We Toured The Restricted Parts of Heathrow Airport

hi i'm matt man i'm tom and we're on the roof of a throw airport no idea if you can see them [Music] hi I'm Matt and I'm John and this is the park bench and a couple of weeks ago the lovely people at Heathrow invited us to go and have a look around behind the scenes before we start this is not a sponsored video they've given us an amazing opportunity and we're going to talk about it in return but there are no money changing hands or anything here no however we need to let you know that while they didn't have any editorial control we have run this past them for security reasons because if we've accidentally filmed something in the back that shouldn't be in the public so if that happens if at any point we have accidentally filmed something this will happen to the shot although they would like us to plug a TV show they would like to plug Heathrow Britain's busiest airport which on itv1 stayed in control we got an invite to Heathrow Matt you are a much bigger aviation geek than me this one's all yours I like planes I like airports one of the best things about traveling for me is that I get to go have a go on a plane so they sent through an itinerary of what they had planned for us because originally we were trying to film a video about the baggage area yeah and then he gave us this itinerary which said baggage area terminal 2 roof control tower and apron hello and I couldn't find a good enough story for my channel about the baggage system itself yeah it's a really cool bit of technology but it fits here where we can just keep count about it so that's exactly what we're gonna do so we met up with the lovely people Heathrow Airport who took us through security unsurprisingly we can't show you know basically the main thing that is going to be not showing about this or if the stuff we're not talking about it might be because it's security-related so we go through security and then we walk down some back corridors and back streets to the big building that has the baggage stuff in it and it is a big building it's I think 35 40 meters high it's five stories in it and each floor has multiple layers of conveyor belts and if you're a conveyor belt fan this is the video for you yes now this is this is the point where I put my glasses on and read from my notes I took notes because a new one here so they said they were going to show us the route that a bag would take yes so from going through check-in it goes through check-in then lands on the conveyor belt and to you it disappears and then it appears on the on the returning yeah conveyor belt in the arrivals so this is Terminal 3 at Heathrow Airport it has six collector lines and you film those over the blue conveyor belts so from all of the check-in desks they all of those bags gone to one of those six lines which then put it into the main system and that takes from the main terminal building to this big baggage building the whole system are is I think about 13 kilometers of belts or every bag on those belts is tracked by photoelectric sensors so if something slips somewhere it's gonna know it so if you've ever wondered why they put a tag on your bag and then put another random bit of barcode on the other side it's just so if the bags not visible to the scanner it can still scan it yeah a huge number of scanners everywhere in the system tracking every single bags it goes through anything that is coming in from another flight it goes into the same system the same way all get scanned and screened in stuff that we aren't allowed to show you um but yeah it's it's all tracked that's what got me the whole thing is not just a conveyor belt it's a system of conveyor belts that know where everything is and they said that if something slows down for a very short amount of time the system will no alert someone because if a bag hasn't got from here to here in the normal amount of time something's wrong um conveyor belt - color-coded oh yeah there were blue ones for the input yes and the sort of main lines yeah I come and what the other colors what green ones were going to the storage area yes we'll talk about in a bit yeah and the big sortie thing yes the pre sorta the pre sorter so all the bags they come out of the the check-in area they go through these six lines they go up up and over a bridge into this other building which is pretty cool yeah big long diagonal slope yes of bags and then into this other big room where they compact home again and into the pre sorta which is effectively a roundabout I I swear it looks like what someone who's designing a movie set for what based on combat about some fire things would design because there are so many things going at so many angles and it is so visually interesting that you wouldn't expect it to be like that hazard yeah that's give me some straight compares no it it really reminded me of a pic suffer like that it was either reminding me of the doors bit in Monsters Inc or ethnic something else I can't quite remember which I think was Toy Story 2 but I haven't seen that recently enough but I think it was reminding you of that it's every conveyor belt chase scene in the movie it's great one of the favorite bits on the conveyor belts that I saw in the room with the pre sorter in it yes the there were two lines merging one was coming from above a monk was coming from below and there was a I was about to do hand action so I can show you the video of it they merged vertically and the top thing the top conveyor belt stops and a bridge lifts up and the bag can come in from the bottom and vice versa it's all very clever it's all there is a human in the loop on everything yeah but if there's nothing unusual about the bag and it's in the right foot just dealt with it's in the right place one of those things that it's an automated system but they were still humans all over the place yeah so this pre sorter that we mentioned was effectively a roundabout everything goes virus and then they can choose an exit to wherever they're meant to be going on the system because the barcode tracking knows where everything is and where it's meant to be going yeah so I wonder it goes on to this pre sort of thing which going round and round and round and round around when it finds the right exit it tips it down a chute