I'm flying into LHR at 8.35 on the 29th July, a couple of days after the olympics starts so probably going to be right in the middle of the expected chaos. I shall report back how it goes.

Just spoke with one of my colleagues who waited 1.5 hours in the non-EU line last week. Hard to believe this won't be solved before Olympics but that sure appears to be the case. "Welcome to 2012 - your first lesson is learning how to queue up like a good Brit!" :td:

Seriously considering moving my next meeting to the continent. I suspect after the summer season the airlines will find reduced load factors for LHR as long as this continues. Time is money.

Well worth it to upgrade to business class so you can use fasttrack.

From Guardian: "Additionally we have special lanes in place designated to Olympic athletes to enable them to pass through the border without delay."

Some pigs are more important than other pigs.

Arrived in MAN from BRU last night about 20:50. First forgot there was passport control (so used to coming in from LHR), and was then shocked by the length of the queue.

The Non-EU queue had 1 person waiting.

The EU queue moved fairly fast though, and we were through in 15 minutes.

Of course, they removed all IRIS from Manchester as it "slows things down".

Moral of the story -- if you're non-EU and want to get into the country, fly via mainland europe to somewhere that rarely takes your kind. You'll get through in no time.

I came in to T5 yesterday (8 July) about 1545 and the non-EU line was almost to the end of the tensa barriers. The EU lines looked fairly long too. Everything moved fairly quickly though with lots of desks open, about 30 minutes altogether I passed a sign saying "up to 90 minutes from this point," then about 8 minutes later "up to 60 minutes from this point" and so on.

Assuming a non-EU passport is held!

Are you serious :confused: Whilst the chaos at T5 is pretty unacceptable, have you ever had the pleasure of arriving into the good old US of A as an alien?......1.5 hours is nothing:rolleyes:

I would if it wasn't my parents paying ;)

You are suggesting that the UK use the CBP wait times in the USA as a benchmark? I am sure that will go over quite well. The fact that somebody does something worse than you does not mean you are doing it right. Especially when EU countries next door (who compete for your business) do it so much better.

FYI the lines at US airports are often just as long for US citizens - I've sometimes seen CBP shift citizens to the non-US line and vice versa (something you don't see much at LHR). Of course I don't wait in line any more thanks to Global Entry - you would think that could be linked with the UK Iris scan (as we have done with the Dutch) but that would require us to find a needle in the haystack, i.e. somebody in government who actually cares about efficiency.

Honestly I think the whole exercise is a waste of time. If some terrorist or economic immigrants really wants to get into the country there are many ways to do it. The # that come through airports is pretty low (and the # that get admitted anyway is pretty high). Better to redeploy scarce resources to more efficient endeavours and reduce aggravation for everyone.

Heathrow immigration queue slow hand-clapped
 

Slow hand clapping is not exactly intimidating, although anything can be twisted to make out that it's intimidation.

I wonder how many people will start doing a copycat slow hand-clapping in queues now though?

I think it could be very intimidating if it is 2000 to 1. Even if there are 5 or 6 policemen sitting in the back room, what if those 2000 people reach a boiling point, lose their reason and just walk through the border. Who could stop them? I know it would be foolish as they would then have to proceed to the baggage area and eventually be dealt with, but the police ought to have some concern about this if the situation doesn't improve.

I'm off to Waitrose shortly, will know soon. :D

I arrived at the T5 Immigration Hall around 7:35 am midweek last week. Headed for the Fast Track lane (there was a sizeable queue in the Slow Track non-EU lane), but was shunted off to a FT holding pen. As my prior FT entry a couple of weeks earlier had been relatively painless, I couldn't believe this was FT and asked if it really was. The staffer had the grace to look embarassed. It took me a few minutes to even find the entrance to the pen due to its poor placement smack dab in the midst of the entering hordes--finally someone opened a rope for me. There must have been 50+ people in the queue. Okay, but the queue wasn't moving, until, after 5 or 6 minutes, they let 4 people go stand in another queue and we inched forward. Seemed like a big waste of an FT pass and the inertia was bothering me, so I went into the "regular" line, which was moving regularly. Took just under an hour, but I felt like I was progressing the entire time. To be fair, the FT holding pen cleared out within 40 minutes, so I could presumably have saved myself 15-20 minutes, but as I see no signs of improvement in the process I'm just as glad I saved the FT pass, which I'll horde to use sometime when I'm coming off WT+ and there's no holding pen for FT.

I would assume that will be the case till September. I had a 1 day layover last week from Amsterdam and fast Track was closed so I waited in line for almost 2 hours.

Am I pleased I chose LX to come into LHR. They were half the price of BA for flights at identical times, you get a proper sandwich instead of junk food, and you arrive at T1 where there was a grand total of 0 persons in front of me when I got to immigration. Bliss.