On this page 17
- What the law actually measures
- Why the gap is bigger than you think
- The three numbers airlines will quote at you
- How to evidence the doors-open time
- The long-haul four-hour line
- What the scheduled arrival time is
- Connections, where the threshold is easiest to cross
- How to put a borderline claim
- What if you genuinely were under three hours
- A worked example
- Worth remembering
- If the airline has already refused on timing
- Do not round your own figures
- The habit that costs nothing
- Why airlines fight these hardest
- If you were travelling alone and cannot corroborate
- In short
The compensation thresholds are cliff edges. At two hours fifty-nine minutes you get nothing; at three hours and one minute you get the full band amount. On long-haul there is a second cliff at four hours, where the award doubles. Nothing in the regulation tapers, which makes the measurement of your arrival time the single most consequential fact in a borderline claim.
The short version
Arrival means the moment at least one aircraft door opens and passengers are permitted to leave — not touchdown, not "on blocks". The gap is commonly 15–25 minutes and at a congested hub can be more. If a tracker says you were 2h50m late, you may well have a claim.
What the law actually measures
The regulation itself talks about arrival time without defining it, and airlines spent years arguing for the earliest possible interpretation. The Court of Justice settled it: what matters is when passengers are able to leave the aircraft, because that is the moment the inconvenience the regulation compensates actually ends. Being held on a taxiway, or on stand with the doors shut, is still being delayed.
So the operative moment is the opening of the doors. Not wheels-down, not arrival at the stand, and not the figure in the airline's own operational records, which is usually "on blocks".
Why the gap is bigger than you think
Between touchdown and an open door sit several variable processes: the taxi in, which at a large hub can be fifteen minutes on its own; waiting for a stand to become free; the jetbridge being connected or steps being positioned; and ground staff being available to open up.
At a quiet regional airport with a remote stand and steps, five to eight minutes is typical. At a congested hub during a disrupted evening, twenty-five minutes is unremarkable and longer happens. On an arrival with no stand available, aircraft sometimes hold for forty minutes or more.
Which means the practical rule is: if any flight tracking source puts you within half an hour of a threshold, the claim is live and worth making.
The three numbers airlines will quote at you
| Measure | What it is | Correct? |
|---|---|---|
| Actual time of arrival / touchdown | Wheels on the runway | No — too early |
| On blocks | Parked at the stand, doors still shut | No — still too early |
| Doors open | Passengers may disembark | Yes |
Most refusal letters near a threshold rely on one of the first two, often without saying which. If the letter states a delay figure, ask explicitly: "Please confirm whether the arrival time relied on is touchdown, on-blocks, or doors-open, and state the doors-open time." That question alone resolves a good number of borderline refusals, because the airline either has to produce the right figure or admit it used the wrong one.
How to evidence the doors-open time
You will not have an official record, and you do not need one — but you do need something better than an assertion. In rough order of usefulness:
- A timestamped photo or video taken as you got off — the jetbridge, the steps, the terminal corridor. Phone metadata carries the time and this is the strongest thing an ordinary passenger can produce.
- A message sent to someone the moment you stood up — "just getting off" with a timestamp. Mundane and surprisingly persuasive.
- The first connection to airport wifi, or a mobile network timestamp.
- A payment receipt from the first thing you bought airside, which brackets the time.
- Passport control or baggage hall photos, which put a ceiling on when you got off.
- Other passengers' accounts, if you were travelling together.
None of this needs to be forensic. You are establishing that the doors opened after a particular minute, and a photograph timed at 23:14 proves the doors opened before 23:14, which is frequently exactly the point you need.
The long-haul four-hour line
On journeys over 3,500 km the award is halved where you arrived between three and four hours late. That makes the four-hour mark a second cliff, worth €300 or £260 a head.
It also means the arithmetic cuts both ways and you should check which side you are on before accepting an offer. An airline that pays £260 for an arrival you believe was four hours and ten minutes late has underpaid by half, and the same doors-open argument applies in reverse — you want the later time, they want the earlier one.
If you are near either line
Write the doors-open time down while you are still on the aircraft. Not later, not from memory. It is the only number in the whole claim that you alone can capture and that nobody can reconstruct afterwards.
What the scheduled arrival time is
The other half of the subtraction, and occasionally disputed. It is the scheduled arrival at the time of booking as shown on your confirmation — not a revised schedule the airline moved you to afterwards.
Airlines sometimes retime flights weeks ahead and then measure the delay against the new time, which can erase a claim entirely. If your original confirmation says 18:40 and the airline is measuring against 19:25, that is a schedule change and a separate issue. Keep the original booking confirmation for exactly this reason; the app will show you only the current schedule.
Connections, where the threshold is easiest to cross
If your journey was one booking with a connection, the measurement is to your arrival at the final destination. A borderline first-leg delay that caused a missed connection is not a borderline claim at all — it is however many hours later you eventually arrived, which is usually many.
