Starting Tuesday, American Airlines will operate out of Terminal 5 at Heathrow. Terminal 5 is mostly British Airways. This makes sense as BA and AA are in the same alliance and codeshare many flights.
Addendum: AA moved to Terminal 2 when Heathrow closed Terminal 3 due to the virus. It will now temporarily move to Terminal 5.
Now isn't this interesting. Anyone have any guess as to whether this will become permanent, as in once we get through the Covid interruptions and more flights come back online? As best as I can tell looking at some articles on this, at the moment there are only 4 US flights involved and the capacity is there. As we fly out of Philadelphia and prefer American to BA (AA uses Airbus 330s with 2-4-2 seating for this flight) we would welcome this, especially as one of the articles is mentioning the possibility fo a pre-clearance US Customs being built in T5.
We fly BA out of BWI since it is a direct flight. Nothing will change for us since we’ve been landing at T5 for years. I do wish BA went back to the 2-4-2 seating, rather than the 3-3-3 on the aircraft it currently operates.
According to Heathrow's website, AA had moved to Terminal 2 when the airport closed Terminal 3 but will TEMPORARILY move to Terminal 5 on Tuesday.
I'm going to update my original posting.
Denver-London flights originally used Gatwick, then switched to Heathrow T5 when it first opened, but had been moved to T3, with Boeing 747’s the whole time, 3-4-3 seating in the cheap section. Different airlines with different planes for different routes, and different terminals. We’ll see what happens in the future. Adaptability is key for everyone going forward.
That’s so much more convenient for travelers because as I recall it was at least a 10 minute walk from the main area of T2 to get to the gates where AA flies out of. There was even a warning sign as you walk out of the main area. It wasn’t fun lugging a heavy duffle bag through that!
This could be technically more difficult than it seems because Terminal 5 was set up exclusively using British Airways booking systems and it was a devil of a job a few years ago to get Iberia in to work as despite having the same ultimate ownership they had different legacy systems. Maybe it kind of works through the code share or things have moved on (on a search looks like they have needed to bring in extra kit so AA can only operate from a limited part of the terminal for check in etc).
If BA was running anything close to a pre-March schedule they wouldn't fit in 5, let alone anyone else. Then again AA is running a much reduced service as well. However, since AA and BA effectively operate and plan the transatlantic services as if they were a single airline it has been an aspiration to get AA into 5, even if more BA services went back to 3. So people may end up doing the shuffle in the reverse direction.
T3 may not come back into use until the winter schedules at the earliest though, and T4 is not expected to reopen this year.
EDIT: Finnair are also moving to 5 later this month.
