IT IS the largest single-span building in Britain and is billed as the prestige gateway to the 2012 Olympic Games.

But it is not yet clear if the new Terminal 5 will improve the battered reputation of Heathrow Airport or whether it will make any difference to the often miserable experience of air travel.

Scottish passengers who connect at Heathrow with British Airways will be among those to enjoy the airy, five-storey facility when the airline switches the majority of its services there on 27 March. They will benefit from brighter, cleaner facilities and greater confidence that their baggage will not be lost forever.

But will they experience a historic step-change in their travel experience? Probably not, if early trials of the new facility are anything to go by.

Earlier this week, more than a hundred volunteers - mostly frequent flyers and curious local residents - took part in the first public tests of new equipment including multi-million pound X-ray machines. Unknown to the Spanish-owned airport operator BAA, I was among them.

For many passengers arriving from Scotland and connecting to other destinations, the first experience will be an unexpected hassle: despite having already cleared security at Edinburgh, Glasgow or Aberdeen, they will have to be rescreened at Terminal 5 - something they don’t have to do at the moment.

BAA says the ease of arriving and leaving from one terminal means this is no significant inconvenience. But for anyone travelling with children, laptop computers or bottles of water, it means another unwelcome conga-line of shoe removal.

Those checking in to return to Scotland will discover that BA has replaced its check-in desks with self-service machines and bag drops. The airline hopes 80 per cent of its passengers will only need to drop off baggage, having used online check-in. Staff will be on hand to assist those who haven’t, it says.

Security screening is little better than at present, but Terminal 5 sees the debut of some new X-ray scanners which detect explosives and liquid in hand luggage. Teething troubles included bag-handles getting stuck in the mechanism and lighter items being snatched away by the automatic sensors.

Manufacturers insist better calibration of the machine’s sensors will improve the experience. It had better: this week’s trials saw passengers taking far longer to clear security than they do at present. BA hopes passengers will never have more than one person ahead of them in the queue. On current evidence, that hope will be dashed.

Anyone flying to Scotland will also have to give their fingerprints at security - a civil-liberties nightmare in the making. Domestic and international passengers share the “airside” post-security zone. Aside from making domestic travellers bring their passports, fingerprinting is the only way of preventing international passengers who will not necessarily have cleared UK immigration from sneaking on to a domestic flight.

Once airside, passengers enjoy astonishing views through the glass sides of the building of departing planes. The main shop is a giant Harrods, but there are plenty of smaller retailers and restaurants - including a smoothie bar named “welovejuice”, where unfortunately the “we” was still missing from the fascia this week.

Although the check-in hall has the most striking architecture, the unexpected brightness of functional areas such as the immigration hall and baggage-reclaim zone are more impressive. Linking the basement underground station with the top-floor check-in hall is a giant escalator encased in a glass atrium. Gone are the grime-trap grey carpets, replaced with smooth marble floors, floods of daylight and soothing aquamarine glass panels.

During the trials, thousands of suitcases filled with sand - quite possibly baggage that went missing from Terminal 4 - were used to test the hi-tech system.

Passengers flying from Scotland with Bmi will remain in the filthy, grim Terminal 1 until it is replaced by Heathrow East in 2010. But there are no losers here: with BA gone, even Terminal 1 will seem like bliss. FACTS AND FIGURES

The main building is the largest single-span structure in Britain.

It is 400 metres long, 180 metres wide and 40 metres high, with 105 lifts. It has 65 escalators but only two travelators.

There are 120 shops, of which the biggest is a Harrods.

The new air traffic control tower is 87 metres tall.

There are 11 baggage reclaim belts.

Terminal 5’s baggage system has capacity to process up to 12,000 bags per hour at peak, 70,000 bags per day

There are 13.5km of tunnels.

Landscaping includes 250,000 evergreen groundcover shrubs, 30,000 native woodland plants and 2,000 metres of native hedgerow.

(AP)The American Civil Liberties Union said it is suing Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing Co., claiming it provided secret CIA transportation services for three terrorism suspects who were tortured under the U.S. government’s “extraordinary rendition” program.

The cases involve the alleged mistreatment of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen, in July 2002 and January 2004; Elkassim Britel, an Italian citizen, in May 2002; and Ahmed Agiza, an Egyptian citizen, in December 2001, ACLU officials said at a Manhattan news conference.

