Originally Posted by
IC125
Thank you. I'll double check the times, but I don't think I'll be getting to the airport until 10ish, so it may well have to be in the morning.
Welcome to Flyertalk and the BA forum.
I think 2 hours is fine, bearing in mind it's T5 not T3, and bearing in mind that 1 hour would probably still work (though with checked baggage, tomorrow isn't the day to experiment with this). They won't let you in until 05:00 anyway, though unofficially they may be open half an hour earlier. There are several paradoxes here: because of all the headlines , people turn up early for flights, then go through check-in and security much earlier than necessary, when the staffing is determined for the flights that take off in the next 2 hours. So particularly in the morning it's utterly self-destructive and ideally airports under stress would keep people away until 2 hours beforehand. However if they did that then they are on the hook for anyone who misses their flights. For an individual traveller they aren't really interested if 2,000 extra people show up, they are only worried about their own travel plans, which would on the face of it be best secured by turning up early.
However T5 is mainly BA, it culled loads of flights weeks ago (they will be thanking their lucky stars on that one) and so the dynamics of other airlines and their problems doesn't greatly wash over the terminal like it seems to be doing in T3 and perhaps LGW. This accepts that IB, AA, QR run a few services out of T5.
But in your case, I would still go for 2 hours, and follow the advice in post 1 if you haven't got to security around an hour to departure, as a Plan B.