.

By the time she cleared customs and stepped onto the polished marble floor of the arrivals hall--two hours later and missing her luggage--Bocus’ civic pride had turned to livid shame.

“This is just disgusting!” she said. “It’s just not the kind of welcome that I as an Italian would like to see for all these passengers arriving in northern Italy. Everything here is supposed to be well organized.”

Just about everything that could go wrong with Malpensa 2000’s inauguration did. Computer failures, human error, pranksters, angry environmentalists and clueless employees conspired to delay outbound flights by up to four hours, upsetting travel plans across Europe. Arriving passengers had to wait up to two hours for their baggage.

Airport officials said the delays, which affected nearly all 500 or so flights that came and went Sunday, are likely to continue most of the week until dozens of problems are solved.

Following Hong Kong, Oslo and Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, Milan is the fourth city this year to suffer the bottleneck blues after building or expanding an airport far from its congested center and starting up operations literally overnight.

At the end of a day during which passengers screamed at helpless clerks across many of the 133 check-in counters, Giuseppe Bonomi, chairman of the airport authority, insisted that the problems are manageable and that “the worst is over.”

Bonomi said Milan had avoided the systemwide computer breakdowns that paralyzed both Asian airports at their debuts. “If Hong Kong was 100 on the disaster scale, here it was maybe 20 to 30,” said an airport spokesman, Federico Bianchessi.

It wasn’t supposed to work this way in Italy’s smooth-running financial and fashion capital, which had been planning for 14 years to make Malpensa its main air gateway.

Until Sunday’s opening of the new terminal, most air travelers to Milan used hemmed-in Linate, a single-runway airport six miles from the city center. Distant Malpensa, sprawling at the foot of the Alps, handled most of the city’s cargo and some intercontinental flights.

With no room for Linate to expand, northern Italy has lacked a major airport worthy of its growing economic might. Italy and its struggling state-owned carrier, Alitalia, are now counting on Malpensa to lure back northern travelers who hop to London or Frankfurt for long-haul flights on rival European carriers rather than flying Alitalia via Rome. Malpensa eventually expects to handle 24 million passengers a year, rivaling Rome’s haul.

Months before its inauguration, Italian designs for Malpensa were causing havoc across Europe.

Carriers of nine European nations persuaded the European Union last month to block Milan’s order to move their flights from Linate to Malpensa. They cited the city’s failure to complete plans for a high-speed rail line to the new terminal--delayed until May--and a widened parallel highway. The 33-mile drive from central Milan to Malpensa now takes about an hour and costs up to $80 by taxi.

In its ruling, the European Union called the planned move “discriminatory and illegal” under its antitrust rules because only Alitalia would be allowed to continue using the more convenient Linate airport.

Milan agreed to a compromise this month allowing Alitalia’s rivals--including Air France, British Airways and Lufthansa--to keep one-third of their flights at Linate for now. But that did not end the fight. Swissair, whose country is not in the European Union, is still excluded from Linate and waging a legal battle against Milan.

Another set of opponents--hundreds of environmentalists and residents of communities near Malpensa--marched to the airport Sunday to protest an increase in jet noise. They tied up traffic, delaying some transit passengers who were being bused from Malpensa’s older terminal to the new one.

Some of the new terminal’s 4,000 employees, switched from Linate, were also delayed by the tie-up. Once at work, many didn’t know what to do.

Technicians couldn’t figure out how to update the terminal’s computerized flight information displays, so they were shut down and replaced by loudspeaker announcements. Electricians had trouble getting escalators working after unidentified travelers--children or maybe adult pranksters, officials surmised--kept pushing the emergency-stop buttons.

Unfamiliar with the new runway layout, ground crews were slow to maneuver enclosed exit ramps and drive passenger buses to meet incoming jets, airport officials said. And computer-illuminated signs that are supposed to help other drivers get the right luggage to each of the 36 carousels broke down, causing a monumental mix-up of bags.

Then there was the mix-up of airports.

Diane Winsock, a business analyst from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., had a British Airways ticket to Linate and a driver waiting there. She landed instead at Malpensa. Others in the same situation voiced outrage at being “hijacked.”

Adding to the travelers’ frustration were conflicting explanations for all their problems by a confused airport staff.

“At the information desk, they told me our delay was due to a computer failure, but they told my friends here that it was just the fog and the rain,” said U.S. Army Capt. Doug Krawczak, one of four North Atlantic Treaty Organization staff officers passing through Milan from a conference in Naples back to headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany. “Either way, here we are, stuck in their inauguration.”