into the next conveyor but yes good that was pretty much all we did on level 10 on the next level oh that's the other thing heat heat now come on bloody boiling in there yeah it was a few weeks ago and it was just I if it was either drizzling or pissing it down so I wore a coat and a hoodie and there it was 25 degrees yeah I was holding cameras I couldn't really carry my coat as well there are a lot of motors moving a lot of stuff oh yeah they all put out low heat so from there we went to the early bag store that is a cool room it is a robotic storage system for bags they were multiple aisles each with no two three-story huts with bag stacking yeah and each aisle had its own robotic bag grabber which could grab I think two bags at a time while you are filming they told me something that yeah it's deliberately designed so that each aisle can technically have two robotic bag wrappers because it's in the aisle robot aisle robot aisle robot oh one for each side so if one of the robots breaks down the one next to it can take over its job that makes sense yeah that's but means you back this and get stuff yeah robot break 4800 places for banks in theory they're never going to go over 4,600 to need a bit of space to move things about yeah and that is four bags if you've checked in more than two hours before your flight or if you've got a connection Heathrow that's longer than two hours your bags gone in there or if you were about to fly out but if you're playing got cancelled yes and everyone's connections not for a while that's a clever easy to find place for the system to dump the bags yeah because in most airports it's just a house with bags on the floor on shelves with humans and computers can remember things are better than people can so Heathrow has they call them a B and C days and separate for both arrivals and departures C is a normal day B is quite busy in here a is everything is as busy as it can be that's flying just for Christmas or Easter or something like that [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] I should point out that there is a separate system for out of what we call out of gauge bags which is anything that is large or fragile or doesn't fit in the early bag store this is this design for the stuff that is just going to get uh I think that's all we've got for the early bag store which means we moved on to the robot arms which sadly we're not running at the time at the time but the eventual output for all these bags once it gets into the system it has to get into the plane and to get into the plane they in most cases will go into one of the bins which is if you've seen them in an airport the silvery containers that are sort of like a square with a triangle chopped out at the bottom because that fits inside a plane shape I don't think I've got any footage of these because we didn't have permission from the airlines to film their individual things really had permission for the airport itself but look out of the window of an airport next time I mean and they're a silvery thing on a trolley going towards a plane so that is just a big box they stack bags in and normally the unless high-tech airports a human will just pick up bags and put them in it yeah if you're not using the rover arm they had a conveyor belt that went up to nice easy lifting Heights to where you're about to put the bag and that went up and down and the system automatically puts the bags in weight order well again these are things that I found out while you were off filming is that yeah they just put them in weight order where's my pocket vibrating that can wait professional so if you're not gonna go full human lifting they have these two CooCoo robot arms hi can I call you back in 10 minutes please sorry about that wait guess who forgot he had a phone call at 11:00 today w in in her play murder plane hi so they've got these robot arms they've got a couple of them and it's got one of the conveyor things on the end of it by the looks of it and the whole point of that is that it can do all the lifting and all of the packing of that crate without a human having to lift anything yeah it's still supervised and controlled by a person but I would expect the efficiency and the you were doing the talking and the listening to the clever people I was doing it yes um yeah essentially it takes the bag on a tray and puts it in the right place keeps the tray paksy packs the entire thing by itself they were saying in certain situations it is just easier to do it with people yeah and that's why people do it in so many places now rather than robot arms being everywhere yeah so that that was beginning use that there that was baggage that's all the no time dropping baggage from there the one thing that we have mentioned is you might be thinking well what if my tag gets ripped off when it's in all of this system loss what happens well if anything everything just ends up on the pre sorter as it's going round and round and round if it's been if a bag has been on there for over a defined interval it gets dumped into a room with some people I think they call it the UFO root for the bank's unidentified flying object because it's an object that is going to be flying and we can't identify there are there are people there that can check the tags on the bag normally it's just got a bit crumpled yep mostly and they can straighten it out and check it in on the system in a lot of cases they if it's not got a connection from then on if it just needs to get to the right bin then okay it's that one and the computer sounds cool I know that bag now because it's trapped through the whole system it'll come out the other end so we were in Terminal three we had to get to Terminal two which is you know how the outputs are a bit confusing when you're walking around them imagine going around an airport backwards and through longer tunnels with more security in that we can't talk about because we're doing it backwards you're not meant to unless your stuff so we're escorted a long way around and Heathrow Airport is huge it's got five terminals that span pretty much the entire length of their to current runways and wider yeah and two and three the two terminals that are next to each other but it still took us a good 10 15 minutes just to get to where we're having lunch