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Mar 30, 2016 | 7:07 am

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Checking bags in the middle of a leg (reverse short checking)

I have a weird question I'm hoping someone has experience with: I took advantage of a good ex-CPH business fare to the US, I live in London, and I have some bags I'll need to check. My itinerary currently looks like this:

AA6387 (BA813) - Departs CPH 10:25 - Arrives LHR 11:35
AA135 - Departs LHR 14:00 - Arrives LAX 17:15

I usually don't check bags, so ordinarily I would do a same-plane turn at the European outstation for this situation, which generally works really well. In this case that'd mean buying BA812 on my own, flying it to CPH, and taking the same plane back to LHR to start my ex-CPH leg to LAX. CPH is especially easy for this type of thing. The problem this time is the bags... I don't think it's a good idea to check them with BA on the LHR-CPH leg and have them through-checked back to LHR and onward to LAX on AA. If such a thing is even possible, I'm worried at least one bag would get waylaid. The trip is for a wedding, so I'd like to minimise risk of lost bags where possible.

What I'd prefer to do is to leave the bags at left luggage at LHR T3 the day before, then the day of travel do the same-plane turn at CPH, go landside at LHR to transfer to T3, retrieve the bags from left luggage, then check the bags and head airside and fly to LAX. Can anyone think of any reason this wouldn't work? Has tried this and run into issues? Will AA agents have a problem checking the bags in the middle of the leg (after the completion of AA6387/BA813 but before the checked bag cutoff time for AA135)?

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