This experience was, as they say, upclose and personal at LHR last Friday morning ... This was for a BA to TXL (Berlin) from T1 with an 08:50 departure.
Jetnoise UK
As I understand it, the previous hand baggage max size was expressed as the sum of the three measurements. Can the new limits be used the same way - i.e. is a bag whose dimensions are less than 96 cm in total allowable?
Second question - are the checkin desks (LHR and LGW in particular) insisting that ALL hand baggage go in to the cages (or hastily assembled MDF boxes) to check compliance or is it done by sight judgement only?
First The answer is
NO!
Second The answer is
YES!
If your bag does not fit in the reduced sized frame then you get sent back. When I reached the front of the queue to enter air side, there was a very polite woman checking bags into the frame. She was patient in helping people and very smartly saying, "If it doesn't fit in to the frame - they will send you back to check it in." Actually, No 'they ' would not as
she was the one doing the sending!! But she was cleverly offsetting the potential arguments by making out that there lay some further size related screening ahead which, of course, I knew that there would not be!! Effectively, she was saying that there was no good complaining to her!
I had carefully measured by old computer bag at home and knew that it was within spec. When I put it into the frame it stuck up just above and she suggested that I try it horizontally. Jamming the bag in and out of the frame was not straightforward and so I also took her advice to see if there was something that could be rearranged. I took an item from the width of the bag (CD pack) and placed it nearer the top, so shrinking the bag's width. It then went in horizontally and I was off to enjoy the next part of the day.
There was one other unexpected side effect to all of this. Because many people had gone on-line to check details, many many more than usual had checked in on-line. The self-serve machines were almost empty and with no queues - because most folks had their print out in hand. This meant that there was a
very long queue for the newly named SLOW BAG DROP.
As always, if you were polite to the staff, they were appreciative of a smile and sympathy. I would not have their job. In the end we were 30 minutes late out but no explanation as to why. The flight was not posted for a gate until almost time to push-back, so it looked like an unrelated delay but no one said a word.
On board was the usual pleasant BA experience (All Day Deli that tasted like ti was produced by MacDs) but the staff were as good as always.
Returning on Sunday evening was normal - except that the baggage hall at T1 was in melt down. Here a note I posted in another forum.
... Sunday 20th arriving into T1 from Berlin at about 21:00 ... the airport that was now 'running normally' certainly was!
The T1 baggage hall was awash with bags, dozens pulled off the carousels and sitting around on trolleys and cluttering up the hall, many with new routing labels on them.
The hall was packed and the escalator delivering more every minute. The indicator board (to advise which carousel) was full and four entries had several garbage characters so as to render the entry invalid. For example there is no carousel '54', although it might be helpful if they did have that many.
The board was not updated for nine minutes after I started watching it and then the four entries were replaced by 'Please Wait' for another eight minutes.
Yes, it was good to know that the airport was fully back to normal. Now to open the duty free ... and then
