Excellent info. Thanks for all the responses. Yes getting out of the East Coast is indeed a bit of a challenge today as it was yesterday. Hopefully they will not have much a of a delay tonite. Well while I was in my fourth hour being infinitely soothed by the AA hold music I suddenly received a call waiting ... it was the callback I had requested last night which I had forgotten about! After only 16 hours. 😀 Anyways I was able to get this agent to reconfirm her on an AA non-stop to Heathrow tonight ... so that's one problem solved...

Now on to the bag... she went to the check-in counter and asked if her bag which was tagged to AMS yesterday could be retrieved so she could re-check it to LHR to which the agent said they couldn't retrieve it but that they were able to locate the bag and confirm that it was going to London on the new flight...

Should she be hopeful that the bag will show up at Heathrow and that AA would be able to internally successfully retag the bag? I chose to put her on an AA flight even though the BA flight was offered, because I thought an AA to AA bag retag might be safer than an AA to BA... but I must admit I have no substantive insight into how the bag thing works behind the scenes.