A glimpse of London Heathrow Terminal 4 before it reopens

It is not every day that one gets to walk through the halls of an empty airport. Even less so, when the airport in question is one of the busiest in the world.

Although London Heathrow’s Terminal 4, once home to the mighty British Airways and later of the no less formidable SkyTeam alliance, has been eerily silent since the outbreak of the covid pandemic in 2020. T4 was closed for a while and later timidly reopened for arrivals from countries in the so-called “red list”.

In any case, LHR’s T4 is not yet open for business and even the surface links, such as the metro (“the Tube” for Londoners) are closed. So, it was a bit of an adventure finding the right suburban bus (there are a couple of lines still linking it to the rest of the terminals), but made it recently to T4 for a tour of Etihad’s new A350-1000 (which was temporarily parked there).

Besides the obvious aeronautical interest of the visit (we were guests of Etihad, which is going to move to T4 shortly from T3), this visit gave our group the chance to get an unusual glimpse of an empty London Heathrow’s Terminal 4 ahead of the reopening, which is planned for sometime either in June or July, the official date is not confirmed yet at the time of writing these lines.

The only people around were some workers giving the final touches to T4 before it reopens to the public this summer. It feels quite surreal to walk such a facility while totally empty!