This is the most common way a two-hour-fifty-minute problem becomes a six-hour claim, and it is worth checking before you write off a short delay. Missed connections.
How to put a borderline claim
Do not hedge. State the figure you are relying on and where it comes from:
Scheduled arrival was 21:35. The aircraft doors opened at 00:41, a delay of 3 hours 6 minutes at my final destination. Arrival for the purposes of the Regulation is the moment passengers are permitted to leave the aircraft, rather than touchdown or on-blocks time. I attach a timestamped photograph taken on disembarkation. Compensation of [amount] per passenger is therefore payable under Article 7.
If the reply disputes the time, ask which measure the airline used and for its doors-open record. It has one.
What if you genuinely were under three hours
Then compensation is not payable and that is the end of that element — but two things remain. The duty of care may still have been triggered, since on short-haul it starts at two hours, so meals you paid for yourself are claimable. And if the delay caused a missed connection on the same booking, the measurement changes entirely.
It also costs nothing to submit a claim where you are close and uncertain. The burden of establishing both the cause and the timing sits with the airline, and you will at least learn which arrival time it intends to rely on.
A worked example
Scheduled arrival at Gatwick 20:15. Flight tracking shows touchdown at 23:05 — two hours fifty minutes, and on the face of it no claim. In fact the aircraft taxied for eleven minutes, then held nine minutes for a stand, and the doors opened at 23:25. That is three hours and ten minutes, which on a 2,100 km route is £350 a head.
Nothing unusual happened in that example. Twenty minutes between touchdown and an open door is an ordinary evening at a busy airport, and the only thing standing between the passenger and £350 is whether anyone wrote the time down.
Now the long-haul version. Scheduled arrival at Heathrow 06:20, doors open at 10:28 — four hours and eight minutes on a 9,000 km route, so £520. Had the doors opened at 10:15, it would have been £260. The thirteen minutes between those outcomes is worth £260 per passenger, and on a family of four, £1,040.
Worth remembering
If you are anywhere near three hours, or near four on a long flight, note the doors-open time before you leave the aircraft. It is the only fact in the entire claim that disappears if you do not capture it, and it is routinely the fact the whole claim turns on.
If the airline has already refused on timing
A refusal based on arrival time is among the easiest to overturn, because it usually relies on the wrong measure rather than on a judgement call. Reply with one question and one fact: ask which arrival measure was used and for the doors-open record, and state your own timestamped evidence.
Airlines hold doors-open data. It is recorded operationally for every flight. An airline that declines to produce it while relying on a touchdown time has not answered the claim, and that is a point a regulator or a court will understand immediately without needing to know anything about aviation.
Do not round your own figures
State minutes, not approximations. "About three hours" invites a refusal; "3 hours 6 minutes, doors open at 00:41 against a scheduled arrival of 21:35" does not. Precision signals that you have a record, and on a cliff-edge threshold it is the only thing that distinguishes a claim from a complaint.
The habit that costs nothing
Whenever a flight is running late by anything approaching two hours, take a photograph as you step off the aircraft. Not of anything in particular — the jetbridge, the stairs, the sky. It takes a second, it carries a timestamp, and it is the only piece of evidence in the entire process that nobody can recover for you afterwards.
Most people never need it. The ones who do find it is worth several hundred pounds per passenger, and the ones who did not take it are reduced to arguing from memory against an airline quoting its own records.
Why airlines fight these hardest
Borderline claims are where the money is for an airline, because the volume sits there. A thirty-minute shift in how arrival is measured moves a large number of flights across the threshold in either direction, which is why the arrival-time definition was litigated at all rather than simply assumed.
It also means a refusal on timing is not a considered assessment of your flight. It is the output of a system applying a measure. Asking which measure was used is therefore not an aggressive question — it is the question that makes the system look at your flight properly for the first time.
If you were travelling alone and cannot corroborate
A single timestamped photograph is still evidence, and it is considerably better than nothing. Courts and regulators are not applying a forensic standard here; they are deciding which of two accounts is more likely, and a contemporaneous image beats an airline's unexplained assertion that its figure is right.
If you have genuinely nothing, claim anyway and ask the airline for its doors-open record. The worst outcome is that it produces a figure under three hours, which at least tells you where you stand.
In short
Doors open, not wheels down. Note the minute, state it precisely, and ask the airline which measure it used. On a cliff-edge threshold that is the entire argument, and it is one the passenger is unusually well placed to win.
A photograph taken on the jetbridge costs nothing and settles it. Take it whenever a flight is running meaningfully late, and delete it later if the claim never materialises.
It is the cheapest insurance available to a delayed passenger, and the only evidence in the whole process that nobody else can obtain on your behalf once the moment has passed.
Treat it as a reflex on any late flight and you will never need to argue from memory about the one fact the airline and the passenger genuinely disagree on.
The airline has its own record of that minute. The only question is whether you have one too, and whether you thought to capture it before walking into the terminal.
Work out your own figure
Four regimes checked at once, no sign-up, and it shows you the article the number comes from.