Ordinarily I do this without issue but my family have got a flight tomorrow. I'm tasked with dropping them off at Heathrow. Now it's been a while since I've been to Heathrow (around four years in fact).

The flight is around 9pm and check in is usually three hours beforehand (6pm). Brum to Heathrow is two hours but factor an extra hour for travel and I reckon we should be on the road at 3pm.

Is this plan sound? I'm normally quite good at this but today has been an arse of a day and brain is befuddled to high heaven. I don't trust anyone in my family with itinerary planning since they almost always cock it up. The next reliable people I know are you guys.

Anything I need to know about heathrow? I imagine the queues and traffic must be immense just to get in. Should I add in another hour for travel time and leave at 2pm instead? What's parking like there?

Hopefully I'll have rallied round in a few hours but if not, any advice would be appreciated.

Well you only need to drop them off so better early than late. With hold ups your plan should get them there on time easily and if it all goes smoothly they'll have an extra couple of hours for drinking/shopping.

They're expecting me to spend some time with them before the check-in. Not that I want to.

Airports are fun places to sit.
Apart from all the other people. Haven't they got some place else to be?

Yes. That's usually the problem.

Very important question: Which terminal?
Terminal 5 is awesome as there's a slip road off the M25.
Terminals 1-3 can take ages to get to due to congestion at the airport entrance tunnels after you leave the M4.
I've no idea about T4.
The good news is that the M25 has recently been widened all the way from the M1 to Heathrow, so it's not as congested as it used to be. We usually take 2 1/4 to 2 1/2 hours to get from Derby to the in-laws (who live very near Heathrow) during normal traffic. Maybe 2 3/4 to 3 hours in rush hour conditions.

Looks like it's terminal 4.

Ring someone up and ask if it'll be busy

Yeah there's probably a good time to get there when it'll be quiet.

Right worked out the T4 has a separate entry/exit so hopefully won't be as busy. 2hrs journey is fine as well as leaving an hour to actually get into the bloody place.

Now if I could get my satnav to work, I'd be a happy happy.

That was really painless. Parked up within two hours of leaving home!

Already checked in and I'm now expected to wait until they open the gates around 8pm!

airports are scary for me when I was flying last time I got a few random looks from people, dunno why, sat down for ages and looked down at my tshirt and I thought "omg " didnt notice that I was wearing my "Bin ladens daughter" tshirt

Well i left them at around 7ish and they boarded the plane.

Rather strangely, on the way out of the car park, I didn't have to insert my paid ticket or anything. Barrier just opened and message said something like "ticket paid".

I was trying to work out how it figured I had done so. I thought it might have been ANPR but at no point did I enter my reg no in. I thought it might be RFID but I was at least a metre away. May be it was just a c*ck up?

They all use anpr, so if you were still in the free period allowance, that might explain it. Either that or your family pre-paid as a nice gesture!