and then more wandering to get up onto the roof it's a good roof it has a good view it's just the only way you can get a view like that is to stand on the river you don't really get to see a top-down view of a runway and it wasn't really top down because we're only about six stories up but well we weren't six stories up for long so yeah we went on the roof and then the next stop was the control tower yes we didn't get to go in the room with the people doing the things because they were busy doing the things perfect control is a serious job and they don't need to silly people like us putting off yeah so rest assured if you're flying through Heathrow that day the air traffic controllers will not disturb but we got a good view out of their windows yes and we saw one of their control screens as well which is based on radar view of the area if you've ever seen a flight raid or any of the websites like that they'll let you see where planes are in the sky and on the ground it's similar to that it's the load of dots on the screen with names of planes from the radar system so they know where the planes are even if they can't see them yeah front they got a good overview of the airport I was surprised I knew that we'd walk quite far yes I was getting retired weather today but I could see this in sheer size of that baggage building from up there yeah and the way that we had walked on the roof at the far corner of that building cluster yeah wiggling all the way through to the pretty much died most diagonally opposite point we could be in to go up that's how diagonals you could see oh yeah from that control to her what he throw used to be it used to be a military base with kind of a star arrangement of runways also sort of I 120 degree angles sounds right and you can still see the layout flatten a few places he talks just got the big two runways now we can still see the diagonals and then we got to see those runways a bit closer whoa we got a mini bestow of the vet of the airport that the plane's driver we hopped in the minibus we were told yeah we're going outside but we weren't really told anything else yeah we'll see what we can find you yeah and we should set off down a taxiway and they've Park up we are not driving this minibus just to be clear here oh yeah one of the it's one of the official they were driving us around to places that the newest save they had radios and everything to air traffic control and parked up on an unused taxiway that joined straight onto the runway said you want to pop out here and get some shots but yeah so that the plane was going right past as it was taking off and we got several vantage points on this from several different ways so what I would wanted to see was the plane actually a big plane doing the rotating and yes and lifting off right in front of me which I realized I had already been given something amazing and I thought I'd chance it and you not I always ask and this time I got just move down there a bit so we're at the bit where the 747 is take off please they won't yeah we'll see what we can find they found it I didn't have a particularly zoomy camera with me so you'll see it just in the distance coming towards us I got a couple of shots of kind of zooming around you with you trying to get I was grinning you were there was one final stop though which was the the landing the not the landing point but the the start of the runway the very start of the runway before that oh we got to see Concorde as well oh that was afterwards but yes I can't remember the order now is alright we got close to Concord as well it's not he throws it belongs to B a and they have parked it on their own area just on the edge of Heathrow so we still the other side of a fence looking at Concord and I've seen underneath a Concorde before because at the intrepid museum in New York there is one on the side but there is no you can't see the side of it up close is this tables and chairs underneath it where you can have your lunch but I haven't you know scene yeah a profile anything other than the Conchords ask from up close the windows are into basically about that big because it had to have windows and the engine is really didn't want it to have windows and that's what they come from the only thing that concorde can do is go fast everything else is a compromise why yeah then after there we-we've minibus driver followed one of the bright orange yellow flashy cars yes who took us to the it's such nice weather that the camera has overheated I don't quite understand how but it says it's overheated and it's stopped fortunately we're mostly cutting to b-roll now you were probably in the flashing car we followed the flashy car to the very beginning of the runway there was a that day there was mostly a taking off runway in a London right so we went to the very beginning of the landing runway like walking over our hedges with all their lucky I feel like I need earplugs for this five minutes I'm standing here noisy but working there every day and that is obviously I like planes I'm not the kind of person who will go out to the airports and take photos anything I'm not a plane spotter I just like big engineering things and they're one of them yes I'm not saying anything bad about those people no you better not because they will be in the comments I'm part of the reason I was excited to do this is so it can share some of the stuff that they don't get to see because as we drove to that point there were several people on the bank outside the bounds of the in a parka outside the bounds of the airport try to get as close to the views we got sorry so yeah thank you to everyone at Heathrow I think that was a heck of a thing to get access to we should plug the TV show again because it asked us to it's on screen Heathrow Britain's busiest airport on ITV thank you so much I say my arms time [Laughter] [Music] good job on you know that

Channel: Matt and Tom

Views: 431,379

Keywords: matt gray, tom scott, mattg, mattgray, unnamedculprit, tomscott, tomscottgo, matt and tom, park bench, heathrow, restricted area, behind the scenes, heathrow airport

Id: WXF0uYdILGc

Length: 21min 50sec (1310 seconds)

Published: Wed May 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/brtt3000]

I don't like this format, it is messy and feels lazy.