Mohamed is currently being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Britel in Morocco and Agiza in Egypt, the ACLU said in a statement.

The lawsuit, which the ACLU planned to file in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, charges that flight services provided by Jeppesen enabled the clandestine transportation of the men to secret overseas locations, where they were tortured and subjected to other “forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”

Boeing itself is not named in the lawsuit.

Mike Pound, a spokesman for Englewood, Colo.,-based Jeppesen, said company officials had not yet seen the lawsuit and had no immediate comment.

He said Jeppesen provides support services rather than the flights themselves. “We create flight plans, what the fuel requirements might be, where they might refuel, the airports that they might use.”

He said the company’s customers include airlines, private pilots and companies.

“We don’t know the purpose of the trip for which we do a flight plan,” said Pound. “We don’t need to know specific details. It’s the customer’s business, and we do the business that we are contracted for. It’s not our practice to ever inquire about the purpose of a trip.”

ACLU attorney Ben Wizner said after the news conference: “Either they knew or reasonably should have known that they were facilitating a torture program.”

Companies “are not allowed to have their head in the sand, and take money from the CIA to fly people, hooded and shackled, to foreign countries to be tortured,” said Wizner.

Boeing spokesman Tim Neale said company officials “typically don’t comment on lawsuits” and had not seen this one, “nor are we confirming the reports” that Jeppesen provided services to the CIA because “there’s a confidentiality clause with all its customers.”

The lawsuit says the company “furnished essential flight and logistical support to aircraft used by the CIA to transfer terror suspects to secret detention and interrogation facilities in countries such as Morocco and Egypt where, according to the U.S. Department of State, the use of torture is ‘routine,’ as well as to U.S.-run detention facilities overseas, where the United States government maintains that the safeguards of U.S. law do not apply.

“American corporations should not be profiting from a CIA rendition program that is unlawful and contrary to core American values,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU. “Corporations that choose to participate in such activity can and should be held legally accountable.”

The CIA is not named in the suit. Wizner said the executive branch has evoked a state secrets defense in similar lawsuits.

The Bush administration has insisted it receives guarantees from countries receiving terror suspects that prisoners will not be tortured.

The ACLU said its lawsuit was being filed under the Alien Tort Statute, which permits aliens to bring claims in the United States for violations of the law of nations or a United States treaty. It said the statute recognizes international norms accepted among civilized nations that are violated by acts such as enforced disappearance, torture and other inhuman treatment.

Techies say goodbye to cubicles

Silicon Valley is breaking away from its the traditional reliance on cubicle-dominated offices as part of an effort to boost collaboration among workers, the San Jose Mercury News said. Chip giant Intel is redesigning its offices with open areas furnished with comfortable armchairs and tables where workers are encouraged to make themselves comfortable while working on their laptops. A program manager at Cisco said the cubicle-less environment has increased team interaction and boosted productivity.

College requires GPS cell phone

A New Jersey college has become one of the first in the U.S. to require full-time undergraduates, numbering about 6,000, to carry phones equipped with GPS tracking. Montclair State Univ. officials expect the phones will improve safety by enabling campus authorities to quickly send out campus alerts or allowing students to call for help with the device pinpointing their location. While students praise the safety features, some grumble that the phones must be bought through the school for $210 a semester.

Honey proved better than cough syrup in suppressing nighttime coughing by children, a Penn State Univ. study concluded. Researchers said buckwheat honey clearly performed better than the common cough syrup ingredient, dextromethorphan, in a test of 105 children. The popular folk remedy was found to effectively soothe sore throats and reduce the frequency and severity of coughing.

Faster movie downloads are the most appealing promise of a next-generation, high-speed Internet, a survey of U.K. Web surfers found. About 61% of those queried said they would like to see 5-minute downloads of DVD-quality movies, easily surpassing other innovations such as video phone calls and high-definition gaming. In S. Korea, the need for speed has been driven by the growing popularity of online gaming.

94% of emergency rooms are not equipped to care for young children, a UCLA study found. Half of hospitals surveyed didn’t have medical equipment designed for use on infants and small children, such as breathing masks or small forceps to remove objects from young throats.