Originally Posted by
madanda
Apologies if I am not asking in the right place, if this has been answered elsewhere, but I have a question about minimum connection time at Heathrow and how it relates to EU261.
TLDR: Does the 60 minute BA LHR MCT go from incoming flight landing to connecting gate closure or departure time?
According to British Airways, my daughter's connecting flight was missed at Heathrow due to ground operations/ATC decisions after the incoming flight landed. Her flight's arrival gate was changed three times before she was allowed to disembark. For this, BA is denying EU261 compensation due to circumstances beyond their control, since I guess the airport and not the airline assigns the arrival gate.
HOWEVER, looking at the FligthAware info from that day, it appears that my daughter's flight was slightly delayed to be begin with, even before all the ground operations issues, which gave her three minutes under the minimum connection time to make her flight, IF MCT refers to gate closure and not flight departure (a difference of 20 minutes). Her flight was scheduled to land at 14:35, but landed at 14:43, and the gate for her connecting flight closed at 15:40.
I'm thinking maybe she is eligible for compensation after all?
Minimum connection times are not particularly relevant when it comes to compensation claims - they only really matter for booking in the first place. BA likes to talk about them when denying compensation claims but that's just their own made-up set of rules, really.
The key thing here is that for T5, gate allocation is down to BA. The information is communicated to aircraft by ATC, but the message comes from BA and so if they don't have a stand available, it's generally BA's fault. The scheduled arrival time is also the time that the doors are supposed to be open and the first passengers can leave - so if the flight only landed 8 minutes after that, it suggests it was at least 20 or so minutes late in departing. Does your daughter know why this was; what did the pilots say?
There's a secondary question - particularly relevant if your daughter was travelling without checked luggage - as to whether she could have made the connecting flight but was denied the ability to do so by the connections barriers which again, are operated by Heathrow but based on rules set by BA, and BA can override them in any event.