November 1st - From an interminable passport queue at Heathrow Terminal 2
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 1 November 2022
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today's podcast comes from an interminable passport queue at Heathrow Terminal 2. Only a limited number of planes are allowed to touch down at the UK's busiest airport before 6am, which means they avoid having to fly holding patterns before arrival and the wait for UK Border Control is short. That’s one reason I paid a premium for the pre-6am arrival on Singapore Airlines. But when the carrier decided to wait for transferring passengers before leaving Singapore, the schedule started to unravel.
Of course this podcast is free, much like my weekly newsletter. Get it delivered every Friday to your inbox by subscribing at https://www.independent.co.uk/newsletters
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Corder. |
| 0:07.6 | It's Tuesday the 1st of November and I'm talking to you quite early in the morning from passport control at Heathrow Airport, but not as early as I would like to. |
| 0:19.4 | And it's a bit of a lesson about how interconnected aviation is, |
| 0:24.9 | obviously, and how trying to do the right thing can end up causing a lot of problems. I'm in a vast |
| 0:34.6 | queue and it's about an hour later than I is expecting to be in a modest queue. |
| 0:40.9 | So let me tell you what happened. |
| 0:44.4 | I flew in overnight from Singapore. |
| 0:48.3 | There's a flight that leaves quarter to midnight, |
| 0:51.3 | a bus A380 with 500 people on board flying to in London Heathrow |
| 0:59.6 | except that it didn't leave at quarter to midnight it actually left on the wrong day which is |
| 1:07.3 | quite easy if you've got a quarter to midnight departure. The captain told us at the |
| 1:12.8 | time we were supposed to be leaving, we've got a delayed flight coming in from Australia, |
| 1:18.6 | and therefore we're going to hang on for a while. And I noticed I'm normally the last one on the |
| 1:24.3 | plane, and I noticed when I was walking through there were maybe 10 15 empty seats |
| 1:29.9 | and presumably those belonged to the people who were rushing from the Australian flight |
| 1:37.8 | and we were also told their bags were going to be loaded on as well he said it would be five or 10 |
| 1:43.6 | minutes now in the way of things of course it wasn't fine I told their bags were going to be loaded on as well. He said it would be five or ten minutes. |
| 1:49.6 | Now, in the way of things, of course, it wasn't five or ten minutes. |
| 1:52.0 | It was 15. |
| 1:58.6 | And then when we were ready to push back, we couldn't because an aircraft next to us, which was on time and ready to go left when it was supposed to |
| 2:02.2 | meaning that we had to wait so in the end half an hour late leaving so what's an |
| 2:09.7 | hour between friends well it's actually quite a lot when um you're you're flying intercontinately |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Independent, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Independent and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.