How to visit Heathrow Terminal 2 before it opens to the public

Fancy being an airport guinea-pig for a day?

Now that Heathrow Airport is nearing the completion of the demolition and rebuilding of its Terminal 2 building, and like any large transport site that will be used by lots and lots of people, it helps to test if the human side of the facility works as planned.

So, they hold trials — with unpaid volunteers pretending to be passengers.

Eurostar did the same thing when they opened up their St Pancras terminal, and that was frankly, damn good fun, although I did get a very terse email from them after I blogged about it as I wasn’t supposed to and had to delete the post. Whoops.

Heathrow’s Terminal 5 also did the same thing back in late 2007, which was frankly, rather less fun — but it’s still an unusual thing to do, and anything unusual is likely to appeal, even if it is unusually tedious instead of unusually great fun.

It’s the unusualness that matters.

Hopefully, though T2 testing will be more fun than T5.

If you want to register as a volunteer and get a sneak preview of the Terminal building — then click here and fill in details.

You’ll then get an invite to participate later in the year.

But — and this is very important — don’t use your normal web password when they send you the confirmation email, as the second email after that will include your password, in plain text for anyone to see.

A more hideous security blunder it is difficult to imagine.

And finally, as with the Olympic Park, the clock on the T2 website seems to suggest that the new building will be opening at midnight. Really?