Originally Posted by
Blumie
I have flown in and out of LHR T3 for 30 years and experienced this for the first time a month or so ago. My AA flight departed out of one of these gates — I didn’t realize AA still uses these gates — and as I walked from the lounge (the CX lounge, of course!) to the gate, I was stopped and had to wait what seemed like a significant amount of time while passengers disembarked a recently arrived aircraft. It made me wonder — and I apologize if this already has been discussed in this thread — whether LHR is able to time this to eliminate (or at least reduce) the chances that it causes a passenger to miss a flight.
Yes, that particular corridor I think is the last one in LHR, there used to be others. If you look around the structure there isn't an easy way to segregate the two flows in the available space while allowing departing passengers to get to the end gate area. It would require a full rebuild and taking the gates out of service for multiple months to do this. It's not unique to LHR - both MAN and EDI have similar cross flows. MAN has another variant at another terminal too.