Well I got back from my segment run yesterday evening. I'm happy to report that the back to back in LHR went perfectly. We landed at 20:50 and were on stand at 20:55 so I had 1h 20 in the end to make the connection. I was through arrivals and up at the check-in desk by 21:05 so it was all very relaxed. Nobody in front of me at security and I was sitting at the gate before they even called boarding. Why did I go to the check-in desk I hear you ask.......well that's a slightly longer story.
Let's start at the beginning: so I arrive in TXL on Saturday morning about 1h 50 before the flight. Just as check-in is opening actually. I'd already seen that the inbound aircraft was a new A320 with sharklets so all was good with the world. I go to the check-in desk and the agent is really lovely. She says "I can print all 4 boarding passes for you". Excellent I think! She hits print and her boarding pass printer beeps and refuses to print anything. After a bit of troubleshooting (including turning it off and back on again), she can't print any boarding passes at all! She asks her supervisor to print my BP and the same happens to her. My itinerary has now broken 2 check-in desks! A quick phonecall to the technician (who asks if she's tried turning it off and back on!), and he promises to drop by ASAP. I go and grab a Currywurst from the Ess-Bahn to start my day in style.
Back to the desk about half an hour later and things are running smoothly again. They could only print the BP to LHR but that's fine, I have 4 hours there so I can collect the rest then. As long as I get the LHR-ATH leg printed before I leave ATH, all will be good I think.
Great flight down to ATH and we arrive a few minutes early. I head straight to the check-in desk and explain the situation. "No problem" says the Goldair Handling agent. Goes into my booking, presses print and then "beep, beep, beep". She tries again, the same thing happens. Now her printer is broken! She calls her supervisor, he tries it too and now his printer is broken!!! He makes a load of phonecalls and suddenly, another agent appears from behind me with A4 pages with my BPs printed out from the OLCI stations in ATH. What great thinking! Excellent service from Goldair and A3 at this point.
I'm good to go and not worrying about my connection anymore. Incidentally, I also try the SSKs in ATH and they won't print anything either!
So that's how we get back to LHR and I go to the check-in desk. I wanted to see if my theory that the 1 hour in LHR was causing the system to fall over was correct. And it was! The guy in LHR was able to print my BP for LHR-ATH and ATH-TXL no problem. I can only assume that A3s systems did not like me only having 1 hour in LHR despite it being a perfectly legal connection. If it hadn't been for the quick thinking of the Goldair agent in ATH, I'd have been fretting about my connection in LHR far more. I would probably have downloaded the BP to my phone just to be certain but I much prefer paper BPs, as they can't run out of battery.
Hope you enjoyed reading my mini saga! In conclusion, LHR is more than doable on the last flight of the day but I wouldn't want to try it on any of the earlier ones, as there's no way T2 will be that quiet then!
Edited to add: I've updated the wiki with my experience as well.
