T5 Club World Check-in Queues
 

Dreadful this morning! That they even need Tensabarriers speaks volumes. :td:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CNPBmJSWoAAl3M_.jpg
- Courtesy of @ads1085 on Twitter

Sort it out, BA!

http://i.imgur.com/UUt7sGMl.jpg

Fairly normal for the summer. There are usually similar queues for the F check in area too.

T5 Club World Check-in Queues
 

What do the lines look like elsewhere in the terminal? Worse? Or are people simply queueing at Club checkin for whatever reason rather than strolling up to a shorter Economy line?

I've had the Zone H Tensa-barriers earlier this year. Makes a lot of sense, when busy, to feed pax to the first available desk, instead of getting stuck in one of several short queues behind a family with tons of overweight luggage and a language barrier! :)

Our queue wasn't quite as long as that shown, but we were at a desk in about 3 minutes.

I was in that queue in the last hour too. Seemed rather excessive, but the queue moved relatively quickly. Guesstimating I was in the queue for about 20 minutes, so not the end of the world for me personally.

The queues at the economy lines seemed quite comparable.

Looks like the late summer bank holiday get away has started early, plus its the last couple of weeks of the UK school holidays..

Just looks like any other UK airport in fairness..

Also as a gold why didnt you go the F check in??

The queues were much shorter at the North end, as they often are. I agree it's normal for the time of year, and Friday is a peak day coming up. I think today is 70k passengers, if I recall correctly, which is high but not huge. 100k is huge, 50k is normal, as I understand it.

Wouldn't that suggest that 100k means all BA's planes are full, whereas on a normal day with 50k passengers their planes are just half full?

Depends on how many planes and their capacity on the day in question! If you look at the BA schedules carefully, you'll notice how the fleet gets scheduled so that on Fridays out from London there is often A380s and A321s going outbound but perhaps a 777-200 or an A319 on the more lightly loaded inbound service on the same route. You also get a visual representation of this by looking at the apron - I can work out what day of the week it is by strolling out to the CCR or Flounge terrace. But it does explain why delays happen on peak days when the bigger birds get flogged into tight schedules and boarding takes longer.

They seem to have opened a third lane for fast track at South Security T5.

Yesterday, I decided to use the non-Fast Track lane as Fast-Track looked slow.

A bit after the boarding pass scan they have one of the normal belts set up for Fast Track as a bit of an overflow.

That's also quite common. If you see bunching just after the Fast Track gates on the right hand side, and perhaps some less competent travellers ahead of you, you should notice there is a passage gap behind the back of the agent's chair on the left side, this feeds into main security, and then as you say there may be some overflow Fast Track channels on the right of main security, show your boarding pass to get admission. Just ask the gate agent in Fast Track "Am I best to go left?".

Interesting, what sort of long haul routes are affected by these changes?

This cannot be true - T5 was the terminal designed to eliminate queuing wasn't it Willie Walsh!