The Heathrow Airport Experience

I was recently on a trip to Europe and this is about the heathrow airport experience. We went through heathrow airport going to and returning from Europe. This blog will be about the return leg, and will actually start in schiphol airport in amsterdam.

On the last day of our trip,  we woke up at 2:45 to take a 3:46 train from Amsterdam Centraal station to Schiphol Airport. I was quite sick, at this point, and probably had covid. We will never know because I never took a covid test to confirm. I had a terrible runny nose, a nasty cough, and a fever, so I was sweating horribly and it was not a fun experience. We get to schiphol airport at 4:00 for our 7:20 flight. We get to our gate at about 5:30, and we sit there for a while. I go and buy a couple of water bottles for myself so I didn’t get dehydrated on the flight, and then we boarded. Amsterdam-London is only a 40 minute flight, and we end up in a holding pattern over London waiting for our turn to land. This was due to the high volume of traffic heading to london in the morning, and the high fog. This meant that atc had to space out the arrivals more, and led to more delays. We eventually landed and sat in a penalty box for a further 30 minutes. (a few months before the flights, british airways moved our flight home forward, giving us less time to transfer in london) We eventually go to our gate and deplaned, and went through immigration. Immigration in london is nice and quick because they have e-gates which just scan your passport and you walk through. We had to pick up my dad’s bag which had been checked, and then we had to transfer from terminal 4 to terminal 5. You would probably imagine that terminal five and terminal four would be right next to each other, because that makes sense, but not Heathrow airport. We had to exit the terminal and take the Elizabeth line to terminals 2 and 3, and then transfer onto the heathrow express train to terminal five. This took around 20 minutes, and once we got to terminal five, we had one hour to check my dads bag, and make it through security, and make it to the gate before our flight would leave. This is a good time to mention that Heathrow airport has a policy where you must clear security at least 35 minutes before your flights scheduled departure time. Once we got to the security line we had 35 minutes until 9:35 which is when we had to make it through security. We then waited in line for around 20 minutes, leaving us with 15 minutes. We put all of our bags into the xray machines, and walked through the metal detector. Unfortunately for me, my metal zipper set off the machine, meaning that I had go through the millimeter wave scanner. Also unfortunately for me, they had to recalibrate the machine, which took a few minutes. Then, after going through the machine, I had to get a pat down. For some reason, I, who was visibly sick, and was clearly not a terrorist, still deserved a full pat down as if I was a terrorist anyway. They even wiped my shoes with the bomb residue test thing. After this I see my dad with my bag that included all of my clothes and my money belt which contained all of my documents and boarding pass. However, he didn’t have my bag with all of my electronics and other quick access travel stuff. This was the bag that would likely go under the seat in front of me. Unfortunately, it had gone through to the other side of the xray machine, meaning that it would have to manually searched. At this point that we had 5 minutes to make it through security, however there were still three other bags that had to be searched in front of mine, and only one guy searching them. Once he got to my bags, he goes, “You left a water bottle in your bag mate,” and starts throwing the contents of the carefully packed bag all over the bin. He then finds a bottle of sparkling water that I had somehow made it through security in schiphol with. He then takes my backpack, throws it through another xray and gives it the bomb residue swipe. By this point it was not 9:40, five minutes past when we needed to pass security. Now we have to get to our gate. Of course, this was literally the farthest gate away from where we were, and we would need to take the train to get there. Once the train got to the station beneath the terminal area we were in, the other passengers got off the train, and then a security person needed to search every single car. Once we were on the train, we had to take it to its end, and then run to our gate. We made it to our gate, as the last of almost 600 passengers. We boarded, and of course, the flight then left 30 minutes late. The flight was officially 10:21 minutes, but we actually spent more like 11:15 on the aircraft. Overall it probably would have been a pretty good flight if I wasn’t very sick. But after this, I am probably going to try and avoid Heathrow airport with any connection less than 3 hours, that was a nightmare.

My current Challenge progress as of September 12, 2024.