Interesting lesson from last week. My friend was running late on her way to LHR and it was clear she would miss the 35-min conformance time at T5. I had always assumed that offloading is fully automatic and not much can be done in a situation like this (although I'm sure c-w-s will correct me!).

I did flag this however to the check-in agent at the First desks and she called a (very helpful) supervisor who manually added 5 minutes, thus reducing the conformance time to 30 minutes . The flight was leaving from the C gates and was "on time" so she said this was the absolute best she could do and probably not enough time to get to the departure gate anyway.

My friend still missed this amended T-30 conformance time by a few minutes which I thought was a clear case of "game over", so I told her to go to the First check-in and said that the absolute best scenario to hope for is that she will be put on the next available flight for free as a gesture of goodwill (which happened to me in a similar situation in the past).

The supervisor however called the gate and managed to reinstate the BP. Less than a minute later, boarding commenced. Again, I thought there was no way to get to the C gates before the flight closed but somehow she made it .

All in all, I was surprised this could be done. BA staff - as usual - extremely helpful and going out of their way to help, which is not so surprising as I have experienced that on many occasions ^