There are 5 e-gates at T5, and looking at my timings I can't realistically see a 30 minute delay happening. 15 minutes on a rough day would happen if 1 or 2 channels were out AND the queue was all the way back along the wall between the hall and apron. There can be competency issues in terms of the users in there. If the delays get towards the 20 minute period (which hits a target threshold) then they reduce the processing of non EEA passengers, so that agents can be switched to EEA.

The best thing to do is to join the e-gates queue if there are less than 30 people in the queue OR if the manual queue has more than 4 or so loops in the queuing pens.

If there are only 3 operating channels (they seem to breakdown a lot) then best go manual.